r clothing when wet, if it was not the
intention to give them camp-kettles in which to boil the water, hammocks
in which to sleep, and clothing enough for a change? The American
people, certainly, are both able and willing to pay for the proper
support and equipment of their army. If it had cost five million
dollars, or ten million dollars, to supply every company in General
Shafter's command with hammocks, waterproof rain-sheets, extra clothing,
and camp-kettles, the money would have been appropriated and paid
without a grumble or a murmur. We are not a stingy people, nor even an
economical people, when the question is one of caring for the men that
we send into the field to fight for us. If, then, the financial
resources of the War Department were unlimited, and if it had supreme
power, why could it not properly equip and feed a comparatively small
invading force of only sixteen or eighteen thousand men? Were the
difficulties insuperable? Certainly not! It is safe, I think, to say
that there were a thousand business firms in the United States which,
for a suitable consideration, would have undertaken to keep General
Shafter's army supplied, at every step of its progress from Siboney to
Santiago, with hammocks, waterproof tents, extra clothing, camp-kettles,
and full rations of food. The trouble was not lack of money or lack of
facilities at home; it was lack of foresight, of system, and of
administrative ability in the field.

Lieutenant Parker of the Thirteenth Infantry has pointed out the fact
that the army was not properly equipped and fed "even after the
surrender [of Santiago] had placed unlimited wharfage at our disposal
within two and a half miles of the camps over excellent roads."[21] A
week or ten days after the surrender, officers were coming into Santiago
on horseback and carrying out to the camps over the pommels of their
saddles heavy hospital tents for which they could get no other
transportation and of which their men were in urgent need. As late as
August 13--nearly a month after the surrender--the soldiers of the Ninth
Massachusetts were still sleeping on the ground in dog-kennel tents,
toasting their bacon on the ends of sticks, and making coffee in old
tomato-cans, although at that very time there were hundreds of large
wall-tents piled up in front of the army storehouse on the Santiago
water-front and hundreds of tons of supplies, of all sorts, in the
storehouses and on the piers.

The state of