THE FIELD-HOSPITAL
On the morning of Friday, July 1, Dr. Egan and I, with three Cuban
soldiers put at our service by General Castillo, set out on foot for the
front, carrying on our backs or in our hands such medicines and hospital
supplies as we thought would be most needed by the wounded, as well as
hammocks, blankets, cooking-utensils, and four or five days' rations for
ourselves. The march was a long and tiresome one, and it was after noon
before we reached the glade, or opening, near the Pozo house which had
been selected as the site for the first and only field-hospital of the
Fifth Army-Corps. We reported at once to Major Wood, chief surgeon of
the First Division, who gave us a hearty welcome and at once granted our
request to be set at work. The second day's battle was then in progress;
the booming of cannon and the rattle of Krag-Jorgensens could be plainly
heard a short distance in advance, and wounded men by the score were
coming back in army wagons from the firing line.
The First Division hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps was established in
the field, about three miles east of Santiago, Wednesday, June 29. At
that time it was in advance of the whole army, and had no other
protection than a line of pickets thrown out toward the enemy's
intrenchments. The site of the camp was a large, partly open glade, or
field, on the floor of a wooded valley, which was bounded on the
northeast, at a distance of three miles, by a range of mountains, and
which extended to within a mile of Santiago. Through this valley ran the
Siboney-Santiago road, nearly parallel with a brook which had its source
in the mountains to the northward, and after being joined by a number of
other brooks coming from the same direction, fell into the sea through a
notch in the coast rampart three or four miles east of Morro Castle. The
glade, or field, in which the hospital camp stood was one of a series of
similar glades stretching away to the northeast toward the base of the
mountains, and resembling a little in outline and topographical
arrangement the openings known as "barrens" in the forests of Nova
Scotia. In every other direction except the one taken by this line of
glades the camp was bounded by a dense tropical jungle through which the
Siboney-Santiago road had been cut. The opening occupied by the hospital
camp was covered with a dense growth of high wild grass, shaded here and
there by small clumps of pinon-bushes, with a few larger trees of kinds
to me unknown. South and southwest of the camp lay a tropical forest
which I did not undertake to explore, but which our pickets said was so
wild and so tangled with vines and creepers as to be almost
impenetrable. The site of the camp between the road and the brook was
well chosen, and it was, perhaps, as satisfactory a place for a hospital
as could have been found in that vicinity.
The hospital, when I arrived, consisted of three large tents for
operating-tables, pharmacy, dispensary, etc.; another of similar
dimensions for wounded officers; half a dozen small wall-tents for
wounded soldiers; and a lot of "dog-kennels," or low shelter-tents, for
the hospital stewards, litter-bearers, and other attendants. I do not
know how many ambulances the hospital had for the transportation of
wounded from the battle-line, but I saw only two, and was informed by
Dr. Godfrey that only three had been brought from Tampa. Fifty or more
had been sent to that port for the use of the Fifth Army-Corps, but had
been left there, by direct order of General Shafter, when the expedition
sailed.
The hospital staff at the beginning of the first day's battle consisted
of five surgeons: namely, Major M. W. Wood, chief surgeon of the First
Division; Major R. W. Johnson, in command of the First Division
hospital; Dr. Guy C. Godfrey, Dr. H. P. Jones, and Dr. F. J. Combe.
The resources and supplies of the hospital, outside of instruments,
operating-tables, and medicines, were very limited. There was
tent-shelter for only about one hundred wounded men; there were no cots,
hammocks, mattresses, rubber blankets, or pillows for sick or injured
soldiers; the supply of woolen army blankets was very short and was soon
exhausted; and there was no clothing at all except two or three dozen
shirts. In the form of hospital food for sick or wounded men there was
nothing except a few jars of beef extract, malted milk, etc., bought in
the United States by Major Wood, taken to the field in his own private
baggage, and held in reserve for desperate cases.
Such was the equipment of the only field-hospital in Cuba when the
attack on Santiago began. That it was wretchedly incomplete and
inadequate I hardly need say, but the responsibility for the
incompleteness and inadequacy cannot be laid upon the field force. They
took to the hospital camp from the steamers everything that they could
possibly get transportation for. There was only one line of very bad
road from Daiquiri and Siboney to the front, and along that line had to
be carried, with an utterly insufficient train of mules and wagons, all
the food and ammunition needed by an advancing army of more than sixteen
thousand men. In loading the mules and wagons preference was given to
stores and supplies that could be used in killing Spanish soldiers
rather than to stores and supplies that would be needed in caring for
our own, and the result was the dreadful and heartrending state of
affairs in that hospital at the end of the second day's fight. If there
was anything more terrible in our Civil War, I am glad that I was not
there to see it.
The battle before Santiago began very early on Friday morning, July 1,
and the wounded, most of whom had received first aid at
bandaging-stations just back of the firing line, reached the hospital in
small numbers as early as nine o'clock. As the hot tropical day
advanced, the numbers constantly and rapidly increased until, at
nightfall, long rows of wounded were lying on the grass in front of the
operating-tents, without awnings or shelter, awaiting examination and
treatment. The small force of field-surgeons worked heroically and with
a devotion that I have never seen surpassed; but they were completely
overwhelmed by the great bloody wave of human agony that rolled back in
ever-increasing volume from the battle-line. They stood at the
operating-tables, wholly without sleep, and almost without rest or food,
for twenty-one consecutive hours; and yet, in spite of their tremendous
exertions, hundreds of seriously or dangerously wounded men lay on the
ground for hours, many of them half naked, and nearly all without
shelter from the blazing tropical sun in the daytime, or the damp,
chilly dew at night. No organized or systematic provision had been made
for feeding them or giving them drink, and many a poor fellow had not
tasted food or water for twelve hours, and had been exposed during all
that time to the almost intolerable glare of the sun. I saw a soldier of
the Tenth Cavalry, who had been shot through the body, lie on the ground
in front of the operating-tent for at least three hours, naked to the
waist, and exposed to sunshine in which I could hardly hold my hand. I
speak of this particular soldier, not because he was an exception, but
rather because he exhibited such magnificent fortitude and
self-control. Although he must have been suffering terrible agony, he
lay there for three hours without a murmur or a complaint, and, so far
as I could see, without change of countenance, until his turn came and
he was lifted upon the operating-table.
At sunset the five surgeons had operated upon and dressed the wounds of
one hundred and fifty-four men. As night advanced and the wounded came
in more rapidly, no count or record of the operations was made or
attempted. Late in the evening of Friday, division and regimental
surgeons began to come back to the hospital from the front, and the
operating force was increased to ten. More tables were set out in front
of the tents, and the surgeons worked at them all night, partly by
moonlight and partly by the dim light of flaring candles held in the
hands of stewards and attendants. Fortunately, the weather was clear and
still, and the moon nearly full. There were no lanterns, apparently, in
the camp,--at least, I saw none in use outside of the
operating-tent,--and if the night had been dark, windy, or rainy, four
fifths of the wounded would have had no help or surgical treatment
whatever until the next day. All the operations outside of a single tent
were performed by the dim light of one unsheltered and flaring candle,
or at most two. More than once even the candles were extinguished for
fear that they would draw the fire of Spanish sharp-shooters who were
posted in trees south of the camp, and who exchanged shots with our
pickets at intervals throughout the night. These cold-blooded and
merciless guerrillas fired all day Friday at our ambulances and at our
wounded as they were brought back from the battle-line, and killed two
of our Red Cross men. There was good reason to fear, therefore, that
they would fire into the hospital. It required some nerve on the part of
our surgeons to stand beside operating-tables all night with their backs
to a dark tropical jungle out of which came at intervals the sharp
reports of guerrillas' rifles. But there was not a sign of hesitation or
fear. Finding that they could not work satisfactorily by moonlight,
brilliant although it was, they relighted their candles and took the
risk. Before daybreak on Saturday morning they had performed more than
three hundred operations, and then, as the wounded had ceased to come
in, and all cases requiring immediate attention had been disposed of,
they retired to their tents for a little rest. The five men who composed
the original hospital force had worked incessantly for twenty-one hours.
Of course the wounded who had been operated upon, or the greater part of
them, had to lie out all night on the water-soaked ground; and in order
to appreciate the suffering they endured the reader must try to imagine
the conditions and the environment. It rained in torrents there almost
every afternoon for a period of from ten minutes to half an hour, and
the ground, therefore, was usually water-soaked and soft. All the time
that it did not rain the sun shone with a fierceness of heat that I have
seldom seen equaled, and yet at night it grew cool and damp so rapidly
as to necessitate the putting on of thicker clothing or a light
overcoat. Many of the wounded soldiers, who were brought to the hospital
from a distance of three miles in a jolting ambulance or army wagon, had
lost their upper clothing at the bandaging-stations just back of the
battle-line, where the field-surgeons had stripped them in order to
examine or treat their wounds. They arrived there, consequently, half
naked and without either rubber or woolen blankets; and as the very
limited hospital supply of shirts and blankets had been exhausted, there
was nothing to clothe or cover them with. The tents set apart for
wounded soldiers were already full to overflowing, and all that a
litter-squad could do with a man when they lifted him from the
operating-table on Friday night was to carry him away and lay him down,
half naked as he was, on the water-soaked ground under the stars. Weak
and shaken from agony under the surgeon's knife and probe, there he had
to lie in the high, wet grass, with no one to look after him, no one to
give him food and water if he needed them, no blanket over him, and no
pillow under his head. What he suffered in the long hours of the damp,
chilly night I know because I saw him, and scores more like him; but the
reader, who can get an idea of it only through the medium of words, can
hardly imagine it.
When the sun rose Saturday morning, the sufferings of the wounded who
had lain out all night in the grass were intensified rather than
relieved, because with sunshine came intense heat, thirst, and surgical
fever. An attempt was made to protect some of them by making awnings and
thatched roofs of bushes and poles; but about seven o'clock ambulances
and wagons loaded with wounded began again to arrive from the
battle-line, and the whole hospital force turned its attention to them,
leaving the suffering men in the grass to the care of the camp cooks and
a few slightly wounded soldiers, who, although in pain themselves, could
still hobble about carrying hard bread and water to their completely
disabled and gasping comrades.
The scenes of Saturday were like those of the previous day, but with
added details of misery and horror. Many of the wounded, brought in from
the extreme right flank of the army at Caney, had had nothing to eat or
drink in more than twenty-four hours, and were in a state of extreme
exhaustion. Some, who had been shot through the mouth or neck, were
unable to swallow, and we had to push a rubber tube down through the
bloody froth that filled their throats, and pour water into their
stomachs through that; some lay on the ground with swollen bellies,
suffering acutely from stricture of the urinary passage and distention
of the bladder caused by a gunshot wound; some were paralyzed from the
neck down or the waist down as a result of injury to the spine; some
were delirious from thirst, fever, and exposure to the sun; and some
were in a state of unconsciousness, coma, or collapse, and made no reply
or sign of life when I offered them water or bread. They were all placed
on the ground in a long, closely packed row as they came in; a few
pieces of shelter-tenting were stretched over them to protect them a
little from the sun, and there they lay for two, three, and sometimes
four hours before the surgeons could even examine their injuries. A more
splendid exhibition of patient, uncomplaining fortitude and heroic
self-control than that presented by these wounded men the world has
never seen. Many of them, as appeared from their chalky faces, gasping
breath, and bloody vomiting, were in the last extremity of mortal agony;
but I did not hear a groan, a murmur, or a complaint once an hour.
Occasionally a trooper under the knife of the surgeon would swear, or a
beardless Cuban boy would shriek and cry, "Oh, my mother, my mother!" as
the surgeons reduced a compound fracture of the femur and put his leg in
splints; but from the long row of wounded on the ground there came no
sound or sign of weakness. They were suffering,--some of them were
dying,--but they were strong. Many a man whose mouth was so dry and
parched with thirst that he could hardly articulate would insist on my
giving water first, not to him, when it was his turn, but to some
comrade who was more badly hurt or had suffered longer. Intense pain and
the fear of impending death are supposed to bring out the selfish,
animal characteristics of man; but they do not in the higher type of
man. Not a single American soldier, in all my experience in that
hospital, ever asked to be examined or treated out of his regular turn
on account of the severity, painful nature, or critical state of his
wound. On the contrary, they repeatedly gave way to one another,
saying: "Take this one first--he's shot through the body. I've only got
a smashed foot, and I can wait." Even the courtesies of life were not
forgotten or neglected in that valley of the shadow of death. If a man
could speak at all, he always said, "Thank you," or "I thank you very
much," when I gave him hard bread or water. One beardless youth who had
been shot through the throat, and who told me in a husky whisper that he
had had no water in thirty-six hours, tried to take a swallow when I
lifted his head. He strangled, coughed up a little bloody froth, and
then whispered: "It's no use; I can't. Never mind!" Our Dr. Egan
afterward gave him water through a stomach-tube. If there was any
weakness or selfishness, or behavior not up to the highest level of
heroic manhood, among the wounded American soldiers in that hospital
during those three terrible days, I failed to see it. As one of the army
surgeons said to me, with the tears very near his eyes: "When I look at
those fellows and see what they stand, I am proud of being an American,
and I glory in the stock. The world has nothing finer."
