SIBONEY DURING THE ARMISTICE
On the morning of July 3, General Shafter, who had recovered confidence,
demanded the immediate surrender of Santiago, threatening, in case of
refusal, to bombard the city; and negotiations under a flag of truce
continued thereafter for a period of ten days. Meanwhile, on the evening
of Friday, July 8, Miss Barton, Dr. Egan, Dr. Hubbell, and I returned to
the _State of Texas_ to meet Mrs. J. Addison Porter, wife of the
President's secretary, who had just arrived on the hospital steamer
_Relief_, and to get some ice and other hospital supplies of which we
were in need. We left the field-hospital in an army wagon about seven
o'clock and reached Siboney soon after ten. The surf raised by a strong
south-easterly wind was rolling so high on the strip of beach behind
which the village stood that we could not get off on board the _State of
Texas_, nor even communicate with her. It was extremely tantalizing to
us, tired, hungry, and camp-soiled as we were, to see the lights of our
steamer only a quarter of a mile away, to know that almost within reach
were a cool bath, a good supper, a clean bed, and all the comforts, if
not the luxuries, of life, and yet to feel that, so far as we were
concerned, they were as unattainable as if the ship were in the Bay of
San Francisco.
Siboney at that time was a wretched little hamlet containing only ten or
fifteen abandoned and incredibly dirty Spanish houses, most of which
were in use either as hospitals or for government offices. None of them
contained sleeping accommodations, even of the most primitive kind; all
of them were crowded; and if one arrived in the village, as we did, at a
late hour of the night, there was nothing to be done but bivouac
somewhere on the dirty, flea-infested floor of an open piazza, or lie
out on the ground. One of the largest and most commodious buildings in
the village, a one-story house with a high front stoop or porch, had
been used, apparently, during the Spanish occupation of the place, as a
store or shop. At the time of our return from the front it sheltered the
"United States Post-Office, Military Station No. 1," which had been
transferred from Daiquiri to Siboney two or three days before. In front
of this building our army wagon stopped, and we men went in to inquire
for mail and to see if we could find a decently clean place for Miss
Barton to sleep. She was quite ready to bivouac in the army wagon; but
we hoped to get something better for her. Mr. Brewer, the postmaster,
whom I had met in one of my lecture trips through the West and more
recently in the field, received us cordially, and at once offered Miss
Barton his own cot, in a room that had not yet been cleaned or swept,
back of the general delivery department. By the light of a single candle
it seemed to be a gloomy, dirty, and barn-like apartment; but the cot
was the only thing in the shape of a bed that I had seen in Siboney,
outside of the hospitals, and we accepted it for Miss Barton with
grateful hearts. The employees of the post-office were all sleeping in
camp-chairs or on the counters and floors. Where Mr. Brewer went when he
had given his own bed to Miss Barton, I do not know. I left her writing
orders and telegrams by the light of a flaring, guttering candle at
about eleven o'clock, and went out on the piazza to take a more careful
survey of the premises and make up my mind where I would sleep.
Lying across the high stoop was a long white object, which appeared, in
the darkness, to be a woman in her nightgown, with her head raised a
little on the sill of a disused door. I stepped over her once in going
down-stairs to the street, and wondered what calamity of war had reduced
a woman to the necessity of sleeping in such a place and in
circumstances of such hardship and privation. I was just discussing with
Dr. Hubbell the possibility of getting the United States Signal Corps
man in the telegraph office to signal our steamer for a boat, regardless
of the high surf, when the long white figure on the floor rose, with an
unmistakably masculine grunt, and remarked, with a slight English
accent, that he did not think there was any possibility of getting off
to a ship in a small boat, inasmuch as he had been trying for
twenty-four hours to get on board of his own vessel and had not
succeeded yet. The figure proved to be that of Lord Alfred Paget, naval
observer for the British government, and what I had taken in the
darkness for the white gown of a woman was his white-duck uniform. After
discussing the situation for a few moments, and declaring discontentedly
that our engineer corps had had time enough to build six piers and yet
had not finished one, he lay down on the floor again, without blanket,
pillow, or overcoat, rested his head on the sill of the disused door,
and apparently went to sleep, while I debated in my mind the question
whether I had better sleep with him on the floor of the piazza, and take
the chance of getting yellow fever from a possibly infected building, or
lie out on the ground, where I might be stepped on by prowling Cuban
refugees, or run over by a mule-team coming in from the front. I finally
decided that sleeping accommodations which were good enough for Lord
Alfred were good enough for me, and, just as the moon was rising over
the high, rocky rampart east of the village, I rolled myself up in my
blanket and lay down on the floor against the piazza rail. Dr. Hubbell
slept on the counter of the money-order division of the post-office,
while Dr. Egan, without blanket or pillow, stretched himself out on the
dirty planks below.
