r 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 r