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.