ated, is that, owing to bad management, lack of
foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of the commissary and
medical departments of the army, our soldiers in Cuba suffered greater
hardships and privations, in certain ways, than were ever before endured
by an American army in the field. They were not half equipped, nor half
fed, nor half cared for when they were wounded or sick; they had to
sleep in dog-kennel shelter-tents, which afforded little or no
protection from tropical rains; they had to cook in coffee-cups and old
tomato-cans because they had no camp-kettles; they never had a change of
underclothing after they landed; they were forced to drink brook-water
that was full of disease-germs because they had no suitable vessels in
which to boil it or keep it after it had been boiled; they lived a large
part of the time on hard bread and bacon, without beans, rice, or any of
the other articles which go to make up the full army ration; and when
wounded they had to wait hours for surgical aid, and then, half dead
from pain and exhaustion, they lay all night on the water-soaked ground,
without shelter, blanket, pillow, food, or attendance. To suppose that
an army will keep well and maintain its efficiency under such conditions
is as unreasonable and absurd as to suppose that a man will thrive and
grow fat in the stockaded log pen of a Turkish quarantine. It cannot be
fairly urged in explanation of the sickness in the army that it was due
to the deadliness of the Cuban climate and was therefore what policies
of marine insurance call an "act of God." The Cuban climate played its
part, of course, but it was a subordinate part. The chief and primary
cause of the soldiers' ill health was neglect, due, as I said before, to
bad management, lack of foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of
the army's commissary and medical departments. If there be any fact
that should have been well known, and doubtless was well known, to the
higher administrative officers of the Fifth Army-Corps, it is the fact
that if soldiers sleep on the ground in Cuba without proper shelter and
drink unboiled water from the brooks they are almost certain to contract
malarial fever; and yet twelve or fifteen thousand men were sent into
the woods and chaparral between Siboney and Santiago without hammocks or
wall-tents, and without any vessel larger than a coffee-cup in which to
boil water. I can hardly hint at the impurities and the decaying organic