We were all up at daybreak, and making my toilet by tightening my belt
and putting on my mud-spattered pith helmet, I went down to the water's
edge to try to find some means of communicating with the ship. During my
absence at the front there had evidently been strong winds and heavy
seas, for the strip of beach was covered with the wrecks of lighters
which had been smashed while trying to land supplies in the surf, and a
large steam lighter-launch, loaded with twenty tons or more of hard
bread, beans, etc., was lying on the bottom, half submerged, about fifty
yards from shore, with the sea breaking over her. The small temporary
pier at which I landed when I went to the front had been completely
demolished and swept away, but another stronger one was in process of
construction.
The most serious embarrassments with which the army of invasion had to
contend after it reached the coast and began its march on Santiago were:
first, the extreme difficulty of landing supplies in a place like
Siboney, where there was neither pier nor shelter, and where the beach
was lashed a large part of the time by a high and dangerous surf; and,
second, the difficulty of getting such supplies to the front over a
single line of very bad road, with an insufficient number of mules and
army wagons. If these two difficulties had been foreseen and provided
for there would not have been so many smashed lighters and launches on
the beach, and the soldiers at the front would not have lived so much of
the time on short rations, nor have been compelled to boil water and
cook their rations in coffee-cups and tomato-cans, as they had to do
throughout the campaign. The difficulty of landing supplies on that
exposed and surf-beaten coast might have been anticipated, it seems to
me, and provided for. The warships of Sampson's and Schley's fleets were
there long before General Shafter's army left Tampa, and their
commanders must have seen, I think, that to get supplies ashore through
the surf at any point between Santiago and Guantanamo Bay would be
extremely difficult and hazardous, and would probably require the use of
special engineering devices and appliances. The prevailing winds there
are from the east and southeast, and from such winds the little
indentations of the coast at Siboney and Daiquiri afforded no protection
whatever. A strong breeze raised a sea which might amount to nothing
outside, but which was very troublesome, if not dangerous, to loaded
boats and lighters as soon as they reached the line where it began to
break in surf. The water was very deep close to shore; it was difficult,
therefore, to construct a pier of any great length; and even if there
had been a long and solid pier, small boats and lighters could not have
discharged cargo upon it with any safety while they were being tossed up
and down and dashed against it by a heavy sea.
I do not pretend to be an expert in such matters, but in watching the
landing of supplies here, both from our own steamer and from the army
transports, it seemed to me that what is known, I believe, as a "cable
hoist" might have been used to advantage if it had been provided in
time. It is a contrivance resembling the cable and car employed by
life-saving crews on our coasts to bring shipwrecked sailors ashore
under similar conditions; or, to use a comparison that is more familiar,
it is a reproduction on a large scale of the traveling cash-boxes on
wires used in large department stores. If a suitable transport had been
anchored outside the line of surf, fifty or seventy-five yards from the
beach, and a steel cable stretched from it to a strong mast on shore, I
do not see any reason why cargo might not have been carried over the
cable in a suspended car or cars with much greater rapidity and safety
than it was carried in lighters. Such devices are used, I think, at
several points on the western coast of South America for putting guano
and phosphates on board of vessels where communication with the shore is
hazardous and uncertain on account of swell or surf.
The second difficulty, namely, that of transportation to the front,
might have been avoided by taking to Cuba a larger number of wagons and
mules. Our army before Santiago suffered for want of a great many things
that the soldiers had with them on the transports, but that were not
landed and carried promptly forward. Among such things were large tents,
rubber blankets, camp-kettles, and large cooking-utensils generally.
