the first and second of July, the
tents were more than filled with wounded in the battle of San Juan Hill.
Three of the five Sisters went into the operating tent, and with the
surgeons worked for thirty hours with only a few moments' rest now and
then for a cup of coffee and a cracker or piece of bread. We heard
nothing more about a woman nurse being out of place in a soldiers'
hospital.

On Saturday evening, the second day of the San Juan battle, a slip of
paper with these penciled words was brought to the door of the hospital:

"Send food, medicines, anything. Seize wagons from the front for
transportation.

"SHAFTER."

The call for help was at once sent over to the State of Texas, and we
worked all night getting out supplies and sending them ashore with a
force of Cubans, only too glad to work for food.

I wish I could make apparent how difficult a thing it was to get
supplies from our ship to the shore in a surf which, after ten o'clock
in the morning, allowed no small boats to touch even the bit of a pier
that was run out without breaking either the one or the other, and
nothing in the form of a lighter save two dilapidated flat-boat
pontoons. These had been broken and cast away by the engineer corps,
picked up by ourselves, mended by the Cubans, and put in condition to
float alongside of our ship, and receive perhaps three or four tons of
material. This must then be rowed or floated out to the shore, run onto
the sand as far as possible, the men jumping into the water from knee to
waist deep, pulling the boat up from the surf, and getting the material
on land. And this was what was meant by loading the "seized wagons from
the front" and getting food to the wounded. After ten o'clock in the day
even this was impossible, and we must wait until the calm of three
o'clock next morning to commence work again and go through the same
struggle to get something to load the wagons for that day. Our supplies
had been gotten ashore, and among the last, rocking and tossing in our
little boat, went ourselves, landing on the pier, which by that time was
breaking in two, escaping a surf which every other moment threatened to
envelop one from feet to head, we reached the land.

Our "seized" wagons had already gone on, loaded with our best hospital
supplies--meal, flour, condensed milk, malted milk, tea, coffee, sugar,
dried fruits, canned fruits, canned meats, and such other things as we
had been able to get out in the h