so? Could it be possible that the commander who had captured a city
declined to be the first to enter, that he would hold back his flag-ship
and himself, and send forward and first a cargo of food on a plain ship,
under direction of a woman? Did our commands, military or naval, hold
men great enough of soul for such action? It must be true, for the
spires of Santiago rise before us, and turning to the score of
companions beside me I ask: "Is there any one here who will lead the
Doxology?" In an instant the full rich voice of Enola Gardner rang out:
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow." By that time the chorus was
full, and the tears on many a face told more plainly than words how
genuine was that praise, and when in response to a second suggestion "My
Country 'Tis of Thee" swelled out on the evening air in the farewell
rays of the setting sun, the State of Texas was nearing the dock, and
quietly dropping her anchor she lay there through the silence of the
night in undisputed possession, facing a bare wind-swept wharf and the
deserted city of Santiago.
Daybreak brought quiet to an end. The silence was no longer oppressive.
A hundred and twenty stevedores lined up on the wharf for work and
breakfast. The dock had tracks, and trucks running to its open
warehouses. Boxes, barrels, and bales, pitched out of that ship, thrown
onto the trucks and wheeled away, told the story of better days to come.
It was something to see the lank, brawny little army of stevedores take
their first breakfast in line, alongside of the ship.
Later in the day the flag-ship brought Admiral Sampson and Admiral
Schley, who spent several hours with us. They had every opportunity to
see how our work was done, and if we were equal to unloading our ship.
When they were about to leave Admiral Sampson was asked what orders or
directions he had for us. He replied: "You need no directions from me,
but if any one troubles you let me know."
The amiable pleasantries of these two gallant officers during that visit
are a pleasure to recall. As I was, at an opportune moment, attempting
to express my appreciation and thanks to Admiral Sampson for the
courtesy of allowing us to precede him into Santiago, Admiral Schley,
with that _naïveté_ and apt turn of expression so characteristic of him,
in a half undertone side-remark, cautioned me with "Don't give him too
much credit, Miss Barton; he was not quite sure how clear the channel
might be. Remember that was a trial trip."
How sadly the recollection of that pleasant, memorable day has since
recurred to me; brave, gallant brothers in arms, and in heart; knowing
only a soldier's duty; each holding his country's honor first, his own
last; its glory his glory, and for himself seeking nothing more. Ah,
people, press, and politics! How deal ye with your servants?
A message was received from General Shafter, who telegraphed from his
headquarters; "The death rate at El Caney is terrible; can you send
food?" The answer was to send the thirty thousand refugees of El Caney
at once back to Santiago; we were there and could feed them; that the
State of Texas had still twelve hundred tons of supplies.
The thirty thousand inhabitants of Santiago had been driven to El Caney,
a village designed for five hundred. In two days all were called back
and fed, ten thousand the first day, twenty thousand the second. Then
came our troops, and Santiago was lived and is remembered. Its
hospitals, the ante-chamber to Montauk, are never to be forgotten.
A general committee was formed, the city districted into sections, with
a commissioner for each district, selected by the people themselves
living there. Every family or person residing within the city was
supplied by the commissioner of that district, and all transient
persons were fed at the kitchens, the food being provided by the Red
Cross.
The discharge of the cargo of the State of Texas commenced at six
o'clock Monday morning, July 18th. One hundred and twenty-five
stevedores were employed and paid in food issued as rations. Four days
later the discharge was completed.
Although the army had entered the city during the latter part of that
time, there had been no confusion, no groups of disorderly persons seen,
no hunger in the city more than in ordinary times. We had done all that
could be done to advantage at that time in Santiago. The United States
troops had mainly left. The Spanish soldiers were coming in to their
waiting ships, bringing with them all the diseases that unprovided and
uncleanly camps would be expected to hold in store. Five weeks before we
had brought into Santiago all the cargo of the State of Texas excepting
the hospital supplies, which had been used the month previous among our
own troops at Siboney, General Shafter's front, and El Caney during the
days of fighting.
These were the last days of General Shafter in Santiago, who was, as he
had at all times been, the kind and courteous officer and gentleman.
