Campaigning in Cuba Part 8

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 antic.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sistance 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 cooperate 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 dest.i.tute, 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, a.s.sort it in a warehouse, and prosecute the work of relief upon a more extensive scale. Our sanguine antic.i.p.ations, 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed 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 cooperated 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 a.s.sistant 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e. 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.

CHAPTER XIV

ENTERING SANTIAGO HARBOR

As soon as possible after our return from Guantanamo, Miss Barton sent a note to Admiral Sampson, on board the flagship _New York,_ saying that, as the inhabitants of the city were reported to be in a starving condition, she hoped that food would be allowed to go in with the forces. The admiral promptly replied: "The food shall enter in advance of the forces; you may go in this afternoon." Almost any other naval commander, after destroying a hostile fleet and reducing all the batteries that defended a hostile city, would have wished to crown his victory and enjoy his triumph by entering the harbor in advance of all other vessels and on one of his own ships of war; but Admiral Sampson, with the modesty and generosity characteristic of a great and n.o.ble nature, waived his right to be the first to enter the city, and sent in the _State of Texas_, flying the flag of the Red Cross and carrying food and relief for the wounded, the starving, and the dying.

An officer from the _New York_ had been at work all day locating and removing the submarine mines in the narrow part of the channel just north of Morro Castle; but there were still four that had not been exploded. As they were electrical mines, however, and as the cables connecting them with the sh.o.r.e had been cut, they were no longer dangerous, and there was nothing to prevent the entrance of the _State of Texas_ except the narrowness of the un.o.bstructed part of the channel.

The collier _Merrimac_, sunk by Lieutenant Hobson and his men, was not in a position to interfere seriously with navigation. Cervera's fleet ran out without any serious trouble on the western side of her, and there was no reason why Admiral Sampson, if he decided to force an entrance, should not run in, following the same course. In order to prevent this, the Spaniards, on the night of July 4, attempted to sink the old war-ship _Reina Mercedes_ in such a position that she would close the channel at a point where it is very narrow, between the _Merrimac_ and the entrance to the harbor. The ships of the blockading fleet, however, saw her coming out about midnight, turned their big guns upon her, and sank her with six-and eight-inch projectiles before she could get into position. She drifted around parallel with the sh.o.r.e, and lay half submerged on the eastern side of the channel, about one hundred and fifty yards from the entrance and three hundred or three hundred and fifty yards from the _Merrimac_.

At four o'clock Admiral Sampson sent Lieutenant Capehart on board the _State of Texas_ to give Captain Young all necessary information with regard to the channel and the mines, and a few moments later, under the guidance of a Cuban pilot, we steamed slowly in under the gray, frowning battlements of Morro Castle. As we approached it I had an opportunity to see, for the first time, the nature and extent of the damage done to it by the guns of Admiral Sampson's fleet, and I was glad to find that, although it had been somewhat battered on its southern or sea face, its architectural picturesqueness had not been destroyed or even seriously impaired. To an observer looking at it from the south, it has, in general outline, the appearance of three huge cubes or rectangular ma.s.ses of gray masonry, put together in such a way that the largest cube occupies the crest of the bold, almost precipitous bluff which forms the eastern side of the entrance to the harbor, while the other two descend from it in colossal steps of diminishing size toward an escarpment in the hillside seventy-five or a hundred feet below, where appear five or six square, grated doors, leading, apparently, to a row of subterranean ammunition-vaults. Underneath the escarpment is a zigzag flight of steps, screened at exposed points by what seem to be comparatively recent walls, or curtains of masonry, much lighter in color than the walls of the castle itself. Still lower down, at the base of the bluff, are two or three huge, dark caves into which the swell of the Caribbean Sea rolls with a dull, reverberating roar. The height of the castle above the water appears to be one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet. There are very few embrasures, or port-holes, in the gray, lichen-stained walls of the old fortification, and, so far as I could see, it had no armament whatever except two or three guns mounted en barbette on the parapet of the uppermost cube, or bastion.

