"And it will be a great help and comfort to them to know that their dear mother's prayers are following them," rejoined Harold, tenderly pressing the hand she had laid in his.
The next moment Herbert joined them, and he too had a farewell talk with his mother, for the brothers were to leave for Tampa the next morning to join the troops about to sail for Cuba.
CHAPTER X.
By the last of May there were sixteen thousand men at Tampa under the command of General Shafter, but it was not until the 14th of June that they set sail for Cuba. On a clear, scorchingly hot morning, June 22d, they landed at Daiquiri, twelve miles east of the entrance to Santiago Bay. From all accounts things seem to have been wofully mismanaged, so that our poor soldiers had no facilities for landing. Those who loaded the ship, it would appear, must have been great bunglers—either exceedingly ignorant in regard to such work or most reprehensibly careless. In consequence, scarcely anything could be found when wanted. Medical stores were scattered among twenty vessels; so that when fever broke out in the trenches before Santiago it was almost impossible to get the needed remedies; probably—though there were never enough on the field—some medicines were left on the ships and carried back to the United States. All this made the work of the physicians doubly trying. Besides, they were too few in number, the wounded many more than it had been expected they would be, and brought in faster than they could be attended to; the surgeons worked all night by the light of spluttering lamps, and there was not enough of even surgical instruments. But the poor wounded men were wonderfully brave and patient. Harold and Herbert Travilla felt that they had not engaged in a cause which did not need them. After the fighting began their labors were exhausting; all the more so because of the drain upon their sympathies.
On the morning of July 2d our troops were found safely intrenched on the ridge of the hill above Santiago. The day before had been one of heavy losses to our army—many officers and men killed and wounded. And now, just as light began to show in the east, the Spaniards opened a heavy fire on our works. Our men made few replies, for ammunition was getting scarce; and so anxious for it were the soldiers that they hailed an ammunition train with great joy, though they were half starved and knew that no provisions could come while the road was crowded with such trains.
The war artist, Frederic Remington, tells of the delight with which the poor hungry fellows hailed a pack-train loaded with ammunition, though they knew that no food would be brought them that night. "The wounded going to the rear cheered the ammunition, and when it was unpacked at the front the soldiers seized it like gold. They lifted a box in the air and dropped it on one corner, which smashed it open.
"'Now we can hold San Juan hill against them garlics; hey, son?' yelled a happy cavalryman to a doughboy.
"'You bet! until we starve to death.'