General Wood, who was made Governor of the Province of Santiago upon the
day of surrender--alert, wise, and untiring, with an eye single to the
good of all--toiled day and night.
The State of Texas steamed away to its northern home. Peace and plenty
came. The reconcentrados we went in search of were never reached. To
those who could not withstand, Heaven came. To those who could, _Cuba
Libre_.
Later on, general efforts were made for the protection of the thousands
of orphans over the island, in which efforts the Red Cross joined. But
the people of Cuba solved the question themselves--by a general adoption
in their own homes--and orphanages in Cuba became a thing of the past.
Thus our work on that distressful field closed, after nearly two years
of such effort as one would never desire to repeat. The financial
management of that field, so far as the Red Cross was concerned, was
done under the attorneyship of the Central Cuban Relief Committee of New
York, whose reports are models of accuracy and accountability, and to
which any person desiring information may be referred.
Cuba was a hard field, full of heart-breaking memories. It gave the
first opportunity to test the cooperation between the government and its
supplemental handmaiden, the Red Cross. That these relations might not
have been clearly understood at this initial date may well be
appreciated, but that time and experience will remedy this may be
confidently hoped.
Through all our discouragements the steady hand and calm approval of our
great head of the army and navy was our solace and our strength. And
when at length it was all over, his hand could trace for his message to
his people the following testimonial, what need had one even to remember
past discouragements, however great? It was as if the hand of the martyr
had set its undying seal upon the brow of the American Red Cross. What
greater justification could it have? What greater riches could it crave?
"In this connection it is a pleasure for me to mention in terms of
cordial appreciation the timely and useful work of the American Red
Cross, both in relief measures preparatory to the campaigns, in sanitary
assistance at several of the camps of assemblage, and, later, under the
able and experienced leadership of the president of the society, Miss
Clara Barton, on the fields of battle and in the hospitals at the front
in Cuba. Working in conjunction with the governmental authorities and
under their sanction and approval, and with the enthusiastic cooperation
of many patriotic women and societies in the various States, the Red
Cross has fully maintained its already high reputation for intense
earnestness and ability to exercise the noble purposes of its
international organization, thus justifying the confidence and support
which it has received at the hands of the American people. To the
members and officers and all who aided them in their philanthropic
work, the sincere and lasting gratitude of the soldiers and the public
is due and freely accorded.
"In tracing these events we are constantly reminded of our obligations
to the Divine Master for His watchful care over us, and His safe
guidance, for which the nation makes reverent acknowledgment and offers
humble prayers for the continuance of His favors."--FROM PRESIDENT
MCKINLEY'S MESSAGE TO CONGRESS, DECEMBER 6, 1898.
IX
GALVESTON
1900
This time there was no murmur in the air, no warning of approaching
danger. Even the watchful press, that knows so much before it ever
happens, slumbered quiet and deep, till the hissing wires shrieked the
terrifying word--Galveston.
Then we learned that, as at Port Royal, the sea had overleaped its
bounds and its victims by thousands were in its grasp.
In all the land no one slept then. To us it was the clang of the
fire-bell, and the drop of the harness. The Red Cross clans commenced to
gather.
In two days a little coterie of near a dozen left Washington under
escort of the competent agency of the New York World, which had on the
first day telegraphed that it would open a subscription for the relief
of Galveston, and would be glad to send all supplies and money received
to the Red Cross, if its president, Miss Clara Barton, would go and
distribute it. It was the acceptance of this generous offer that had
brought to the station in Washington the escort; and a palace-car,
provided with all comforts for the journey to Galveston, was under the
management of the World's efficient correspondent and agent, Robert
Adamson.
The direfulness of the news gathered as we proceeded on our journey, and
delays were gotten over as quickly as possible. A detention of several
hours in New Orleans gave opportunity for consultation with the officers
of the Red Cross Society of that city, which had held its loyal ranks
unbroken since 1882, and became a tower of strength in this relief. A
day of waiting in Houston for a passage over the Gulf gave us a glimpse
of what the encroachment had been on the mainland. We found the passage
across to Galveston difficult, and with one night of waiting by the
shore in almost open cars, at Texas City, we at length arrived in
Galveston on the morning of the 15th of September.
