volume 1, part 2, pages 155-157.

As stated above, permission was given on the 3d for non-combatants to leave the city. "They did leave in the following days to the number of perhaps 20,000, filling the neighboring villages and roads with destitute people, mostly women and children. It then seemed to fall to our lot to see that these people did not starve in a desolate country, and to be as much our duty to take care of these people, whom our policy had driven from their homes, as it was for Spain to feed the reconcentrados, whom they drove from their homes under their war policy. The task was not insignificant."

_Report of Inspector-General (Annual Reports of the War Department, 1898,