As a defensive work the Morro Castle of Santiago has no importance or significance whatever, and its complete destruction would not have made it any easier for Admiral Sampson to force an entrance to the harbor. It is the oldest Morro, however, in Cuba; and as a relic of the past, and an interesting and attractive feature in a landscape already picturesque, it has the highest possible value, and I am more than glad that it was not destroyed. There was no reason, really, for bombarding it at all, because it was perfectly harmless. The defenses of Santiago that were really dangerous and effective were the submarine mines in the channel and the earthwork batteries east and west of the entrance to the harbor. Morro was huge, formidable-looking, and impressive to the eye and the imagination, but the horizontal reddish streaks of freshly turned earth along the crests of the hills east and west of it had ten times its offensive power. I saw the last Spanish soldier leave the castle at noon on Sunday, and when we pa.s.sed it, soon after four o'clock, its flag was gone, its walls were deserted, and buzzards were soaring in circles about its little corner turrets.

About one hundred and fifty yards inside the entrance to the harbor we pa.s.sed the wreck of the _Reina Mercedes_, lying close to the sh.o.r.e, on the right-hand side of the channel, with her port rail under water and her masts sloping at an angle of forty-five degrees to the westward. Two bra.s.s-bound sea-chests and a pile of signal-flags were lying on her deck aft, and she had not been touched, apparently, since she was sunk by the guns of our battle-ships on the night of July 4.

Three hundred or three hundred and fifty yards farther in we pa.s.sed what the sailors of the fleet call "Hobson's choice," the steam-collier _Merrimac_. She lay in deep water, about midway from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, and all that could be seen of her were the tops of her masts and about two feet of her smoke-stack. If the channel were narrow and were in the middle of the pa.s.sage, she would have blocked it completely; but apparently it is wider than her length, and vessels drawing twenty feet or more of water could go around her without touching bottom. It is a little remarkable that both combatants should have tried to obstruct this channel and that neither should have succeeded. The location chosen by the Spaniards seemed to me to be a better one than that selected by Hobson; but it is so near the mouth of the harbor that the chance of reaching it with a vessel in the glare of our search-lights and under the fire of our guns was a very slight one. The _Reina Mercedes_ reached it, but was disabled before she could get into position.[5]

Beyond the _Merrimac_ the entrance to the harbor widens a little, but the sh.o.r.es continue high and steep for a distance of a mile or more. At intervals of a few hundred yards, however, beautiful deep coves run back into the high land on either side, and at the head of every one the eye catches a glimpse of a little settlement of half a dozen houses with red-tiled roofs, or a country villa shaded by palms and half hidden in shrubbery and flowers. One does not often see, in the tropics or elsewhere, a harbor entrance that is more striking and picturesque than the watery gateway which leads from the ocean to the s.p.a.cious upper bay of Santiago. It does not look like an inlet of the sea, but suggests rather a tranquil, winding river, shut in by high, steep ramparts of greenery, with here and there an opening to a beautiful lateral cove, where the dark ma.s.ses of chaparral are relieved by clumps of graceful, white-stemmed palms and lighted up by the solid sheets of bright-red flowers which hide the foliage of the _flamboyam_, or flame-tree.

As ours was the first vessel that had entered the harbor in nearly two months, and as we were flying the Red Cross flag, our arrival naturally caused great excitement in all the little settlements and at all the villas along the sh.o.r.es. Men, women, and children ran down to the water's edge, waving their hats and handkerchiefs or brandishing their arms in joyous welcome, and even old, gray-haired, and feeble women, who could not get as far as the sh.o.r.e, stood in front of their little houses, now gazing at us in half-incredulous amazement, and then crossing themselves devoutly with bowed heads, as if thanking G.o.d that siege and starvation were over and help and food at hand.