Here again no description could adequately serve its purpose. The sea,
with fury spent, had sullenly retired. The strongest buildings, half
standing, roofless and tottering, told what once had been the make-up of
a thriving city. But that cordon of wreckage skirting the shore for
miles it seemed, often twenty feet in height, and against which the high
tide still lapped and rolled! What did it tell? The tale is all too
dreadful to recall--the funeral pyre of at least five thousand human
beings. The uncoffined dead of the fifth part of a city lay there. The
lifeless bodies festering in the glaring heat of a September sun told
only too fatally what that meant to that portion of the city left alive.
The streets were well-nigh impassable, the animals largely drowned, the
working force of men diminished, dazed, and homeless. The men who had
been the fathers of the city, its business and its wealth, looked on
aghast at their overwhelmed possessions, ruined homes, and, worse than
all, mourned their own dead.
Yet these men, to the number of thirty or more, had, as one may say,
pulled themselves together, and were even at that early date a relief
committee, holding their meetings at the wrecked and half-ruined hotel,
almost the only public house left standing. To this hotel we also went
and reported to the committee. To say that we were kindly and
gratefully received by them says nothing that would satisfy either
ourselves or them.
The conditions were so new to them that it was a relief to meet persons
who had seen such things before. We were asked not only to act with
them, but to assume charge of the administration of relief. This, of
course, we would not do, but that we would meet with, counsel, and aid
them in every way in our power, is needless to affirm. That we did do
this, through every day of our stay of three months, not only our own
conviction, but the unasked and unexpected testimony of both Galveston
and the Legislature of the State of Texas, go to assure.
On the third day after our arrival we were joined by Mr. Stephen E.
Barton, President of the former Central Cuban Relief Committee, and Mr.
Fred L. Ward, its competent secretary, who became our secretary from the
time of his arrival until the close of the field, continuing until after
our return to headquarters and settling the last account. Not only the
thanks of the Red Cross are due for his faithful, painstaking work, but
his name is still a household word through the score of counties
skirting the shore on the mainland of Texas.
It may be interesting to readers to know what is done first, or just how
a relief party commence under circumstances like that. A few words will
give an outline. First the ground must be overlooked and conditions
learned. This is not easy when it is remembered that broken houses,
cars, wagons, church steeples, and grand pianos were liable to be
encountered in the middle of the leading streets, themselves buried
three feet in the coarse black sand, brought in by the great tidal wave.
Nevertheless, a building must be found in which to store and distribute
the supplies that would immediately come. How needful these supplies
would be can be inferred when it is recalled that scores of persons came
alive out of that wreck, with simply the band of a shirt or a
night-dress held by its button about the neck as the only reminder that
ever a cover of clothing had been theirs.
A little meeting of my assistants early held assigned each to his duty
and his place. A warehouse, fortunately still intact, was generously
supplied by Mr. John Sealy. Major James A. McDowell, with the
experience of this branch of Red Cross work from Johnstown down, and the
record of twenty-six battles in the old civil war, was placed in charge.
Here is one of the scenes given by a casual eye-witness:
A poor feeble-looking man, with scant clothing, enters the warehouse and
waits. "Hello there," calls the observant major--with his Grand Army
button--overhauling clothes for the visitor. "But, major, I was a
Confederate soldier." "Lord bless your poor suffering soul, what
difference does that make? Here, this will suit you."
It was thought advisable by some of the party to establish an orphanage,
which was done and carried through, regardless of the common-sense idea
that few children would survive, when the parents were drowned. And so
it proved, although the work was faithfully administered.
Homes must be made, lumber obtained, and houses built. The Red Cross
sent out the appeal for lumber and aided in the work of shelter.
Mrs. Fannie B. Ward was placed in charge of a special clothing
department. Need I remind thoughtful readers that in a disaster like
that, where people of affluence, culture, and position are in a night
bereft of all, one of the cruelest features might be to go to the open
boxes of a relief station for clothing, such as never before worn, and
could not be asked for through the choking tears. In all humanity these
cases must be properly, respectfully, and discreetly met, as one lady
could meet another in distress.
