JULY FIFTH IN RIFLE PITS.
The sea grew wild and rough; the water was too deep for firm anchorage, and we rocked at such a fearful rate that in pity for the pale faces about me, I begged the captain to draw as near the shore as possible and let, at least, a portion of them onto the land. Let them have, if only a few minutes, the solid ground under their feet. He drew up to within two or three hundred feet of the cliff which runs around like a firm sea wall, and succeeded in anchoring; took a boat and tried to land some of our people, but there were no wharves; the poor little seven by nine bench, designated as a wharf, running out into the sea, against which the boats swung and crashed as they tried to land supplies, was all there was, except the narrow beach with a heavy surf. Our people declined the landing, and headsick, heartsick and seasick returned to the ship.
We had been long without news from the United States; but the next day brought the following dispatch from the New York Cuban Relief Committee:
Cobb sails Wednesday with Red Cross supply boat. All articles requested by her will be shipped. The launch will be towed from Jacksonville. Do you want additional nurses? Five hundred tons provisions and clothing, also three ambulances complete, shipped to Key West warehouse this week from New York. Send “State of Texas” to New York as soon as can be spared. Cobb with Red Cross boat expects to reach Guantanamo July 5 to 10. Massachusetts relief ship cannot sail before middle of July. Will dispatch schooner with ice within a fortnight. Make your requisitions specific in kind and quantity.
This was only one of the scores of dispatches reaching us within the few following weeks, and I repeat it here, not as having any special significance, excepting to show the uncertainty and utter instability of all human calculations. Analyzing this kind-hearted and well-meant dispatch in the light of the future, we find that neither the Red Cross supply boat, the steam launch, the Massachusetts relief ship, nor the additional nurses ever reached us. The ice schooner proved to be the “Mary E. Morse,” of which mention is made elsewhere. The five hundred tons of provisions shipped to the Key West warehouse were distributed there. I name this, not in any spirit of complaint—far from it, indeed—but simply to show still further and make more apparent, if possible, the difficulties attendant upon all work at a field of war. Those who have seen only this one war will find these uncertainties and shortcomings very strange, and unaccountable; to me, who had seen other wars, they seemed natural, probably largely inevitable, and quite the thing to be expected, the fatal results of which misfortunes I had spent half my lifetime in instituting measures to prevent or lessen.
We were honored next day by a call from an officer of the “Olivette,” with his assistant. It is not singular, in the light of the great, elegant, newly-fitted ship at his command, that it was difficult for him to realize the use or the necessity of an unpretending little black boat like the “State of Texas,” or of what service it could be expected to be to an army. We labored to impress upon him the fact that this ship did not come for the war, but was loaded and dispatched weeks before there was any war, and simply waited an opportunity to deliver its cargo to the hungry and naked reconcentrados for whom they were designed. This explanation we hoped would make it apparent to the gentleman, how it was, that our supplies of clothing would not be likely to contain the articles of which he said his ship was in want; it probably never having entered into the minds of our sympathetic generous lady donors of America to provide pajamas for Cuban women. Anything we had was freely at his service. If we made any attempt at conversion (which I do not now recall), it was simply on the line of a better understanding of Red Cross methods and principles as connected with his profession, and not a change of heart.
With the constant reminders of the sufferings of the people on shore and our inability to reach them, it was a welcome errand brought by a dispatch boat that afternoon from Captain McCalla, that if we could get five thousand rations to him before the next Thursday morning, he could find a way to deliver them to the refugee families of insurgents and others lying out in the hills and woods beyond his camp at Guantanamo, where they had fled for safety. We steamed at once to Guantanamo and landed the rations next morning, returning to Siboney the same afternoon. The next day our working force was busy all day getting off material to refugees coming in from the mountains. General Garcia detailed a detachment to repair pontoons for the purpose of landing the supplies. Captain McCalla cabled for twenty thousand rations for refugees, to be delivered at Guantanamo by Sunday.
Our Red Cross sisters and surgeons were all busy at the Cuban Hospital, when the following letter from Major Le Garde was received: