the fifteen thousand
refugees from Santiago who fled, hungry and destitute, to the right wing
of our army at Caney when General Shafter threatened to bombard the
city. For the opportunity to get into the field we were indebted to the
general in command, to his hospital corps, and to the officers of his
army; and we desire most gratefully to acknowledge and thank them for
the helping hand that they extended to us when we had virtually no
transportation whatever of our own.

When we returned to the _State of Texas_ on July 9, the situation, so
far as Red Cross relief-work on the southeastern coast of Cuba is
concerned, was briefly as follows: We had a station in the
field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps at the front, and a hospital of
our own in Siboney, with twenty-five beds attended by six trained nurses
under direction of Dr. Lesser. We also had entire charge of one ward of
thirty beds in the general hospital directed by General Lagarde. We were
feeding refugees at several points on a line extending east and west
nearly sixty miles from the right wing of our army at Caney to the naval
station at Guantanamo Bay, and at the latter place we had landed fifteen
thousand rations to be distributed under the general direction of
Captain McCalla, of the cruiser _Marblehead_, and General Perez,
commanding the Cuban forces in the Guantanamo district. To the refugees
from Santiago at Caney--about fifteen thousand in number and mostly
women and children--we had forwarded, chiefly in army wagons furnished
by General Shafter, six or eight tons of food, and were sending more as
fast as we could land it in lighters through the surf. Mr. Elwell, of
Miss Barton's staff, was taking care of two or three thousand refugees
at Firmeza, a small village in the hills back of Siboney, and we hoped
soon to enter the harbor of Santiago, discharge the cargo of the _State
of Texas_ at a pier, assort it in a warehouse, and prosecute the work of
relief upon a more extensive scale. Our sanguine anticipations, however,
were not to be realized as soon as we hoped they would be, and our
relief-work was practically suspended on July 10, as the result of an
outbreak of yellow fever.

The circumstances in which this fever first made its appearance were as
follows: When the army landed at Siboney it found there a dirty little
Cuban village of from twelve to twenty deserted houses, situated at the
bottom of a wedge-shaped cleft in the long, rocky rampart whi