"What's the use of telling us to drink only boiled water," said an
officer of the Seventh Infantry to me, "when we haven't anything bigger
than a coffee-cup or an old tomato-can to boil it in, or to keep it in
after it has been boiled? They tell us also that we must sleep in
hammocks, not get wet if we can help it, and change our underclothes
whenever we do get wet. That's all very well, but there isn't a hammock
in my company. I haven't any rubber blanket or spare underclothes
myself, and I don't believe any of my soldiers have. They made us leave
at Tampa everything that we could possibly dispense with, and then, when
we got here, they didn't land and send with us even the indispensable
things that we had on the transports."
The complaint of the officer was a perfectly just one, and I heard many
more like it. The insufficient and inadequate provision for the care and
feeding of the wounded at the field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps,
which I have tried to describe in the preceding chapter, was due largely
to the inability of General Shafter's commissaries and quartermasters
to cope successfully with the two great difficulties above indicated,
namely, landing from the steamers and transportation to the front. The
hospital corps had supplies on the vessels at Siboney, but as everything
could not possibly be landed and carried forward at once, preference was
given to ammunition and rations for able-bodied soldiers rather than to
tents, blankets, and invalid food for the wounded. I do not mean to be
understood as saying that the hospital-corps men had even on the
transports everything that they needed in order to enable them to take
proper care of the eight hundred or one thousand wounded who were thrown
on their hands in the course of forty-eight hours. I do not know whether
they had or not. Neither do I mean to say that the commissaries and
quartermasters did not do all that they possibly could to land and
forward supplies of all kinds. I mean only that, as a result of our
inability to surmount difficulties promptly, our army at the front was
not properly equipped and our wounded were not adequately cared for.
The hospital corps and quartermaster's and commissary departments of the
army, however, were not alone in their failure to anticipate and fully
provide for these difficulties. The Red Cross itself was in no better
case. There was perhaps more excuse for us, because when we fitted out
we did not know where the army was going nor what it proposed to do, and
we had been assured by the surgeon-general and by General Shafter that,
so far as the care of sick and wounded soldiers was concerned, our
services would not be required. We expected, however, that they would
be, and could we have known in what field and under what conditions our
army was going to move and fight, we should probably have had, in some
directions, a better, or at least a more suitable, equipment. If we had
had at Siboney on June 26 half a dozen army wagons, an equal number of
saddle-horses, and forty or fifty mules of our own, we should have been
in much better condition than we were to cope with the difficulties of
the situation. But for the assistance of the army, which helped us out
with transportation, notwithstanding its own limited resources, we
should not have been able to establish a Red Cross station at the front
in time to cooeperate with the hospital corps after the battle of July
1-2, nor should we have been able to send food to the fifteen thousand
refugees from Santiago who fled, hungry and destitute, to the right wing
of our army at Caney when General Shafter threatened to bombard the
city. For the opportunity to get into the field we were indebted to the
general in command, to his hospital corps, and to the officers of his
army; and we desire most gratefully to acknowledge and thank them for
the helping hand that they extended to us when we had virtually no
transportation whatever of our own.
When we returned to the _State of Texas_ on July 9, the situation, so
far as Red Cross relief-work on the southeastern coast of Cuba is
concerned, was briefly as follows: We had a station in the
field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps at the front, and a hospital of
our own in Siboney, with twenty-five beds attended by six trained nurses
under direction of Dr. Lesser. We also had entire charge of one ward of
thirty beds in the general hospital directed by General Lagarde. We were
feeding refugees at several points on a line extending east and west
nearly sixty miles from the right wing of our army at Caney to the naval
station at Guantanamo Bay, and at the latter place we had landed fifteen
thousand rations to be distributed under the general direction of
Captain McCalla, of the cruiser _Marblehead_, and General Perez,
commanding the Cuban forces in the Guantanamo district. To the refugees
from Santiago at Caney--about fifteen thousand in number and mostly
women and children--we had forwarded, chiefly in army wagons furnished
by General Shafter, six or eight tons of food, and were sending more as
fast as we could land it in lighters through the surf. Mr. Elwell, of
Miss Barton's staff, was taking care of two or three thousand refugees
at Firmeza, a small village in the hills back of Siboney, and we hoped
soon to enter the harbor of Santiago, discharge the cargo of the _State
of Texas_ at a pier, assort it in a warehouse, and prosecute the work of
relief upon a more extensive scale. Our sanguine anticipations, however,
were not to be realized as soon as we hoped they would be, and our
relief-work was practically suspended on July 10, as the result of an
outbreak of yellow fever.
