st closed were discussed in low tones, as though in fear
of awakening the sleepers on the near-by hill-side.

After the fight of Las Guasimas, its heroes rested and waited for six
days, while the remainder of the army effected its landing and made its
slow way to the position they had won over the narrow trails they had
cleared. These days of waiting were also days of vast discomfort, and
the patient endurance of drenching tropical rains and steaming heat,
the wearing of the same battle-soiled clothing day after day and night
after night, and, above all, of an ever-present hunger, that sapped
both strength and spirits. They had started out with but three days'
rations, and four days passed before a scanty supply of hard-tack,
bacon, and coffee began to dribble into camp. The road to Siboney,
flooded by constant rains, bowlder-strewn, and inches deep in mud, was
for a long time impassable to wagons; and during those six days such
supplies of food and ammunition as reached the idle army were brought
to it by three trains of pack-mules that toiled ceaselessly back and
forth between the coast and the front, bringing the barest necessities
of life, but nothing more.

So the American army suffered and prayed to be led forward, while the
Spaniards between them and Santiago strengthened their own position
with every hour, and confidently awaited their coming. The invaders
now occupied the Sevilla plateau, and were within five miles of the
city they sought to capture. In their front lay a broad wooded valley,
to them an unknown region, and on its farther side rose a range of
hills, that Ridge Norris told them were the San Juan Heights, strongly
protected by block-houses, rifle-pits, and bewildering entanglements of
barbed wire, a feature of modern warfare now appearing for the first
time in history. With their glasses, from the commanding eminence of
El Poso Hill, crowned with the ruined buildings of an abandoned
plantation, the American officers could distinctly see the Spaniards at
work on their intrenchments a mile and a half away, and note the
ever-lengthening lines of freshly excavated earth.

But for six days the army waited, and its artillery, which was expected
to seriously impair, if not utterly destroy the effectiveness of those
ever-growing earthworks, still reposed peacefully on board the ships
that had brought it to Cuba. Only two light batteries had been landed,
and on the sixth day after Las Guasimas thes