the club to the plaza I met a few Cuban
negroes in dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers, and half a dozen or
more pale-faced Spanish soldiers, but the streets in that part of the
city seemed to be almost wholly deserted. Beyond the plaza, however, on
Enramadas Street, I began to meet the stream of destitute refugees
returning to the city from Caney, and a more dirty, hungry, sick, and
dejected-looking horde of people I had never seen. When General Shafter
gave notice to the Spanish military authorities that if Santiago were
not surrendered it would be bombarded, fifteen thousand men, women, and
children abandoned their homes and fled, most of them on foot, to
various suburban villages north of the city. Most of these fugitives
went to Caney, where, for nearly two weeks, they camped out in the
streets, suffering everything that human beings can suffer from hunger,
sickness, and exposure. Both General Shafter and the Red Cross made
every possible effort to relieve them by sending provisions to them from
Siboney; but the distance from that base of supplies was fifteen miles
or more over a terrible road, the number of horses and mules available
for transportation was hardly adequate to supply even our own army with
ammunition and food, and the most that could be done for the refugees at
Caney was to keep them from actually starving to death. Hundreds of them
perished, but they died from exposure, exhaustion, and sickness, rather
than from starvation. As soon as Santiago surrendered, these fugitives
began to stream back into the city, and it was the advance-guard of them
that I met on Enramadas Street on Tuesday morning. They represented both
sexes, all ages, all complexions, and all classes of the population,
from poor Cuban or negro women carrying huge bundles on their heads and
leading three or four half-naked children, to cultivated, delicately
nurtured, English-speaking ladies, wading through the mud in bedraggled
white gowns, carrying nothing, perhaps, except a kitten or a cage of pet
birds. Many of them were so ill and weak from dysentery or malarial
fever that they could hardly limp along, even with the support of a
cane, and all of them looked worn, exhausted, and emaciated to the last
degree. Hundreds of these refugees died, after their return to Santiago,
from diseases contracted in Caney, and if it had not been for the prompt
relief given them by the Red Cross as soon as they reached the city,
they would have pe