The circumstances in which this fever first made its appearance were as
follows: When the army landed at Siboney it found there a dirty little
Cuban village of from twelve to twenty deserted houses, situated at the
bottom of a wedge-shaped cleft in the long, rocky rampart which forms
the coast-line between Siboney and Morro Castle, and at the mouth of a
low, swampy, malarious ravine or valley extending back into the
foot-hills, and opening upon the sea through the notch. The site of the
village, from a sanitary point of view, was a very bad one, not only
because it was low and confined, but because in the valley immediately
back of it there were a number of stagnant, foul-smelling ponds and
pools, half overgrown with rank tropical vegetation, and so full of
decaying organic matter that when I passed them for the first time on my
way to the front I instinctively held my breath as much as possible
because the very air from them seemed poisonous. The houses of the
village, as a result of long neglect, had become as objectionable from a
sanitary point of view as the location in which they stood. They were
rather large, well-built, one-story frame houses with zinc roofs, and
were erected, if I mistake not, by the Spanish-American Iron Company for
the accommodation of its native employees. Originally they must have
been very commodious and comfortable buildings, but through the neglect
and untidiness of their later occupants they had become so dirty that no
self-respecting human being would be willing to live in them.
Such were the village and the houses of Siboney when the army landed
there on June 23. In view of the nature of the Cuban climate during the
rainy season, and the danger of infection from abandoned houses whose
history was entirely unknown, and within whose walls there might have
been yellow fever, it was obviously somebody's duty not only to clean up
the place as far as possible, but to decide whether the houses should be
burned to the ground as probable sources of infection, or, on the other
hand, washed out, fumigated, and used. The surgeons of the blockading
fleet recommended that the buildings be destroyed, for the reason that
if Siboney were to be the army's base of supplies it would be imprudent
to run the risk of infection by allowing them to be used. Instead of
acting upon this advice, however, the army officers in command at
Siboney not only allowed the houses to be occupied from the very first,
but put men into them without either disinfecting them or cleaning their
dirty floors. Chlorid of lime was not used anywhere, and the foul
privies immediately back of and adjoining the houses were permitted to
stand in the condition in which they were found, so that the daily rains
washed the excrement from them down under the floors to saturate further
the already contaminated soil.
When we returned from the front on July 9, we found the condition of the
village worse than ever. No attempt, apparently, had been made to clean
or disinfect it; no sanitary precautions had been taken or health
regulations enforced; hundreds of incredibly dirty and ragged
Cubans--some of them employed in discharging the government transports
and some of them merely loafers, camp-followers, and thieves--thronged
the beach, evacuating their bowels in the bushes and throwing remnants
of food about on the ground to rot in the hot sunshine; there was a dead
and decomposing mule in one of the stagnant pools behind the village,
and the whole place stank. If, under such conditions, an epidemic of
fever had not broken out, it would have been so strange as to border on
the miraculous. Nature alone would probably have brought it about, but
when nature and man cooeperated the result was certain. On July 8 the
army surgeons reported three cases of yellow fever among the sick in the
abandoned Spanish houses on shore. On the 10th the number of cases had
increased to thirty, and included Dr. Lesser, chief surgeon of the Red
Cross, and his wife, two Red Cross nurses, and Mrs. Trumbull White, wife
of the correspondent of the Chicago "Record," who had been working as a
nurse in the Red Cross hospital.
On the 11th General Miles arrived from Washington, and on ascertaining
the state of affairs ordered the burning of every house in the village.
