I presented my credentials to the commandante. He was the most genial Spanish official I had met between Havana and Guadaloupe. When he smiled, his face was all kindness. When he spoke of the reconcentrados, tears welled from his eyes. Yet around his mouth and chin were the cruel lines of a nature as stern as it was commiserative. He told me that the hospital was full, always full; there was room in its wards for only 200 patients, and only one doctor for all. All who entered that place of sickness came out of it, not cured, but dead. Three thousand human beings, mostly women and children, had passed away in that town in three months. Nearly all had died of starvation and exposure. When the cemetery was full, they began burying in the still burning tobacco fields on the hillsides. But it was the siesta hour. The commandante excused himself, saying he would rest awhile and advised me to do the same. The commandante's house was in the center of the town. Round about was a circle of the houses of those who had owned the tobacco fields. Beyond these homes of the well-to-do were hundreds of huts. In these lived the reconcentrados, several families in each, or as many as could huddle within and not pull the roughly constructed frame of palm stalks down about their heads. Outside the circle of huts were the blackened fields and hills. On the tops of the hills, at intervals of 200 yards, was a circle of small houses that looked like sentry boxes. They were really little forts, with four soldiers in each. Beyond the forts were, heaven only knows how many, insurgent guerillas, lynx-eyed human watch dogs, always lurking and waiting for a chance to swoop upon one of the little forts, slay the garrison of four and dash back into the bushes. A SOLDIER'S GHASTLY BURDEN. At this moment not a soldier was in sight. Perhaps all were sleeping, like the commandante. Or perhaps the soldiers always remained inside the barricades surrounding their forts, fearing that to step outside would be to attract the bullets of the lurking insurgents. For such is warfare in Cuba's hills to-day; much the same sort of warfare our American forefathers knew when each man who stepped from his doorway was likely to become a target for the arrows of the lurking and invisible redskins.