ontinued_)

When, on June 14, General Shafter's army sailed for the southeastern
coast of Cuba, without adequate facilities for disembarkation, and
without a sufficient number of mules, packers, teamsters, and army
wagons to insure its proper equipment, subsistence, and maintenance in
the field, it was, _ipso facto_, predestined to serious embarrassment
and difficulty, if not to great suffering and peril. No amount of zeal,
energy, and ability on the part of quartermasters and commissaries,
after the army had reached its destination, could possibly make up for
deficiencies that should have had attention before the army sailed.
Boats, mules, and wagons were not to be had at Siboney, and when the
urgent need of them became apparent it was too late to procure them from
the United States. General Shafter cabled the War Department for
lighters and steam-tugs almost as soon as he reached the Cuban coast,
and General Miles telegraphed for more draft-animals before he had been
in Siboney twenty-four hours; but neither the boats nor the mules came
in time to be of any avail. Cuban fever waits for no man, and before the
boats that should have landed more supplies and the mules that should
have carried them to the front reached Siboney, seventy-five per cent.
of General Shafter's command had been prostrated by disease, due, as he
himself admits, to insufficient food, "without change of clothes, and
without any shelter whatever."[11]

But the lack of adequate land and water transportation was not the only
deficiency in the equipment of the Fifth Army-Corps when it sailed from
Tampa. It was also ill provided with medical stores and the facilities
and appliances needed in caring for sick and wounded soldiers. Dr.
Nicholas Senn, chief of the operating staff of the army, says that
"ambulances in great number had been sent to Tampa, but they were not
unloaded and sent to the front." I myself passed a whole train-load of
ambulances near Tampa in May, but I never saw more than three in use at
the front, and, according to the official report of Dr. Guy C. Godfrey,
commanding officer of the hospital-corps company of the First Division,
Fifth Army-Corps, "the number of ambulances for the entire army was
limited to three, and it was impossible to expect them to convey the
total number of wounded from the collecting-stations to the First
Division hospital."[12]

Lieutenant-Colonel Jacobs of the quartermaster's department, who was
assistan