en drizzling more or less all day, increased. Our
supplies were taken from the wagons, a piece of tarpaulin found to
protect them, and as the fire began to blaze and the water to heat, Mrs.
Gardner and I found the way into the bags and boxes of flour, salt,
milk, and meal, and got material for the first gallons of gruel. I had
not thought to ever make gruel again over a camp-fire. I can not say how
far it carried me back in the lapse of time, or really where, or who I
felt that I was.

It did not seem to be me, and still I seemed to know how to do it.

When the bubbling contents of our kettle thickened and grew white with
the condensed milk, and we began to give it out--putting it into the
hands of men detailed as nurses, and our own men, to take around to the
poor sufferers, shivering and naked in the rain--I felt that perhaps it
was not in vain that history had repeated itself. When the nurses came
back and told us of the surprise with which it was received, and the
tears that rolled down the sun-burned, often bloody face, into the cup
as the poor fellow drank his hot gruel, and asked where it came from,
who sent it, and said it was the first food he had tasted in three days
(for they had gone into the fight hungry), I felt that it was again the
same old story and wondered what gain there had been in the last thirty
years.

The fires burned, the gruel steamed and boiled--bucket after bucket went
out--until those eight hundred men had each a cup of gruel and knew that
he could have another and as many as he wanted. The day waned, the
darkness came, and still the men were unsheltered, uncovered, naked,
and wet--scarcely a groan, no word of complaint--no man said he was not
well treated.

The operating-tables were full of the wounded. Man after man was taken
off, brought on his litter and laid beside other men, and something
given him to keep the little life in his body that seemed fast oozing
out. All night it went on. It grew cold--for naked men bitter
cold--before morning. We had no blankets, nothing to cover them, only
the strips of cotton cloth.

Early in the morning ambulances started, and such of the wounded as
could be loaded in were taken to be carried back over that rough,
pitiless road, down to Siboney, to the hospitals there--that we had done
the best we could toward fitting up--where our hundred cots, hundred and
fifty blankets had gone, cups, spoons, and delicacies, that would help
to strengthen these