t 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