About half-way between Morro Castle and Santiago there is a high, bare, flat-topped hill, or mesa, called the Behia, on which there is a signal-station with a mast for the display of flags. Just before this hill is reached the channel widens, and, as the steamer rounds a high, bold promontory, the beautiful upper bay comes into view, like a great placid lake framed in a magnificent amphitheater of mountains, with a fringe of cocoanut-palms here and there to break the level sh.o.r.e-line, and a few splashes of vivid red where flame-trees stand out in brilliant relief against the varied green of the mountain background. Two miles away, on the eastern side of the harbor, appeared the city of Santiago--a sloping expanse of red-tiled roofs, green mango-trees, and twin-belfried Spanish churches, rising from the water's edge to the crest of a range of low hills which bound the bay on that side. A week or ten days earlier I had seen the town from the rifle-pits of the Rough Riders at the front of our army; but its appearance from the harbor was so different that I could hardly recognize it as the same place. Seen from the intrenched hill occupied by General Wheeler's brigade, it appeared to consist mainly of barracks, hospitals, and shed-like buildings flying the flag of the Red Cross, and had no beauty or picturesqueness whatever; but from the water it seemed to be rather an interesting and attractive Spanish-American town.

As we entered the upper bay and caught sight of the city, some of our Red Cross nurses who were standing with Miss Barton in a little group at the bow of the steamer felt impelled to give expression to their feelings in some way, and, acting upon a sudden impulse and without premeditation, they began to sing in unison "Praise G.o.d, from whom all blessings flow." Never before, probably, had the doxology been heard on the waters of Santiago harbor, and it must have been more welcome music to the crowds a.s.sembling on sh.o.r.e than the thunder of Admiral Sampson's cannon and the jarring rattle of machine-guns from the advance line of our army. The doxology was followed by "My country, 'tis of thee," in which the whole ship's company joined with a thrill of patriotic pride; and to this music the _State of Texas_ glided swiftly up the harbor to her anchorage. It was then about half-past five. The daily afternoon thunder-shower had just pa.s.sed over the city, and its shadow still lay heavy on the splendid group of peaks west of the bay; but the light-green slopes of the gra.s.sy mountains to the eastward, as well as the red roofs and gray church steeples of the city, were bathed in the warm yellow light of the sinking sun.

Before we had fairly come to anchor, a great crowd had a.s.sembled on the pier nearest to us, and in less than five minutes half a dozen small boats were alongside, filled with people anxious to know whether we had brought food and when we would begin to distribute it. Many of them said that they had not tasted bread in weeks, and all agreed that there was nothing to eat in the city except rice, and very little of that. We told them that we should begin discharging the cargo of the _State of Texas_ early on the following morning and should be in a position to feed ten thousand people within the next twenty-four hours. The normal population of the city at that time was about fifty thousand, but a large part of it had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and more than half the houses were closed and deserted.

General Shafter had entered the city with a single regiment--the Ninth Infantry--at noon, and had raised the American flag over the palace of the Spanish governor.

CHAPTER XV

THE CAPTURED CITY

We lay at anchor all Sunday night off the foot of the street known as Calle Baja de la Marina, and early on Monday morning steamed up to the most s.p.a.cious and convenient pier in the city, made fast our lines, and began to discharge cargo. The dock and warehouse facilities of Santiago are fairly good. They are not so extensive as those of an American seaport of equal importance, but so far as they go they leave little to be desired. The pier at which the _State of Texas_ lay was s.p.a.cious and well built; an iron tramway ran from it to the customs warehouse, and, with the help of one hundred stevedores, Mr. Warner, of Miss Barton's staff, found it possible to unload and store from three hundred and twenty-five to three hundred and fifty tons of foodstuffs per day. As soon as the steamer had made fast her lines a great crowd of forlorn-looking men and children, clothed in the loose, dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers and battered straw hats which make up the costume of the lower cla.s.ses, a.s.sembled on the pier to stare at the newcomers and watch the unloading of the ship. They were of all ages and complexions, from coal-black, grizzle-headed old negroes leaning on canes to half-starved and half-naked Cuban children, whose tallowy faces and distended abdomens were unmistakable evidences of fever and famine.

