grossly mismanaged and inefficient. We were badly managed, but we had streaks of efficiency. Therein lay the difference--our salvation. When the siege of Santiago was undertaken, General Shafter’s lines were so thin that even poor troops with a little zeal could have punctured them. But the Spaniards for some unknown reason seemed to be more fearful than we were. Even so it would have been a stand-off, had it not been for the great victory of our Navy in destroying Cervera’s fleet. And of course it would destroy the Spanish ships. It had had seven years’ building before the war. Under the supervision of Presidents Cleveland and Arthur, we had developed the famous White Squadron. What would the soldier have done without the Navy? What would he have done without the complete sloppiness of the Spaniard? One authority shows that the war would have lasted four or five years with more useless slaughter of our own men than we had seen even in the Civil War. Even so, in only one hundred nine days of war, the volunteers alone lost two hundred eighty-nine killed--but--listen to the _but_--three thousand eight hundred forty-eight by sickness. Thirteen times as many by disease as by battle. And most of these deaths occurred in our country--before the poor volunteer had had a chance to lift a finger of help. When the twister caught us, we had the great sum of one hundred seventy-nine army medical officers for a mass of men that swelled to two hundred sixteen thousand in four months. In our sleep there had been no thought that the camp is more deadly than the bullet, that any doctor can’t be a sanitary man in the field--that field sanitation is a specialty like eye, ear, nose and throat or abdominal surgery. Doctors can’t get that training in a few months. In over-crowded camps in the United States many an otherwise fine medical man made a fizzle of sanitation. Others who did know sanitation were not backed up by the untrained volunteer officers. So our best youth died like flies and by flies. And the suffering of those who did not die was appalling torture. Filth was too often in the open. An untrained regiment would be strewn with sickness, while a trained one right beside it would have no sickness at all. By our sleep beforehand and our unjust haste after we were waked up by the twister, we had done worse things. We had forced the little seventeen thousand into Cuba at the height of the fever season. Right after the surrender of Santiago, seventy-five per cent of Shafter’s command, the majority of our entire trained forces were on the sick list. Had the Spaniard held out a little longer, he’d have had only a handful or none at all to fight. But he didn’t hold out. And we had another miraculous escape. But the death toll went up. And over in the Pacific it went up higher. In the Philippine Insurrection that followed the Spanish-American War, we lost in two years over seven thousand men.