Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

FEVER IN THE ARMY

The most serious and threatening feature of the situation at Santiago after the capture of the city was the ill health of the army. In less than a month after it began its Cuban campaign the Fifth Army-Corps was virtually hors de combat. On Friday, July 22, I made a long march around the right wing from a point near the head of the bay to the Siboney road, and had an opportunity to see what the condition of the troops was in that part of our line. I do not think that more than fifty per cent. of them were fit for any kind of active duty, and if they had been ordered to march back to Siboney between sunrise and dark, or to move a distance of ten miles up into the hills, I doubt whether even forty per cent. of them would have reached their destination. There were more than a thousand sick in General Kent's division alone, and a surgeon from the First Division hospital—the only field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps—told me that a conservative estimate of the number of sick in the army as a whole would be about five thousand. Of course the greater part of these sick men were not in the hospitals. I saw hundreds of them dragging themselves about the camps with languid steps, or lying in their little dog-kennel tents on the ground; but all of them ought to have been in hospitals, and would have been had our hospital space and facilities been adequate. Inasmuch, however, as our hospital accommodations were everywhere deplorably inadequate, and inasmuch as our surgeons sent to the yellow-fever camps many patients who were suffering merely from malarial fever, a majority of our sick soldiers remained in their own tents, from necessity or from choice, and received only such care as their comrades could give them.

Yellow fever and calenture broke out among the troops in camp around Santiago about the same time that they appeared in Siboney. Calenture soon became epidemic, and in less than a fortnight there were thousands of cases, and nearly one half of the army was unfit for active service, if not completely disabled.

The questions naturally arise, Was this state of affairs inevitable, or might it have been foreseen as a possibility and averted? Is the climate of eastern Cuba in the rainy season so deadly that Northern troops cannot be subjected to it for a month without losing half their effective force from sickness, or was the sickness due to other and preventable causes? In trying to answer these questions I shall say not what I think, nor what I suppose, nor what I have reason to believe, but what I actually know, from personal observation and from the testimony of competent and trustworthy witnesses. I was three different times at the front, spent a week in the field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps, and saw for myself how our soldiers ate, drank, slept, worked, and suffered. I shall try not to exaggerate anything, but, on the other hand, I shall not suppress or conceal anything, or smooth anything over. Poultney Bigelow was accused of being unpatriotic, disloyal, and even seditious because he told what I am now convinced was the truth about the state of affairs at Tampa; but it seems to me that when the lives of American soldiers are at stake it is a good deal more patriotic and far more in accordance with the duty of a good citizen to tell a disagreeable and unwelcome truth that may lead to a reform than it is to conceal the truth and pretend that everything is all right when it is not all right.

The truth, briefly stated, is that, owing to bad management, lack of foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of the commissary and medical departments of the army, our soldiers in Cuba suffered greater hardships and privations, in certain ways, than were ever before endured by an American army in the field. They were not half equipped, nor half fed, nor half cared for when they were wounded or sick; they had to sleep in dog-kennel shelter-tents, which afforded little or no protection from tropical rains; they had to cook in coffee-cups and old tomato-cans because they had no camp-kettles; they never had a change of underclothing after they landed; they were forced to drink brook-water that was full of disease-germs because they had no suitable vessels in which to boil it or keep it after it had been boiled; they lived a large part of the time on hard bread and bacon, without beans, rice, or any of the other articles which go to make up the full army ration; and when wounded they had to wait hours for surgical aid, and then, half dead from pain and exhaustion, they lay all night on the water-soaked ground, without shelter, blanket, pillow, food, or attendance. To suppose that an army will keep well and maintain its efficiency under such conditions is as unreasonable and absurd as to suppose that a man will thrive and grow fat in the stockaded log pen of a Turkish quarantine. It cannot be fairly urged in explanation of the sickness in the army that it was due to the deadliness of the Cuban climate and was therefore what policies of marine insurance call an "act of God." The Cuban climate played its part, of course, but it was a subordinate part. The chief and primary cause of the soldiers' ill health was neglect, due, as I said before, to bad management, lack of foresight, and the almost complete breakdown of the army's commissary and medical departments. If there be any fact that should have been well known, and doubtless was well known, to the higher administrative officers of the Fifth Army-Corps, it is the fact that if soldiers sleep on the ground in Cuba without proper shelter and drink unboiled water from the brooks they are almost certain to contract malarial fever; and yet twelve or fifteen thousand men were sent into the woods and chaparral between Siboney and Santiago without hammocks or wall-tents, and without any vessel larger than a coffee-cup in which to boil water. I can hardly hint at the impurities and the decaying organic matter that I have seen washed down into the brooks by the almost daily rains which fall in that part of Cuba in mid-summer, and yet it was the unboiled water from these polluted brooks that the soldiers had to drink. One captain whom I know took away the canteens from all the men in his company, kept them under guard, and tried to force his command to boil in their tin coffee-cups all the water that they drank; but he was soon compelled to give up the plan as utterly impracticable. In all the time that I spent at the front I did not see a single camp-kettle in use among the soldiers, and there were very few even among officers. Late in July the men of the Thirty-fourth Michigan were bringing every day in their canteens, from a distance of two miles, all the water required for regimental use. They had nothing else to carry it in, nothing else to keep it in after they got it to camp, and nothing bigger than a tin cup in which to boil it or make coffee.

