hters, tugs, and despatch-boats."

Dr. Frank Donaldson, assistant surgeon attached to Colonel Roosevelt's
Rough Riders, states in a letter to the Philadelphia "Medical Journal,"
dated July 12, that "a desperate effort" was made to secure a few cots
for the sick and wounded in the field-hospitals at the front. There were
hundreds of these cots, he says, on one of the transports off Siboney,
but it proved to be utterly impossible to get any of them landed.
Whether they were all carried back to the United States or not I do not
know; but large quantities of supplies, intended for General Shafter's
army, _were_ carried back on the transports _Alamo_, _Breakwater_,
_Vigilancia_, and _La Grande Duchesse_.

I do not mean to throw any undeserved blame upon the quartermasters and
commissaries at Siboney. Many of them worked day and night with
indefatigable energy to get supplies on shore and forward them to the
army; but they were hampered by conditions over which they had no
control, and for which, perhaps, they were not in any way responsible;
they were often unable to obtain the assistance of steamer captains and
other officers upon whose cooeperation the success of their own efforts
depended, and they probably did all that could be done by individuals
acting as separate units rather than as correlated parts of an organized
and intelligently directed whole. The trouble at Siboney was the same
trouble that became apparent at Tampa. There was at the head of affairs
no controlling, directing, and energizing brain, capable of grasping all
the details of a complex situation and making all the parts of a
complicated mechanism work harmoniously together for the accomplishment
of a definite purpose.

III. The strategic plan of campaign and its execution.

As this branch of the subject will be discussed--if it has not already
been discussed--by better-equipped critics than I can pretend to be, I
shall limit myself to a brief review of the campaign in its strategic
aspect as it appears from the standpoint of a civilian.

I understand, from officers who were in a position to know the facts,
that the original plan of attack on the city of Santiago provided for
close and effective cooeperation of the army with the navy, and for a
joint assault by way of Aguadores and Morro Castle. General Shafter was
to move along the line of the railroad from Siboney to Aguadores,
keeping close to the coast under cover of the guns of the fleet, and,