No more vivid picture of the conditions by which we were surrounded can
be imagined than the following extract from Mrs. Ward's report:
"Just seven days after the storm we found ourselves stranded at Texas
City, on the mainland opposite Galveston Island, waiting for
transportation across the six-mile stretch of water. Bridges had been
swept away, and new sand-bars thrown up in the bay; floating roofs and
timbers impeded navigation, and the only method of communication between
the mainland and Galveston was one poor little ferry-boat, which had to
feel her now dangerous way very cautiously, by daylight only. She had
also to carry nearly a quarter of her capacity in soldiers to prevent
her being swamped by waiting crowds of people, frantic to learn the
fate of their friends on the island. Each trip to the mainland, the boat
came filled with refugees from the city of doom--the sick, the maimed,
the sorrowing--many with fearful bodily injuries inflicted by the storm,
and others with deeper wounds of grief;--mothers whose babies had been
torn from their arms, children whose parents were missing, fathers whose
entire families were lost--a dazed and tearless throng, such as Danté
might have met in his passage through Inferno. These were dumped by
thousands on the sandy beach at Texas City, and then conveyed by rail to
Houston, to be cared for by the good people of that city, who,
notwithstanding their own grievous losses, were doing noble work for
their stricken neighbors.
"Of Texas City--a flourishing town of four or five thousand
houses--nothing remained but heaps of bricks and splintered wood, sodden
bales of cotton and bits of household furniture, scattered over the
plain; not a standing habitation within miles, nor any shelter for the
crowds above-mentioned, except two or three hospital-tents, hastily set
up for the sick and wounded, but inadequate for their accommodation.
What was our dismay when told that here we must remain at least
twenty-four hours, for the return of the boat! However, we were better
off, even physically, than most of the waiting crowd, though weariness
of the flesh amounted to actual suffering, after more than fifty hours'
travel. As a special courtesy to Miss Barton, the railway company left a
car to shelter her during the night. Luxurious Pullmans did not abound
at Texas City, and this was the shabbiest of day-coaches, equipped with
few 'modern conveniences.' But this was no time to think of personal
comfort, on the threshold of so much misery; and who could murmur when
the head of our little company set such an heroic example of patience. I
have seen her in many trying situations, that threatened the fortitude
and endurance of the strongest--and have yet to hear the first word of
complaint from her lips. She smilingly 'bunked' upon two seats laid
together--compared to which, for softness, the _penitente's_ slab of
stone would be as 'downy beds of ease'--and encouraged her companions to
do the same. Hunger and thirst would also have been our portion, had it
not been for a Salvation Army Corps encamped in the vicinity, and the
Relief Train of the Philadelphia North American, stranded like
ourselves. Thanks to those good Samaritans, we dined and breakfasted on
tinned beef, bread and coffee; and what more could good soldiers
require?
"That night in Texas City will be long remembered. Sleep was out of the
question--stretched on those cross-bars, like St. Lawrence on his
gridiron. Soldiers patrolled the beach, not only to prevent a stampede
of the boat, but to protect both the quick and the dead from fiends in
human guise, who prowled the devastated region, committing atrocities
too horrible to name. All night the steady tramp, tramp, of the guard
sounded beneath the car-windows, while at either door stood two
sentinels, muskets on shoulders. Skies of inky blackness, studded with
stars of extraordinary brilliancy, seemed to bend much nearer the earth
than at the North; and the Great Dipper hung low on the horizon--for
only just across the Gulf it disappears to give place to the Southern
Cross. Myriads of big, bright fire-flies, resembling balls of flame,
flitted restlessly over the plain, like the disembodied souls whose
homes were here one short week before, searching for their scattered
treasures. Over on Galveston Island, a long line of flame, mounting to
the heavens, marked the burning of ruined homes and corpses; while other
fires, in all directions on the mainland, told of similar ghastly
cremations. At one time I counted twenty-three of these fires, not
including those on the island. Early in the morning a strange odor drew
attention to a fresh funeral-pyre, only a few rods away, around the
horse-shoe curve of the shore. We were told that thirty bodies, found
since daybreak in the immediate vicinity, were being consumed in it.