In the matter of tents and clothing the equipment of the soldiers was equally deficient. Dog-kennel shelter-tents will not keep out a tropical rain, and when the men got wet they had to stay wet for lack of a spare suit of underclothes. The officers fared little better than the men. A young lieutenant whom I met in Santiago after the surrender told me that he had not had a change of underclothing in twenty-seven days. The baggage of all the officers was left on board of the transports when the army disembarked, and little, if any, of it was ever carried to the front.

Nothing, perhaps, is more important, so far as its influence upon health is concerned, than food, and the rations of General Shafter's army were deficient in quantity and unsatisfactory in quality from the very first. With a few exceptions, the soldiers had nothing but hard bread and bacon after they left the transports at Siboney, and short rations at that. A general of brigade who has had wide and varied experience in many parts of the United States, and whose name is well and favorably known in New York, said to me in the latter part of July: "The whole army is suffering from malnutrition. The soldiers don't get enough to eat, and what they do get is not sufficiently varied and is not adapted to this climate. A soldier can live on hardtack and bacon for a while, even in the tropics, but he finally sickens of them and craves oatmeal, rice, hominy, fresh vegetables, and dried fruits. He gets none of these things; he has come to loathe hard bread and bacon three times a day, and he consequently eats very little and isn't adequately nourished. Nothing would do more to promote the health of the men than a change of diet."

A sufficient proof that the soldiers were often hungry is furnished by the fact that men detailed from the companies frequently marched from the front to Siboney and back (from eighteen to twenty-five miles, over a bad road), in order to get such additional supplies, particularly in the shape of canned vegetables, as they could carry in their hands and haversacks or transport on a rude, improvised stretcher. Officers and men from Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders repeatedly came into Siboney in this way on foot, and once or twice with a mule or a horse, and begged food from the Red Cross for their sick and sickening comrades in their camp at the front.

It is not hard to understand why soldiers contracted malarial fever in a country like Cuba, when they were imperfectly sheltered, inadequately equipped, insufficiently fed and clothed, forced to sleep on the ground, and compelled to drink unboiled water from contaminated brooks. But there was another reason for the epidemic character and wide prevalence of the calenture from which the army suffered, and that was exposure to exhalations from the malarious, freshly turned earth of the rifle-pits and trenches. All pioneers who have broken virgin soil with a plow in a warm, damp, wooded country will remember that for a considerable time thereafter they suffered from various forms of remittent and intermittent fever. Our soldiers around Santiago had a similar experience. The unexpected strength and fighting capacity shown by the Spaniards in the first day's battle, and their counter-attack upon our lines on the night of the following day, led our troops to intrench themselves by digging rifle-pits and constructing rude bomb-proofs as places of refuge from shrapnel. During the armistice these intrenchments were greatly extended and strengthened, and before Santiago surrendered they stretched along our whole front for a distance of several miles. In or near these rifle-pits and trenches our men worked, stood guard, or slept, for a period of more than two weeks, and the exhalations from the freshly turned earth, acting upon organisms already weakened by hardships and privations, brought about an epidemic of calenture upon the most extensive scale.

By August 3 the condition of the army had become so alarming that its general officers drew up and sent to General Shafter the following letter: