chapter 6 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company).

The same writer gives a sickening account of the sufferings of the wounded after the battle and the miserable failure of provision for any kind of succor or care of them. "Of course:" he says, "in view of the perilous situation which the two divisions now occupied upon the crest of the hill, and the great anxiety which was felt at headquarters for the safety of the whole army, and the preparations which had to be made against the expected night attack of the Spaniards to drive our men back and retake their lost position, the search for the dead and wounded this evening had to be confined to a very limited area, and was only as thorough as the shortness of the time for which men could be spared from the colors permitted. The jungle and the great fields of long grass were not searched, and thus many of the wounded were not discovered until the following day; and quite a number, indeed, not until the armistice was declared, on the third day after the battle, when the men had time to ransack the hill-side and the valley for the missing. And there were some—those who had the strength when they fell to crawl through the cactus, the Spanish bayonet, and all manner of prickly and trailing plants into the deeper and more protected recesses of the jungle—who were never discovered at all until days, many days, had passed; and the gathering of the vultures told where some poor fellow had died without care and without food, of his wounds or from starvation. Of such an one, when his place of hiding was discovered, there was, as a rule, only left a whitened skeleton and pieces of the uniform he had worn. The last resting place of not a few was never discovered at all.

"I believe I am giving a moderate estimate when I say that at least one-third of the men wounded on July 1st received no attention, and were not brought back to the division hospital until the afternoon of Ju]y 3d. This night we knew nothing, and had not even the slightest suspicion, of how numerous the undiscovered wounded were. … Only about half of the wounded men who were discovered this evening and been brought back to the dressing station when the moon rose above the dark forest line, and lit up the battlefield and the heights of San Juan as clearly, and, indeed, more clearly than day, for there was now not the dazzling force and the confusing mirage of the pitiless sunlight to blind the sight. The majority of these men had had their wounds dressed where they fell, or soon after falling, with the first-aid bandages. There were very few indeed to whom it had been possible to give any further attention than this, as the regimental surgeons, for want of transportation, had been unable to bring their medical chests, and those who were best provided carried with them only small pocket cases. …

"When the first-aid bandages were applied, the wounded man and those who helped him were, as a rule, under fire, which made any but the most summary methods of wound-dressing quite impossible. Fortunately these bandages, so simple and practical, lent themselves excellently well to this procedure. The first thing the soldiers or the hospital attendants would do when they came upon a wounded man was, in the case of a wound in the body, to tear off his shirt, or in the case of a wound in the leg, tear off his trousers, and then wrap around the wound the first-aid bandage. The wound-dressers were generally in such haste, and the wounded men usually so helpless to assist in any way, and their shirts and trousers so rotten from the drenching rains in which they had been worn without change day or night, that the taking off of the clothing was literally what I call it—tearing, and the garment came off so rent as to be quite useless for further wear. Consequently the soldiers were carried half-naked, or, if they had been wounded in both the body and the lower limbs, as was so frequently the case, entirely naked, to the army wagons and so down to the hospital, where there was not a scrap of clothing or bedding forthcoming to cover them with. These who were stripped in this way during the daytime were baked and blistered by the fierce sunlight, only to shiver with the penetrating cold and dampness after the rain had ceased to fall and when the chill night came on.

"Knowing that he was totally unprepared to clothe or cover the wounded that would probably be brought in, the chief surgeon of the corps issued an order, the evening before the battle, that all wounded men should be brought in with their blankets, halves of shelter-tents, and ponchos when possible. This was certainly a step in the right direction, even if it was but a frank confession by the authorities that no preparation had been made by them for the emergency which it cannot be said was suddenly thrust upon them, but which they might have foreseen and should have been preparing against for many weeks previous. {608} While the attending soldiers, realizing how serious for their wounded comrades it would be to have to lie in the hospitals uncovered to wind and weather, made great efforts to find their packs, these efforts were not often successful, and a great majority of the wounded reached the hospital half naked, and had thereafter only the covering and the bedding which their comrades and the hospital attendants were able to 'rustle' for them, and this was little enough and not seldom nothing at all.

"Had this expedition been provided with a greater number of surgeons and hospital attendants, had the ambulances been at hand which we left in Tampa or upon the transports, ambulances without which it is reasonable to suppose—at least we had supposed—no civilized power would enter upon an aggressive war, much less upon a campaign in which we had the advantage of choosing both our own time and the field of operations, the outrageous treatment which our wounded suffered, and the barbarous scenes which we were called upon to witness upon this and the following days would never have occurred."

_S. Bonsai, The Fight for Santiago,