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 piñón-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.