t it became muddy and bad, but was by no means impassable, even
for heavily loaded wagons, when I traversed it for the last time, five
days before the surrender of Santiago. With the fall of that city the
army's base of supplies was transferred from Siboney to Santiago harbor,
and the condition of the Siboney road ceased to be a factor in the
transportation problem. When a dozen steamers, loaded with supplies of
all kinds, anchored off the Santiago piers, on July 15, the bulk of the
army was within two miles of them, and there ought to have been no
difficulty in getting to the troops everything that they needed.

If the road from Siboney to the front was practicable for both
pack-mules and wagons from the time when the army landed to the time
when its base of supplies was transferred to Santiago, and if, as
General Shafter asserts, "the facilities were all there, and the
transportation equipment provided was all that it should have been," why
was the army left for almost a month without suitable tents, without
adequate hospital supplies, without camp-kettles, without
cooking-utensils other than tin plates, coffee-cups, and old
tomato-cans, without hammocks, without extra clothing or spare blankets,
and with only a limited supply of food? That this was the state of the
army is beyond question.

Lieutenant John H. Parker of the Gatling-gun battery reported to
Adjutant-General Corbin, under date of July 23, that he and his men had
been entirely without tents for a period of twenty-eight days.

John Henry of the Twenty-first Infantry wrote to his cousin in Lowell,
Massachusetts, that his regiment had been on the firing line seventeen
days. For two days they had nothing at all to eat, and no shelter, and
lay on the ground in puddles of water.

Ex-Representative F. H. Krebs of the Second Massachusetts Regiment says
that for twenty-six consecutive days he had only hard bread, bacon, and
coffee, and that for three days he lived on one hardtack a day. The
soldiers of his regiment did all their cooking in tin plates and
coffee-cups, and slept for two months on the wet ground, under what are
called "shelter"-tents, for the reason, I suppose,--_lucus a non
lucendo_,--that they do not shelter.

Dr. James S. Kennedy, first assistant surgeon of the Second Division
hospital, wrote from the hospital camp near Santiago: "There is an utter
lack of suitable medicines with which to combat disease. There has been
so much diarrhea, dysen