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 anticipate 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 assured 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 assistance 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 cooeperate with the hospital corps after the battle of July
1-2, nor should we have been able to send food to