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
N,” 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.