About five years ago troops of United States cavalry were sent into the chapparal on the border of Mexico and Texas to drive the Garcia revolutionists back into their own country. One troop, G, Third Cavalry, was ordered out for seven days' service, but when I joined the troop later as a correspondent, it had been in the field for three months, sleeping the entire time under canvas, and carrying all its impedimenta with it on pack mules. It had seldom, if ever, been near a town, and the men wore the same clothes, or what was left of them, with which they had started for a week's campaign. Had the Spaniards followed such a plan of attack as that when the revolution began, instead of building mud forts and devastating the country, they might not only have suppressed the revolution, but the country would have been of some value when the war ended. As it is to-day, it will take ten years or more to bring it back to a condition of productiveness. The wholesale devastation of the island was an idea of General Weyler's. If the captain of a vessel, in order to put down a mutiny on board, scuttled the ship and sent everybody to the bottom, his plan of action would be as successful as General Weyler's has proved to be. After he had obtained complete control of the cities he decided to lay waste the country and starve the revolutionists into submission. So he ordered all pacificos, as the non-belligerents are called, into the towns and burned their houses, and issued orders to have all fields where potatoes or corn were planted dug up and these food products destroyed. These pacificos are now gathered inside of a dead line, drawn one hundred and fifty yards around the towns, or wherever there is a fort. Some of them have settled around the forts that guard a bridge, others around the forts that guard a sugar plantation; wherever there are forts there are pacificos. In a word, the situation in Cuba is something like this: The Spaniards hold the towns, from which their troops daily make predatory raids, invariably returning in time for dinner at night. Around each town is a circle of pacificos doing no work, and for the most part starving and diseased, and outside, in the plains and mountains, are the insurgents. No one knows just where any one band of them is to-day or where it may be to-morrow. Sometimes they come up to the very walls of the fort, lasso a bunch of cattle and ride off again, and the next morning their presence may be detected ten miles away, where they are setting fire to a cane field or a sugar plantation. [Illustration: Guerrillas With Captured Pacificos]