pread of the rebellion, it would be absolutely necessary to
occupy every province of the island in force, and to vigorously attack
the insurgents wherever met with in the field; and that, to do this
effectively, he must have still more troops. Accordingly, more troops
were dispatched, with the result that by the end of the year 1895 the
Spanish arms in Cuba totalled no less than one hundred thousand men,
while the rebel strength had increased to ten thousand, who, however,
were very badly in need of arms, ammunition, and stores. Consequently
Milsom, in the _Thetis_, was kept busy at this time picking up supplies
wherever he could get them, and then smuggling them into the island with
a boldness and ingenuity that completely baffled all the efforts of the
Spaniards to detect him.

The proportion of Spanish troops to the revolutionary forces was at this
time, it will be observed, as ten to one. This, on paper, appears to be
enormous, yet it was not so in reality: for, whereas the Cubans were all
native to the soil and inured to the climate, and were, moreover,
familiar with the topography of the country, the Spanish soldiers were
mostly young, raw recruits, poor shots, quite new to service in the
Tropics, unacclimatised, of poor stamina, and therefore peculiarly
liable to fall victims to the fever and dysentery which follow upon
exposure to tropical rain. Moreover, they were badly fed, and worse
looked after; the great disparity between the strength of the two forces
was consequently much more apparent than real. Then, too, the Spanish
officers were mostly of very indifferent quality: they suffered from the
same climatic disabilities as their men; the heat enervated them to such
an extent that they could not be induced to take the least trouble about
anything, or undertake the least labour; they made no attempt to improve
the quality of their men's shooting; they were lax in the enforcement of
discipline--save, perhaps, in the exaction of a proper measure of
respect from their subordinates; they were strangers to the island and
quite ignorant of its topography, and they were too indolent to attempt
to learn anything of it; and, lastly, the maps with which they had been
supplied were even worse than useless, for they were absolutely
misleading. Thus the insurgents experienced no difficulty in eluding
the pursuit of the Spanish forces, and in luring them, time after time,
into carefully prepared traps, from which escap