affairs in the hospitals was not much better than it had
been a month before. In a signed letter dated "Santiago, August 12," Dr.
James S. Kennedy, first assistant surgeon of the Second Division
hospital, declared that there was "an utter lack of suitable medicines
with which to combat disease. There has been so much diarrhea,
dysentery, and fever, and no medicine at all to combat them, that men
have actually died for want of it. Four days after my reporting here
there was not a single medicine in the entire hospital for the first
two diseases, and nothing but quinine for the fever. Yesterday, August
11, a certain regiment left its encampment to go on board ship for the
North, and ten hours afterward a private who had been left behind
started back to his former encampment to sleep, no private soldiers
being allowed in Santiago after dark. On reaching his camp he found ten
men abandoned--no medicines, no food, no nurses or physicians--simply
abandoned to starvation or suicide."

If these statements are not true, Dr. Kennedy should be brought to trial
by court martial for conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline,
if not conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, in publicly making
injurious charges that have no foundation in fact. If they are true,
they furnish another proof that the lack of medical supplies and medical
attention in the army was due to official negligence and inefficiency.
In June and July it might have been urged with some show of plausibility
that a sudden and unexpected emergency, in the shape of a wide-spread
epidemic of fever, had taken the army by surprise and found it
unprepared; but with the coast of the United States only four or five
days distant, with uninterrupted telegraphic communication, and with
good landing facilities in a safe and sheltered harbor, there was no
excuse for a lack of medicines and hospital supplies on August 12--seven
weeks after the army landed and four weeks after it entered the city of
Santiago.

Defenders of General Shafter and the War Department try to excuse the
wrecking of the army by saying that "the invasion of Cuba was not a
pleasure excursion," that "war is not strictly a hygienic business,"
that "the outcry about sickness and neglect is largely sensational and
for the manufacture of political effect," and that the general criticism
of the management of the campaign is "a concerted effort to hide the
glories of our magnificent triumph under alleged