They were not, as a rule, emaciated, nor did they seem to be in the last stages of starvation; but the eagerness with which they crowded about the open ports of the steamer, and watched the bags of beans, rice, and corn-meal as they were brought out by the stevedores and placed on the little flat-cars of the tramway, showed that at least they were desperately hungry. Now and then a few beans, or a few grains of rice, would escape from one of the bags through a small rip or tear, and in an instant half a dozen little children would be scrambling for them, collecting them carefully one by one, and putting them into their hats or tying them up in their shirt-tails and the hems of their tattered frocks. In one instance half a bushel or more of corn-meal escaped from a torn bag and lay in a heap on the dirty pier. One of the prowling Cuban boys espied it, gathered up a hatful of it, and then looked around for something in which he could put the remainder. Failing to see anything that could be utilized as a receptacle, he seemed for a moment to be in despair; but presently a bright thought flashed into his mind, and was reflected in his thin, eager, street-Arab face. Taking out of his pocket two bits of dirty string, he tied his loose cotton trousers tightly around his ankles, and then, unb.u.t.toning his waist-band, he began scooping up the corn-meal from the filthy planks and shoveling it into his baggy breeches. Five minutes later he waddled off the pier in triumph, looking, so far as his legs were concerned, like a big, badly stuffed sawdust doll, or a half-starved gamin suffering from elephantiasis.

As the day advanced, the number of men and children who crowded about the steamer watching for opportunities to pilfer or pick up food became so great that it was necessary to clear the pier and put a guard of soldiers there to exclude the public altogether. Then the hungry people formed in a dense ma.s.s in the street opposite the steamer, and stood there in the blazing sunshine for hours, watching the little flat-cars loaded with provisions as they were rolled past to the warehouse. From an English cable-operator, who came down to the pier, we learned that for weeks there had been nothing in the city to eat except rice, and that the supply even of that was limited. Hard-bread crackers had sold as high as one dollar apiece and canned meat at four dollars a can, and many well-to-do families had not tasted bread, meat, or milk in more than a month.

Although there was said to be little or no yellow fever in Santiago, the captain of the _State of Texas_ decided to quarantine the steamer against the sh.o.r.e, and gave notice to all on board that if any person left the ship he could not return to it. This made going ash.o.r.e a serious matter, because there was virtually nothing to eat in the city, and no place for a stranger to stay, and if one cut loose from the steamer he might find himself without shelter and without any means whatever of subsistence. We had on board, fortunately, a young American named Elwell, who had lived several years in Santiago, and was well acquainted not only with its resources, but with a large number of its citizens. He said that there was a club there known as the Anglo-American Club, organized and supported by the foreign merchants of the city and the English cable-operators. Of this club he was one of the organizers and charter members, and although it had been closed during the blockade and siege, it would probably be reopened at once, and with an introduction from him I could get a room in it. He doubted whether the steward could give me anything to eat, but I could take food enough with me to last for a day or two, and as soon as possible arrangements would be made to supply the club with provisions from the _State of Texas_. Encouraged by this statement of the possibilities, I decided on Tuesday morning to abandon the steamer and trust myself to the tender mercies of the city and the Anglo-American Club. Hastily packing up a couple of hand-bags, and hiring a ragged, dirty Cuban to carry them and act in the capacity of guide, I left the ship, elbowed my way through the crowd of people at the head of the pier, and entered one of the narrow, ill-paved, and incredibly dirty streets which lead upward from the water-front to the higher part of the city.

The first impression made by Santiago upon the newcomer in July, 1898, was one of dirt, disorder, and neglect. It always had the reputation of being the dirtiest city in Cuba, and at the time of the surrender it was at its worst. I hardly know how to give an adequate idea of it to one who is not familiar with Spanish-American cities and architecture, but I will try. In the first place, the site of the city is the slope of a hill which falls rather steeply to the water on the eastern side of the bay. The most important streets, such as Enramadas and Calle Baja de la Marina, extend up and down the slope at right angles to the water-front, and are crossed at fairly regular intervals by narrower streets or alleys running horizontally along the hillside, following its contour and dipping down here and there into the gullies or ravines which stretch from the crest of the hill to the sh.o.r.e of the bay. As a result of the natural configuration of the ground there is hardly a street in the city that is even approximately level except the wide boulevard which forms the water-front. The east and west streets climb a rather steep grade from this boulevard to the crest of the elevation, and the north and south streets run up and down over the ridges and into the gullies of the undulating slope, so that wherever one goes one finds one's self either ascending or descending a hill. The widest streets in the city--exclusive of the Cristina Boulevard--are hardly more than thirty feet from curb to curb, and the narrowest do not exceed fifteen.

The pavements at the time of my visit were made of unbroken stones and rocks from the size of one's fist to the size of a bushel-basket; the sidewalks averaged from two to three and a half feet in width, and the gutters were open drains, broken here and there by holes and pockets filled with decaying garbage and dirty, foul-smelling water. Piles of mango-skins, ashes, old bones, filthy rags, dung, and kitchen refuse of all sorts lay here and there on the broken and neglected pavements, poisoning the air with foul exhalations and affording sustenance to hundreds of buzzards and myriads of flies; little rills of foul, discolored water trickled into the open gutters at intervals from the kitchens and cesspools of the adjoining houses; every hole and crevice in the uneven pavement was filled with rotting organic matter washed down from the higher levels by the frequent rains, and when the sea-breeze died away at night the whole atmosphere of the city seemed to be pervaded by a sickly, indescribable odor of corruption and decay. I had expected, as a matter of course, to find Santiago in bad sanitary condition, but I must confess that I felt a little sinking of the heart when I first breathed that polluted air and realized that for me there was no return to the ship and that I must henceforth eat, work, and sleep in that fever-breeding environment. In a long and tolerably varied experience in Russia, the Caucasus, Asia Minor, and European Turkey, I have never seen streets so filthy as in some parts of this Cuban city, nor have I ever encountered such a variety of abominable stenches as I met with in the course of my short walk from the steamer to the Anglo-American Club.

The houses and shops which stood along these narrow, dirty streets were generally one story in height, with red-tiled roofs, high, blank walls of stuccoed or plastered brick covered with a calcimine wash of pale blue or dirty yellow, large, heavy plank doors, and equally large, unglazed windows protected by prison gratings of iron bars and closed with tight inner shutters. There were no trees in the streets,--at least, in the business part of the city,--no yards in front of the houses, no shop-windows for the display of goods, and no windows of gla.s.s even in the best private houses. I cannot remember to have seen a pane of window-gla.s.s in this part of Cuba. The windows of both shops and houses were mere rectangular openings in the wall, six feet by ten or twelve feet in size, filled with heavy iron gratings or protected by ornamental metal scrollwork embedded all around in the solid masonry.

These barred windows, with the heavy plank doors, thick stuccoed walls, and complete absence of architectural ornament, made the narrow, muddy streets look almost as gloomy and forbidding as if they were shut in by long rows of Russian prisons. The natural gloominess of the city, due to the narrowness of the streets and the character of the architecture, was heightened at the time of the surrender by the absence of a large part of the population and the consequent shutting up of more than half the houses. Thousands of men, women, and children had fled to Caney and other suburban villages to escape the bombardment, and the long rows of closed and empty houses in some of the streets suggested a city stricken by pestilence and abandoned. At the time when we landed there was not a shop or a store open in any part of Santiago. Here and there one might see a colored woman peering out through the grated window of a private house, or two or three naked children with tallowy complexions and swollen abdomens playing in the muddy gutter, but as a rule the houses were shut and barred and the streets deserted.

The first pleasant impression that I received in Santiago was made by the Anglo-American Club. It was situated on a narrow, dirty street behind the Spanish theater, in a very low, disreputable part of the city, and did not impress me, at first sight, as being likely to afford even the ordinary necessaries and comforts of life, much less the luxuries and conveniences suggested to the mind of a city man by the word "club." But external appearance in a Spanish-American city is often deceptive, and it was so in this case. Opposite the rear or stage entrance of the theater, where half a dozen soldiers of the Ninth Infantry were cooking breakfast in the street, my ragged Cuban guide turned into a dark vaulted pa.s.sage which looked as if it might be one of the approaches to a jail. "It can't be possible," I said to myself, "that this damp, gloomy tunnel is the entrance to a club; the guide must have misunderstood the directions given him."

But the guide was right. At a distance of thirty-five or forty feet from the street the vaulted pa.s.sage opened into a paved patio, or court,--a sort of large, square well,--in the center of which stood a green, thrifty, broad-leaved banana-tree, fifteen or twenty feet in height.

From the corners of this court, on the side opposite the street entrance, two broad flights of steps led up to what seemed to be a hanging garden of greenery and flowers, shut in on all sides by piazzas and galleries. Climbing one of these flights of steps, I found myself in a second and higher patio, shaded by large mango-and mamonilla-trees, brightened by borders of flowering shrubs and plants, and filled with the fragrance of roses, geraniums, and pomegranate blossoms. The transition from the heat, filth, and sickening odors of the narrow street to the seclusion and shady coolness of this flower-scented patio was as delightful as it was sudden and unexpected. I could hardly have been more surprised if I had entered what I supposed to be a Siberian forwarding prison, and found myself in a conservatory of tropical plants and flowers. Around three sides of the patio were s.p.a.cious piazzas in two tiers, and upon these piazzas opened the living-rooms of the club,--about twenty in number,--like the boxes or stalls in the galleries of a European theater. On the southern side of the patio was a large dining-room, and beyond this, occupying the whole width of the building and overlooking the street from a projecting balcony, was the reading-room. This was a high, cool, s.p.a.cious apartment comfortably furnished with easy-chairs, pictures, maps, hanging book-cases, a big library table covered with periodicals, and an American piano. The periodicals were not of very recent date, and the piano was somewhat out of tune, but I was so delighted with the shady, flower-bordered courtyard and the comfort and apparent cleanliness of the club as a whole that I felt no disposition to be hypercritical. To find such a haven of refuge at all in a city like Santiago was unexpected good fortune.

To one who is unfamiliar with the distinctive peculiarities of Spanish-American architecture, nothing, at first, is more surprising than the contrast between the gloomy and unpromising exterior of a Cuban residence and the luxury and architectural beauty which one often finds hidden behind its grated windows and thick stuccoed walls. It is more surprising and striking in Santiago, perhaps, than in most Spanish-American cities, on account of the narrowness and filthiness of the streets on which the houses even of the wealthiest citizens stand.

In the course of the first week that I spent in the city I had occasion to enter a number of Spanish houses of the better cla.s.s, and I never failed to experience a little shock of surprise when I went from what looked like a dirty and neglected back alley into what seemed to be a jail, and found myself suddenly in a beautiful Moorish court, paved with marble, shaded by graceful, feathery palms, cooled by a fountain set in an oasis of greenery and flowers, and surrounded by rows of slender stone columns, and piazzas twenty-five feet in width. The wealthy Spaniard or Cuban wastes no money in beautifying the outside of his house, because, standing as it does on a narrow, dirty street, it cannot be made attractive or imposing by any possible method of architectural treatment; but upon the ornamentation and embellishment of the patio, or interior court, he lavishes all his taste and skill. The patio of the Anglo-American Club was not nearly as large and attractive as the courtyards of private residences on Heredia Street, to which I gained access later, but as it was the first house of the kind that I had seen in Cuba, it made a very pleasant impression upon me.

