"Clara Barton,
"President, American National Red Cross."
Our surgeons and assistants went on shore, where Dr. Le Garde and Dr. Lesser secured a small house, and in a few hours this had undergone the same transformation and by the same hands as the Cuban hospital. The Red Cross flag was hoisted, Dr. Lesser placed in charge, and scores of our soldiers who had been lying on the filthy floors of an adjacent building, with no food but army rations, were carried over, placed in clean cots, and given proper food. From that on, no distinction was made, the Red Cross flag floating over both the American and Cuban hospitals.
A few feet away, all the available army tents were put up as additional accommodation for the "wounded in the engagement about to take place." It did take place the following day, and, as will be well remembered, in those two days, Friday and Saturday, 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 haste of packing—entirely filling the two wagons already in advance.