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.