dition so low that, in the opinion of eight general
officers, it must inevitably "perish" unless immediately sent back to
the United States. Early in August, after a stay in Cuba of only six
weeks, the Fifth Army-Corps began to move northward, and before
September 1 the whole command was in camp at Montauk Point, Long Island.
Of the eighteen thousand men who composed it, five thousand were very
ill, or soon became very ill, and were sent to the general hospital;
while five thousand more, who were less seriously sick, were treated in
their tents.[15] Eight thousand men out of eighteen thousand were
nominally well, but had been so enfeebled by the hardships and
privations of the campaign that they were no longer fit for active Cuban
service, and, in the opinion of General Miles, hardly one of them was in
sound health.[16] I think it is not an exaggeration to describe this
state of affairs as "the wrecking of the army by disease." It is my
purpose in the present chapter to inquire whether such wrecking of the
army was inevitable, and if not, why it was allowed to happen.

A review of the history of campaigns in tropical countries seems to show
that Northern armies in such regions have always suffered more from
disease than from battle; but it does not by any means show that the
virtual destruction of a Northern army by disease in a tropical country
is inevitable _now_. When the British army under the Earl of Albemarle
landed on the Cuban coast and attacked Havana in 1762, it lost nearly
one half its efficiency, as a result of sickness, in about four weeks;
but at that time the fact that nine tenths of all tropical diseases are
caused by microscopic germs, and are therefore preventable, was not
known. The progress made in sanitary science in the present century
renders unnecessary and inexcusable in 1898 a rate of sickness and
mortality that was perhaps inevitable in 1762. Northern soldiers, if
properly equipped and cared for, can live and maintain their health now
under conditions which would have been absolutely and inevitably fatal
to them a century ago.

In April last there was an interesting and instructive discussion of
this subject, or of a subject very closely connected with this, at a
meeting held in the rooms of the Royal Geographical Society, London, and
attended by many of the best-known authorities on tropical pathology in
Great Britain. Most of the gentlemen who took part in the debate were of
opinion that th