there was hardly a suggestion.

On the morning after our arrival I took a carriage and drove around the
city and out to the camp, which was situated about a mile and a half
from the hotel on the other side of the river. In the city itself I was
unpleasantly disappointed. The showy architecture, beautiful grounds,
semi-tropical foliage, and brilliant flowers of the Tampa Bay Hotel
raise expectations which the town across the river does not fulfil. It
is a huddled collection of generally insignificant buildings standing in
an arid desert of sand, and to me it suggested the city of
Semipalatinsk--a wretched, verdure-less town in southern Siberia,
colloquially known to Russian army officers as "the Devil's Sand-box."
Thriving and prosperous Tampa may be, but attractive or pleasing it
certainly is not.

As soon as I got away, however, from the hotel and into the streets of
the town, I saw at almost every step suggestions of the serious and
practical side, if not the tragic side, of war. Long trains of four-mule
wagons loaded with provisions, camp equipage, and lumber moved slowly
through the soft, deep sand of the unpaved streets in the direction of
the encampment; the sidewalks were thronged with picturesquely dressed
Cuban volunteers from the town, sailors from the troop-ships, soldiers
from the camp, and war correspondents from everywhere; mounted orderlies
went tearing back and forth with despatches to or from the army
headquarters in the Tampa Bay Hotel; Cuban and American flags were
displayed in front of every restaurant, hotel, and Cuban cigar-shop, and
floated from the roofs or windows of many private houses; and now and
then I met, coming out of a drug-store, an army surgeon or hospital
steward whose left arm bore the red cross of the Geneva Convention.

The army that was destined to begin the invasion of Cuba consisted, at
that time, of ten or twelve thousand men, all regulars, and included an
adequate force of cavalry and ten fine batteries of field-artillery. It
was encamped in an extensive forest of large but scattered pine-trees,
about a mile from the town, and seemed already to have made itself very
much at home in its new environment.

The first thing that struck me in going through the camp was its
businesslike aspect. It did not suggest a big picnic, nor an encampment
of militia for annual summer drill. It was manifestly a camp of
veterans; and although its dirty, weather-beaten tents were pitched here