things; he has come to loathe hard bread and bacon three times a day,
and he consequently eats very little and isn't adequately nourished.
Nothing would do more to promote the health of the men than a change of
diet."

A sufficient proof that the soldiers were often hungry is furnished by
the fact that men detailed from the companies frequently marched from
the front to Siboney and back (from eighteen to twenty-five miles, over
a bad road), in order to get such additional supplies, particularly in
the shape of canned vegetables, as they could carry in their hands and
haversacks or transport on a rude, improvised stretcher. Officers and
men from Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders repeatedly came into Siboney
in this way on foot, and once or twice with a mule or a horse, and
begged food from the Red Cross for their sick and sickening comrades in
their camp at the front.

It is not hard to understand why soldiers contracted malarial fever in a
country like Cuba, when they were imperfectly sheltered, inadequately
equipped, insufficiently fed and clothed, forced to sleep on the ground,
and compelled to drink unboiled water from contaminated brooks. But
there was another reason for the epidemic character and wide prevalence
of the calenture from which the army suffered, and that was exposure to
exhalations from the malarious, freshly turned earth of the rifle-pits
and trenches. All pioneers who have broken virgin soil with a plow in a
warm, damp, wooded country will remember that for a considerable time
thereafter they suffered from various forms of remittent and
intermittent fever. Our soldiers around Santiago had a similar
experience. The unexpected strength and fighting capacity shown by the
Spaniards in the first day's battle, and their counter-attack upon our
lines on the night of the following day, led our troops to intrench
themselves by digging rifle-pits and constructing rude bomb-proofs as
places of refuge from shrapnel. During the armistice these intrenchments
were greatly extended and strengthened, and before Santiago surrendered
they stretched along our whole front for a distance of several miles. In
or near these rifle-pits and trenches our men worked, stood guard, or
slept, for a period of more than two weeks, and the exhalations from the
freshly turned earth, acting upon organisms already weakened by
hardships and privations, brought about an epidemic of calenture upon
the most extensive scale.

By August 3