nd excites the lively indignation of every one."

The neglect of our soldiers, both at Siboney and at the front, in the
early days of the campaign, was discreditable to the army and to the
country; and there is no reason why military surgeons should not frankly
admit it, because it was not their fault, and they cannot justly be held
accountable for it. The blame should rest, and eventually will rest,
upon the officer or department that sent thirty-five loaded transports
and sixteen thousand men to the Cuban coast without suitable landing
facilities in the shape of surf-boats, steam-launches, and lighters.

In criticizing the condition of our hospitals, I cast no reflection upon
the zeal, ability, and devotion to duty of such men as Colonel Pope,
Major Lagarde, Major Wood, and the surgeons generally of the Fifth
Army-Corps. They made the best of a bad situation for which they were
not primarily responsible; and if the hospitals were in unsatisfactory
condition, it was simply because the supplies furnished in abundance by
the medical department were either left in Tampa for lack of water
transportation, or held on board the transports because no adequate
provision had been made by the commanding general or the quartermaster's
department for landing them on a surf-beaten coast and transporting them
to the places where they were needed.

CHAPTER IX

A WALK TO THE FRONT

When I went on deck, the morning after our return to Siboney, I found
that the _State of Texas_ had drifted, during the night, half-way to the
mouth of the Aguadores ravine, and was lying two or three miles off the
coast, within plain sight of the blockading fleet. The sun was just
rising over the foot-hills beyond Daiquiri, and on the higher slopes of
the Cobre range it was already day; but the deep notch at Siboney was
still in dark-blue shadow, and out of it a faint land-breeze was blowing
a thin, hazy cloud of smoke from the recently kindled camp-fires of the
troops on the beach. There was no wind where we lay, and the sea seemed
to be perfectly smooth; but the languid rolling of the steamer, and a
gleam of white surf here and there along the base of the rampart, showed
that the swell raised by the fresh breeze of the previous afternoon had
not wholly subsided. Fifteen or twenty transport-steamers were lying off
the coast, some close in under the shadow of the cliffs, where the smoke
from the soldiers' camp-fires drifted through their rigging