That peculiar smell of burning flesh, so sickening at first, became
horribly familiar within the next two months, when we lived in it and
breathed it, day after day.
"We found the situation in Galveston infinitely worse than had been
described. The most sensational accounts of the yellowest journals fell
far short of the truth--simply because its full horror was beyond the
power of words to portray. Figures and statistics can give little idea
of the results of such an appalling calamity; and to this day, people
at a distance have no realization of the unutterable woe which our Red
Cross band of less than a dozen, strove to alleviate. We arrived on the
eighth day after the tragedy, in which upward of ten thousand lives went
suddenly out in storm and darkness; and the survivors were just
beginning to realize the extent of their losses.
"At first they seemed stunned to partial insensibility by the very
magnitude of their grief--as a man who has been mangled almost unto
death in a railroad disaster is said to be oblivious to pain. Dead
citizens lay by thousands amid the wreck of their homes, and raving
maniacs searched the _débris_ for their loved ones, with the organized
gangs of workers. Corpses, dumped by barge-loads into the Gulf, came
floating back to menace the living; and the nights were lurid with
incinerations of putrefying bodies, piled like cord-wood, black and
white together, irrespective of age, sex, or previous condition. At
least four thousand dwellings had been swept away, with all their
contents, and fully half of the population of the city was without
shelter, food, clothes, or any of the necessaries of life. Of these,
some were living in tents; others crowded in with friends hardly less
unfortunate; many half-crazed, wandering aimlessly about the streets,
and the story of their sufferings, mental and physical, is past the
telling. Every house that remained was a house of mourning. Of many
families every member had been swept away. Even sadder were the numerous
cases where one or two were left out of recently happy households; and
saddest of all was the heart-breaking suspense of those whose friends
were numbered among the 'missing.'
"We find it hard enough to lay away our dead in consecrated ground, with
all the care and tenderness that love can suggest, where we may water
the sacred spot with our tears and place upon it the flowers they loved
in life; but never to know whether their poor bodies were swallowed by
the merciless Gulf, or fed to the fishes with those grewsome
barge-loads, or left above ground to become an abomination in the
nostrils of the living, or burned in indiscriminate heaps with horses
and dogs and the mingled ashes scattered to the winds--must indeed have
been well-nigh unbearable. No wonder there were lunatics in Galveston,
and unnumbered cases of nervous prostration.
"After weeks had passed and two thousand men, aided by several hundred
teams, had partially reduced the mountain of wreckage, cremation fires
yet burned continuously--fed not only by human bodies, but by thousands
of carcasses of domestic animals. By that time, in the hot, moist
atmosphere of the latitude, decomposition had so far advanced that the
corpses--which at first were decently carried in carts or on stretchers,
then shoveled upon boards or blankets--had finally to be scooped up with
pitchforks, in the hands of negroes, kept at their awful task by the
soldiers' bayonets. And still the 'finds' continued, at the average rate
of seventy a day. The once beautiful driving beach was strewn with
mounds and trenches, holding unrecognized and uncoffined victims of the
flood; and between this improvised cemetery and a ridge of _débris_,
three miles long and in places higher than the houses had been, a line
of cremation fires poisoned the air.
"I think it was during our sixth week in Galveston, when, happening to
pass one of these primitive crematories, I stopped to interview the man
in charge. Boards, water-soaked mattresses, rags of blankets and
curtains, part of a piano, baby-carriages, and the framework of
sewing-machines, piled on top, gave it the appearance of a festive
bonfire, and only the familiar odor betrayed its purpose.
"'Have you burned any bodies here?' I inquired. The custodian regarded
me with a stare that plainly said, 'Do you think I am doing this for
amusement?' and shifted his quid from cheek to cheek before replying.
"'Ma'am,' said he, 'this 'ere fire's been goin' on more'n a month. To my
knowledge, upwards of sixty bodies have been burned in it--to say
nothin' of dogs, cats, hens, and three cows.'
"'What is in there now?' I asked.