It was the splendid courage and fortitude of the men that made their
suffering so hard to see. As the row of prostrate bodies on the ground
grew longer and longer Saturday afternoon and evening, the emotional
strain of the situation became almost unbearable, and I would have
exchanged all the knowledge and ability I possessed for the knowledge
and skill even of a hospital steward, so that I might do something more
than carry around food and water to those suffering, uncomplaining
American soldiers.
Late Saturday afternoon there was a heavy tropical shower, which
drenched not only the wounded who were awaiting examination in front of
the operating-tents, but also the men who had been operated upon and
carried away into the long grass. I doubt, however, whether it made
their condition any worse--at least for a time. Most of them had been
exposed for hours to a tropical sun, and the rain must have given them,
at first, a feeling of coolness and relief.
As the sun set and darkness settled down upon the camp after the short
tropical twilight, candles were again lighted around the
operating-tables, and the surgeons worked on without intermission and
without rest. The rattle of rifles and machine-guns and the booming of
artillery along the line of battle died away into an occasional sputter
after dark; the full moon rose into a cloudless sky, and the stillness
of the jungle south of the camp was broken only by an occasional shot
from a sentry or from a Spanish sharp-shooter hidden in a tree. Around
the operating-tables there was a sound of half-audible conversation as
the surgeons gave directions to their assistants or discussed the
injuries of the men upon whom they were at work, and now and then a
peremptory call for "Litter-squad here!" showed that another man was
about to be brought to the operating-table, or carried from it into the
field and laid on the ground.
At midnight Saturday the number of wounded men that had been brought
into the hospital camp was about eight hundred. All that could walk,
after their wounds had been dressed, and all that could bear
transportation to the sea-coast in an army wagon, were sent to Siboney
to be put on board the hospital steamers and transports. There remained
in the camp several hundred who were so severely injured that they could
not possibly be moved, and these were carried to the eastern end of the
field and laid on the ground in the high, wet grass. I cannot imagine
anything more cruelly barbarous than to bring a severely wounded man
back four or five miles to the hospital in a crowded, jolting army
wagon, let him lie from two to four hours with hardly any protection
from the blazing sunshine in the daytime or the drenching dew at night,
rack him with agony on the operating-table, and then carry him away,
weak and helpless, put him on the water-soaked ground, without shelter,
blanket, pillow, food, or drink, and leave him there to suffer alone all
night. And yet I saw this done with scores, if not hundreds, of men as
brave and heroic as any that ever stood in a battle-line. It might not
have been so,--it ought not to have been so,--but so it was; and in that
hospital there were no means whatever of preventing it. The force of
surgeons and hospital stewards immediately available was altogether too
small to attend properly to the great number of wounded thrown suddenly
upon their hands, and no men could be spared to look after the wretched
and suffering soldiers in the grass whose wounds had been treated, when
there were a hundred more who had not even been looked at in twenty-four
hours, and who were lying in a long, closely packed row on the ground,
awaiting their turns at the operating-tables. When a litter-squad had
carried a man away into the bushes, they had to leave him there and
hurry back to put another sufferer on a table or bring another from an
ambulance or army wagon to the operating-line. Instead of the force of
five surgeons and about twenty stewards and attendants with which the
hospital began work on Friday, there should have been a force of fifty
surgeons and at least two hundred stewards, attendants, and
stretcher-bearers, so that they might have been divided into two
watches, or reliefs, working and resting alternately. As it was on
Friday, five surgeons and twenty attendants had to take care of the
wounded from three whole divisions. They were reinforced by five more
surgeons and perhaps twenty more attendants Friday evening, but even
this force was so insufficient and inadequate that at midnight on
Saturday one of the highest medical officers in the camp said to me:
"This department is in a state of complete collapse."
In nothing were the weakness and imperfect equipment of the hospital
more apparent than in the provision made--or rather the lack of
provision--for the care of wounded after their wounds had been dressed.
It seems to have been expected that, when injured men were brought back
from the battle-line, their blankets, canteens, and rations would be
brought with them; but in seventy-five per cent. of the cases this was
not done, and it was unreasonable under the circumstances to expect that
it would be done. The men did not go into action carrying their blankets
and rations; on the contrary, most of them left all unnecessary
impedimenta in their camps and went into the fight as lightly clad as
possible, often stripped naked to the waist. When they were shot, their
comrades picked them up and carried them to the rear just as they were.