Upon presentation of my introduction from Mr. Elwell, the steward gave me one of the best rooms in the club, but said that it would be impossible to furnish me with food until he could get a cook and servants. The club had been closed for weeks; all of its employees had fled from the city, and he had been left entirely alone. I told him that I would try to forage for myself,--at least, for the present,--and that, if worst should come to worst, I could live two or three days on the hard bread and baked beans that I had brought with me from the ship.

Refreshing myself with a bath, a cracker of hard bread, and a drink of lukewarm tea from my canteen, I left my baggage in the steward's care and set out to explore the city.

The only part of Santiago which then presented anything like a clean and civilized appearance is that which adjoins the so-called "palace" of the Spanish governor, on the crest of the hill at the head of Marina Street.

There, around a small, dusty, bush-planted plaza, or park, stand the governor's residence, the old twin-belfried cathedral, the San Carlos or Cuban Club, the "Venus" restaurant, the post-office, and a few other public or semi-public buildings which make some pretensions to architectural dignity. With the exception of the ma.s.sive stone cathedral, however, they are all low, one-story or two-story brick houses covered with dirty white stucco, and would be regarded anywhere except in Santiago as cheap, ugly, and insignificant.

In the course of my walk from the club to the plaza I met a few Cuban negroes in dirty white-cotton shirts and trousers, and half a dozen or more pale-faced Spanish soldiers, but the streets in that part of the city seemed to be almost wholly deserted. Beyond the plaza, however, on Enramadas Street, I began to meet the stream of dest.i.tute refugees returning to the city from Caney, and a more dirty, hungry, sick, and dejected-looking horde of people I had never seen. When General Shafter gave notice to the Spanish military authorities that if Santiago were not surrendered it would be bombarded, fifteen thousand men, women, and children abandoned their homes and fled, most of them on foot, to various suburban villages north of the city. Most of these fugitives went to Caney, where, for nearly two weeks, they camped out in the streets, suffering everything that human beings can suffer from hunger, sickness, and exposure. Both General Shafter and the Red Cross made every possible effort to relieve them by sending provisions to them from Siboney; but the distance from that base of supplies was fifteen miles or more over a terrible road, the number of horses and mules available for transportation was hardly adequate to supply even our own army with ammunition and food, and the most that could be done for the refugees at Caney was to keep them from actually starving to death. Hundreds of them perished, but they died from exposure, exhaustion, and sickness, rather than from starvation. As soon as Santiago surrendered, these fugitives began to stream back into the city, and it was the advance-guard of them that I met on Enramadas Street on Tuesday morning. They represented both s.e.xes, all ages, all complexions, and all cla.s.ses of the population, from poor Cuban or negro women carrying huge bundles on their heads and leading three or four half-naked children, to cultivated, delicately nurtured, English-speaking ladies, wading through the mud in bedraggled white gowns, carrying nothing, perhaps, except a kitten or a cage of pet birds. Many of them were so ill and weak from dysentery or malarial fever that they could hardly limp along, even with the support of a cane, and all of them looked worn, exhausted, and emaciated to the last degree. Hundreds of these refugees died, after their return to Santiago, from diseases contracted in Caney, and if it had not been for the prompt relief given them by the Red Cross as soon as they reached the city, they would have perished by the thousand. With the aid and cooperation of Mr. Ramsden, son of the British consul, Mr. Michelson, a wealthy resident merchant, and two or three other foreign residents of Santiago, Miss Barton opened a soup-kitchen on sh.o.r.e, as soon as provisions enough had been landed from the _State of Texas_ to make a beginning, and before Tuesday night the representatives of the Red Cross had given bread and hot soup to more than ten thousand sick and half-starved people, most of them returned refugees from Caney, who could not get a mouthful to eat elsewhere in the city, and who were literally perishing from hunger and exhaustion.

CHAPTER XVI