e in a garrison town. Many of
our own men, in the later weeks of the Santiago campaign, were almost as
ragged and dirty as the poorest of the soldiers who came with General
Garcia to Siboney. The Cubans disappointed me, I suppose, because I had
pictured them to myself as a better dressed and better disciplined body
of men, and had not made allowance enough for the hardships and
privations of an insurgent's life.

Turning our backs on the cove, the pier, the white tents of the
quartermasters, the tarpaulin-covered piles of provision-boxes, and the
throng of soldiers, insurgents, and refugees on the beach, we climbed a
steep bank, crossed the railroad-track just west of the red-iron bridge,
and joined a company of the Second Infantry on its way to the front.

The Santiago road, after leaving the village of Siboney, runs up a wide
marshy valley, full of stagnant ponds and lagoons, and sparsely set with
clumps of cocoanut and royal palm. Although this valley heads in the
mountains of the Cobre range, and opens on the sea through the Siboney
notch, its atmosphere seems hot and close, and is pervaded by a foul,
rank odor of decaying vegetation, which is unpleasantly suggestive of
malaria and Cuban fever, and makes one wish that one could carry air as
one carries water, and breathe, as well as drink, out of a canteen. But
one soon escapes from it. A mile or two from the village the road leaves
the valley, turns to the left, and begins to ascend a series of densely
wooded ridges, or foot-hills, which rise, one above another, to the
crest of the watershed just beyond Sevilla. From the point where we left
the valley to the summit of the divide, we never had an unobstructed
outlook in any direction. Dense tropical forests, almost impenetrable to
the eye, closed in upon the road, and when the sea-breeze was cut off
and the sun stood vertically overhead, we lost all means of orientation
and could hardly guess in what direction we were going. Now and then, at
the bottom of a valley or on a sloping hillside, we passed a small,
grassy opening, which would be called, in West Virginia, a glade or an
interval; but during most of the time we plodded along in the fierce
heat, between walls of dark-green foliage which rose out of an
impenetrable jungle of vines, pinon-bushes, and Spanish bayonet. I saw
no flowers except the clustered heads of a scarlet-and-orange blossom
which I heard some one call the "Cuban rose," and I did not see a bird