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.