There was no time to inquire for their personal belongings or to send to
their camps for their blankets; and they came back to the hospital not
only without blankets or ponchos, but often hatless, shirtless, and in
trousers ripped up by surgeon's scissors. Some of them had empty
canteens, but I did not see one who had food. Ample provision should
have been made in this hospital for clothing, feeding, and supplying the
wants of wounded men brought back in this destitute condition; but such
provision as was made proved to be wholly inadequate. The few dozen
shirts and blankets that the hospital contained were soon distributed,
and then the wounded men were taken from the operating-tables and laid
on the ground in the outskirts of the camp in the same state, as regards
clothing and bedding, that they were in when picked up on the
battle-field. For feeding them no arrangements whatever had been made,
and, indeed, there was no food in the hospital suited to their
requirements. Our Red Cross surgeon, Dr. Egan, and I brought in a few
bottles of malted milk, maltine, beef extract, limes, etc., but as we
could not get transportation for a single pound of stuff and had to
march in twelve miles over a bad road, we could not bring much, and our
limited supply of invalid food, although administered only in desperate
cases, was exhausted in two or three hours.
Major Wood, who superintended the bringing in and disposition of the
wounded, did everything that was possible to make them comfortable, and
worked day and night with tireless energy and devotion; but there was
very little that could be done with the resources at his command.
The second day's battle in front of Santiago consisted, generally
speaking, of a series of attempts on the part of the Spaniards to drive
our troops from the positions which they had taken by assault on Friday.
The firing continued throughout the day, and at times was very heavy;
but just before sunset it died away to a faint sputter and crackle of
rifles, and at dark ceased altogether. The moon rose in an unclouded sky
over the dark tree-tops east of the camp; the crickets began to chirp in
the thicket across the brook; sounds like the rapid shaking of a
billiard-ball in a resonant wooden box came from nocturnal birds or
tree-toads hidden in the depth of the forest; and the teeming life of
the tropical wilderness, frightened into silence for a time by the
uproar of battle, took courage from the stillness of night, and
manifested its presence by chirps, croaks, and queer, unfamiliar cries
in all parts of the encircling jungle.
About ten o'clock the stillness was broken by the boom of a heavy gun at
the front, followed instantly by the crash and rattle of infantry fire,
which grew heavier and heavier, and extended farther and farther to the
north and south, until it seemed to come from all parts of our
intrenched line on the crest of the San Juan ridge. For nearly half an
hour the rattle and sputter of rifles, the drumming of machine-guns, and
the intermittent thunder of artillery filled the air from the outskirts
of Santiago to the hospital camp, drowning the murmur of the rippling
brook, and silencing again the crickets, birds, and tree-toads in the
jungle beyond it. Then the uproar ceased, almost as suddenly as it had
begun; the stillness of night settled down again upon the lonely
tropical wilderness; and if I had not been able to hear the voices of
the surgeons as they consulted over an operating-table, and an
occasional shot from a picket or a sharpshooter in the forest, I should
not have imagined that there was an army or a battle-field within a
hundred miles. From the wounded who came back from the firing line an
hour or two later we learned that the enemy made an attempt, about ten
o'clock, to recapture the San Juan heights, but were repulsed with heavy
loss.
Saturday's fighting did not materially change the relative positions of
the combatants, but it proved conclusively that we could hold the San
Juan ridge against any attacking force that the Spaniards could muster.
Why, after a demonstration of this fact, General Shafter should have
been so discouraged as to "seriously consider the advisability of
falling back to a position five miles in the rear," I do not know. Our
losses in the fighting at Caney and San Juan were only two hundred and
thirty-nine men killed and thirteen hundred and sixty-three wounded, yet
General Shafter was so disheartened that he not only thought of
retreating to a position five miles in the rear, but seems to have been
upon the point of surrendering the command of the army to General
Breckenridge. Ill health, doubtless, had much to do with this feeling of
discouragement. It certainly was not warranted by anything that one
could see at the end of the second day's fight. We had taken every
position that we had attacked; we had lost only ten per cent of our
available force; and we were strongly intrenched on the crest of a high
hill less than a mile and a half from the eastern boundary of the city.
After General Lawton's division and the brigade of General Bates had
reinforced Generals Kent and Wheeler at San Juan, there was very little
reason to fear that the Spaniards would drive us from our position.
The fighting of all our soldiers, both at Caney and at San Juan, was
daring and gallant in the extreme; but I cannot refrain from calling
particular attention to the splendid behavior of the colored troops. It
is the testimony of all who saw them under fire that they fought with
the utmost courage, coolness, and determination, and Colonel Roosevelt
said to a squad of them in the trenches, in my presence, that he never
expected to have, and could not ask to have, better men beside him in a
hard fight. If soldiers come up to Colonel Roosevelt's standard of
courage, their friends have no reason to feel ashamed of them. His
commendation is equivalent to a medal of honor for conspicuous
gallantry, because, in the slang of the camp, he himself is "a fighter
from 'way back." I can testify, furthermore, from my own personal
observation in the field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps Saturday and
Saturday night, that the colored regulars who were brought in there
displayed extraordinary fortitude and self-control. There were a great
many of them, but I cannot remember to have heard a groan or a complaint
from a single man. I asked one of them whether any of his comrades
showed signs of fear when they went into action. "No," he replied, with
a grin, "not egzactly; two or three of 'em looked kindo' squandered just
at first, but they mighty soon braced up."
Among the volunteer regiments that were hotly engaged and lost heavily
in Friday's battle were the Seventy-first New York and the Second
Massachusetts. Both were armed with Springfield rifles, and this put
them at a great disadvantage as compared with the regulars, all of whom
used Krag-Jorgensen rifles or carbines with smokeless powder. In a
wooded and chaparral-covered country like that around Santiago, where it
was so easy to find concealment and so difficult to see troops at a
distance, the use of smokeless powder was of the utmost possible
importance. A body of men might be perfectly hidden in woods or
chaparral within five hundred yards of the enemy's intrenchments, and
if they used smokeless powder they might fire from there for half an
hour without being seen or getting a return shot; but if they were armed
with Springfields, the smoke from their very first volley revealed to
the enemy their exact position, and the chaparral that concealed them
was torn to pieces by a hail-storm of projectiles from Mausers and
machine-guns. It was cruel and unreasonable to ask men to go into
action, in such a field, with rifles that could be used only with common
powder. Our men might as well have been required to hoist above the
bushes and chaparral a big flag emblazoned with the words, "Here we
are!" Dr. Hitchcock, surgeon of the Second Massachusetts, told me that
again and again, when they were lying concealed in dense scrub beside a
regiment of regulars, the latter would fire for twenty minutes without
attracting a single return shot from the enemy's line; but the moment
the men of the Second Massachusetts began to use their Springfields, and
the smoke rose above the bushes, the Spaniards would concentrate their
fire upon the spot, and kill or wound a dozen men in as many minutes. It
is to be hoped that our government will not send any more troops abroad
with these antiquated guns. They were good enough in their day, but they
are peculiarly unsuited to the conditions of warfare in a tropical
field.
Wounded men from the front continued to come into the hospital camp on
Saturday until long after midnight, and the exhausted surgeons worked at
the operating-tables by candlelight until 3 A. M. I noticed, carrying
stretchers and looking after the wounded, two or three volunteer
assistants from civil life, among them Mr. Brewer of Pittsburg, who died
of yellow fever a few days later at Siboney.
Worn out by sleeplessness, fatigue, and the emotional strain of two
nights and a day of field-hospital experience, I stretched my hammock
between two trees, about three o'clock in the morning, crawled into it,
and slept, for two or three hours, the dead, dreamless sleep of complete
exhaustion. Dr. Egan, I think, did not lie down at all. After all the
other surgeons had gone to their tents, he wandered about the camp,
looking after the wounded who lay shivering here and there on the bare,
wet ground, and giving them, with medicines, stomach-tube, and catheter,
such relief as he could. Soon after sunrise I awoke, and after a hasty
breakfast began carrying around food and water. I shall not attempt to
describe fully the terrible and heartrending experience of that morning;
but two or three of the scenes that I was compelled to witness seem,
even now, to be etched on my memory in lines of blood. About nine
o'clock, for example, I went into a small wall-tent which sheltered a
dozen or more dangerously wounded Spaniards and Cuban insurgents.
Everything that I saw there was shocking. On the right-hand side of the
tent, face downward and partly buried in the water-soaked, oozy ground,
lay a half-naked Cuban boy, nineteen or twenty years of age, who had
died in the night. He had been wounded in the head and at some time
during the long hours of darkness between sunset and dawn the bandage
had partly slipped off, and hemorrhage had begun. The blood had run down
on his neck and shoulders, coagulating and stiffening as it flowed,
until it had formed a large, red, spongy mass around his neck and on his
naked back between the shoulder-blades. This, with the coal-black hair,
the chalky face partly buried in mud, and the distorted, agonized
attitude of the half-nude body, made one of the most ghastly pictures I
had ever seen. There was already a stench of decomposition in the hot
air of the tent, and the coagulated blood on the half-naked corpse, as
well as the bloody bandage around its head, was swarming with noisy
flies. Just beyond this terrible object, and looking directly at it, was
another young Cuban who had been shot through the body, and who was
half crouching, half kneeling, on the ground, with his hands pressed to
his loins. He was deadly pale, had evidently been in torment all night,
and was crying, over and over again, in a low, agonized tone, "Oh, my
mother, my mother, my mother!" as he looked with distracted eyes at the
bloody, half-naked body of his dead comrade and saw in it his own
impending fate. The stench, the buzzing flies, the half-dried blood, the
groans, and the cries of "O, mi madre!" "O Jesu!" from the half-naked
wretches lying in two rows on the bare, muddy ground, came as near
making an inferno as anything one is ever likely to see.
In another tent, a short distance away, I found a smooth-faced American
soldier about thirty years of age, who had been shot in the head, and
also wounded by a fragment of a shell in the body. He was naked to the
waist, and his whole right side, from-the armpit to the hip, had turned
a purplish-blue color from the bruising blow of the shell. Blood had run
down from under the bandage around his head, and had then dried,
completely covering his swollen face and closed eyelids with a dull-red
mask. On this had settled a swarm of flies, which he was too weak to
brush away, or in too much pain to notice. I thought, at first, that he
was dead; but when I spoke to him and offered him water, he opened his
bloodshot, fly-encircled eyes, looked at me for a moment in a dull,
agonized way, and then closed them and faintly shook his head. Whether
he lived or died, I do not know. When I next visited the tent he was
gone.
As soon as possible after my arrival at the hospital I had obtained an
order from Lieutenant-Colonel Pope, chief surgeon of the Fifth
Army-Corps, for wagons, and on Saturday afternoon I telephoned Miss
Barton from General Shafter's headquarters to send us blankets,
clothing, malted milk, beef extract, tents, tent-flies, and such other
things as were most urgently needed. Sunday afternoon, less than
twenty-four hours after my message reached her, she rode into the
hospital camp in an army wagon, with Mrs. Gardner, Dr. Gardner, Dr.
Hubbell, and Mr. McDowell. They brought with them a wagon-load of
supplies, including everything necessary for a small Red Cross emergency
station, and in less than two hours they were refreshing all the wounded
men in the camp with corn-meal gruel, hot malted milk, beef extract,
coffee, and a beverage known as "Red Cross cider," made by stewing dried
apples or prunes in a large quantity of water, and then pouring off the
water, adding to it the juice of half a dozen lemons or limes, and
setting it into the brook in closed vessels to cool. After that time no
sick or wounded man in the camp, I think, ever suffered for want of
suitable food and drink.
On Monday Miss Barton and Dr. Hubbell went back to the steamer at
Siboney for additional supplies, and in twenty-four hours more we had
blankets, pillows, and hospital delicacies enough to meet all demands.
We should have had them there before the battle began, if we could have
obtained transportation for them from the sea-coast. As fast as possible
the wounded were taken in army wagons from the field-hospital to
Siboney, where they were put on board the transports, and at eight
o'clock on Tuesday evening Major Johnson was able to report to Major
Wood that every wounded man left in the hospital was in a tent, with a
rubber poncho or tarpaulin under him and a blanket over him.
In spite of unfavorable conditions, the percentage of recoveries among
the wounded treated in this hospital was much greater than in any other
war in which the United States has ever been engaged. This was due
partly to improved antiseptic methods of treatment, and partly to the
nature of the wound made by the Mauser bullet. In most cases this wound
was a small, clean perforation, with very little shattering or
mangling, and required only antiseptic bandaging and care. All abdominal
operations that were attempted in the field resulted in death, and none
were performed after the first day, as the great heat and dampness,
together with the difficulty of giving the patients proper nursing and
care, made recovery next to impossible.