I doubt very much whether this step was necessary or judicious, for the
reason that it was taken too late. If there was any reason to believe,
when the army first began to disembark at Siboney, that the houses of
the village were likely to become sources of infection, they should have
been burned or fumigated at once. To burn them after they had set yellow
fever afloat in that malarious and polluted atmosphere was like locking
the stable door after the horse has been stolen. But it is very
questionable whether they should have been burned at any time. In a
country like eastern Cuba, where at intervals of two or three days
throughout the wet season there is a tropical downpour of rain which
deluges the ground and beats through the most closely woven tent, a
house with a tight zinc roof and a dry floor is a most valuable
possession, and it should not be destroyed if there is any way of
disinfecting it and making it a safe place of human habitation. All the
evidence obtainable in Santiago was to the effect that these houses
were not infected with yellow fever; but even if they had been, it was
quite possible, I think, to save them and make them useful. If, when the
army landed, the best of the buildings had been thoroughly cleaned and
then fumigated by shutting them up tightly and burning sulphur and other
suitable chemical substances in them, the disease-germs that they
contained might have been destroyed. Convict barges saturated with the
germs of smallpox, typhus, dysentery, and all sorts of infectious and
contagious diseases are treated in this way in Siberia, and there is no
reason why houses should not be so purified in Cuba. General Miles and
his chief surgeon decided, however, that the whole village should be
burned, and burned it was. The postal, telegraph, and signal-service
officers were turned out of their quarters and put into tents; a
yellow-fever camp was established in the hills about two miles north of
Siboney; more hospital tents and tent-flies were pitched along the
sea-coast west of the notch; and as fast as sick and wounded soldiers
could be removed from the condemned houses and put under canvas or sent
to the yellow-fever camp, the houses were destroyed.
In view of the fact that yellow fever had made its appearance in the
army before Santiago as well as at Siboney, Miss Barton, acting under
the advice and direction of Major Wood, chief surgeon of the First
Division hospital, abandoned the Red Cross station at the front, brought
all its equipment and supplies back to the sea-coast, and put them again
on board the _State of Texas_. She also decided not to allow
fever-stricken employees of the Red Cross to be cared for on board the
steamer, and Dr. and Mrs. Lesser and two nurses were therefore carried
on their cots to a railroad-train and transported to the yellow-fever
camp two miles away. I went through the fever hospital where they lay
just before they were removed, and made up my mind--very ignorantly and
presumptuously, perhaps--that neither they nor any of the patients whom
I saw had yellow fever, either in a mild form or in any form whatever.
They seemed to me to have nothing more than calenture, brought on by
overwork, a malarious atmosphere, and a bad sanitary environment. Mrs.
White, who was also said to have yellow fever, recovered in three days,
just in time to escape being sent to the yellow-fever camp with Dr. and
Mrs. Lesser. I have no doubt that there were some yellow-fever cases
among the sick who were sent to the camp at the time when the village of
Siboney was burned, but I did not happen to see any of them, and it is
the opinion of many persons who are far better qualified to judge than
I, that yellow-fever cases and calenture cases were lumped together
without much discrimination, and that the latter greatly outnumbered the
former.
On July 15 the number of so-called yellow-fever cases exceeded one
hundred, and the most energetic measures were being taken by the medical
authorities on shore to prevent the further spread of the disease.
Everything that could possibly hold or transmit infection was burned,
including my blankets, mackintosh-cape, etc., which I had accidentally
left in the post-office overnight, as well as all the baggage and
personal effects of the postal clerks. Mr. Brewer, the postmaster, died
of the fever, Mr. Kempner, the assistant postmaster, was reduced to
sleeping in a camp-chair out of doors without overcoat or blanket, and
the telegraph and telephone operators worked night and day in a damp,
badly ventilated tent, with their feet literally in pools of mud and
water.
On July 15 we heard at Siboney that Santiago had surrendered, and on the
following day we steamed down to the mouth of Santiago harbor, with a
faint hope that we might be permitted to enter. Admiral Sampson,
however, informed us that the surrender, although agreed upon, had not
yet taken place, and that it would be impossible for us to enter the
harbor until after Morro Castle and the shore batteries had been
evacuated. We then sailed for Guantanamo Bay, with the intention of
landing more supplies for the refugees in that district; but inasmuch as
we had been lying in the fever-infected port of Siboney, Captain
McCalla, who came out to the mouth of the bay in a steam-launch to meet
us, refused to take the supplies, and would not let us communicate with
the shore. On the night of July 16, therefore, we returned to Siboney,
and at noon on the 17th we were again off Morro Castle, waiting for an
opportunity to enter the harbor.