“Yesterday Gen. Kent’s Division left for Montauk, and they left behind 350 sick, many of them too ill to care for themselves. This humane country, of course, left ample care for them? There was left one surgeon, one steward, and one case of medicines. Many of these men are too ill to rise. They are ‘suspected’ of having yellow fever. They are suffering from Cuban malaria, and many of them from diarrhea. There was not left a single bed-pan for this battalion of bed-ridden, suffering humanity, nor any well men to nurse the sick. There was not even left any to cook food for them. Those left by the 9th Infantry had to bribe marauding, pilfering Cubans, with a part of their rations, to carry food to the camp of the 13th, where there were a few less ill, to get it cooked.
“They are too sick to dig sinks; some are delirious. When the poor emaciated wrecks of manhood have to obey the calls of Nature, they must either wallow in their own filth or stagger a few paces from their wet beds on the slimy soil to deposit more germs of disease and death on the surface already reeking with ghastly, joint-racking rheums.
“There were left less than fifty cots for these 350 sick men—men compelled by sheer weakness to lie on the ground which will soon lie on them, if enough strong men are left by that time to cover them mercifully over with the loathsome, reeking vegetable detritus which passes here for soil, and which is so fairly animate that you can see every spadeful of it writhe and wriggle as you throw it over the rotting hour-dead shell of what was a free American citizen and a Chevalier Bayard.
“When the last man and wagon of the flying division disappeared over the hill toward health and home, a despairing wail went up from the doomed 350 left in this condition of indescribable horror. ‘We are abandoned to die!’ they cried; ‘we are deserted by our own comrades in the hour of danger and left to helplessly perish!’
“These men are those who fought the climate, hunger, and the enemy on the battle-field which has shed so much undying glory on the American arms. They are the men who have accomplished unheard-of feats of endurance and performed incredible feats of valor on the same ground—not for Cuba, but at the call of duty. They are citizens. They are brave soldiers who have done their full duty because it was duty.”
Santiago Street Scene
The mail facilities were wretched. Cords of mail were stacked up at Siboney for weeks; and although there was more transportation on hand than could be used, the officer detailed to attend to the mail business of the corps, Lieut. Saville, of the 10th Infantry, could not succeed in securing a wagon to haul this mail to the front. Since the corps returned to the United States a dozen letters have reached the author which have chased him by way of Santiago and Montauk, since dates between the 1st and 20th of July, inclusive. The person to whom these letters were addressed was well known to every officer and employee in the corps, and if the mail addressed to one so well known could go astray in this manner, what could an unknown private expect? This may seem like a little hardship, but to men in the weakened and enfeebled condition of the survivors of the 5th Corps a letter from home was both food and medicine. Scores of men who are to-day rotting in Cuban graves died of nostalgia, and might have lived if they had received the letters from home which were sent to them.