Last year the rebel army was composed, so far as I have been able to ascertain, very much as follows: 25,000 infantry without transport; 14,000 cavalry, with 13,000 horses and mules; artillery,--22 guns, 190 mules or horses, and about 800 men; the whole regular and irregular army, amounting to about 70,000 men, some 10,000 of whom are absolutely unarmed. During the last two years these numbers have probably been greatly reduced. The duty of the unarmed men consists in going round the field after a battle, and gathering up the arms dropped by the wounded and the dead. Behind this regular army, if so it can be called, is another, consisting of a horde of civilized and uncivilized adventurers, recruited from all parts of the island, and indeed from the four quarters of the globe; among them you will find field hands out of employment, the riffraff turned out of the neighbouring islands, Americans, Mexicans, Germans, Italians, and even a few Englishmen. Yet a third band follows behind this extraordinary mass of heterogenous humanity,--a mob of ex-slaves, reinforced by coolies, who may be described as camp followers, and bring their women and children with them. This formidable and incessantly moving army is divided into sections, and distributed over various parts of the island, in camps (by courtesy so called, for their tents are exceedingly few in number, and the majority have to sleep in the open, unless they have time and skill to make themselves huts with palm branches). These Cuban rebels, being acclimatized, have a great advantage over the Spaniards in pursuit of them, who, as often as not, are trapped by "Yellow Jack." They are less easily overwhelmed by the deadly miasmas which hang over the desolate places where, for safety's sake, they are compelled to pitch their tents.[11] Still thousands of them do perish, for though the _vomito nigro_ does not attack the blacks, it carries off thousands of whites and coolies, while other loathsome diseases decimate the uncleanly negroes and their coolie brethren. The wildest imagination can scarcely conceive a more wonderful scene than that presented by an encampment of Cuban rebels in one of the virgin forests which still cover a considerable portion of the island, or else on those level marsh lands, called Manigua, which bear so strong a resemblance to the Roman Campagna. Only those who have been in a tropical forest can form any idea of what it is like. I remember once being taken by two excellent guides a few hundred yards into one of these jungles. An English forest generally consists of one, or, at the most, four or five varieties of tree--the oak, the pine, the ash, the birch, the beech--with an undergrowth of wild nuts and bramble, and a still lower one of bracken fern and grass. In a tropical forest almost every tree and shrub is wholly different from its neighbour.