Naturally the immediate and crying needs had to be corrected at once. But Wood began all on the same day on the beams as well as on the plaster and wall paper--this 20th day of July, 1898. Another man might well have forgotten or never have thought of the fundamentals in the terrible condition within his immediate vision. That seems to be the characteristic of Wood--that while he started to cure the illness, he at the same time started to get ready to prevent its recurrence. And there we may perhaps discover something of the reason for his success, something of the reason why people lean on him and {109} look to him for advice and support in time of trouble. These immediate needs were inconceivable to those who lived in orderly places and orderly times. Of the 50,000 inhabitants, 16,000 were sick. There were in addition 2,000 sick Spanish soldiers and 5,000 sick American troops. Over all in the hot haze of that tropical city hung the terror of yellow fever, showing its sinister face here and there. At the same time a religious pilgrimage to a nearby shrine taken at this moment by 18,000 people led to an immense increase in disease because of the bad food and the polluted water which the pilgrims ate and drank. In the streets piles of filth and open drains were mixed with the dead bodies of animals. Houses, deserted because of deaths, held their dead--men, women and children--whom no one removed and no one buried. All along the routes approaching the city bodies lay by the roadside, the living members of the family leaving their dead unburied because they were too weak and could only drag themselves along under the tropic sun in the hope that they {110} might reach their homes before they, too, should die. This was enhanced by the fact of the siege and the consequent lack of food. The sick could not go for food; and if they could have done so there was little or none to be had. Horrible odors filled the air. Terror walked abroad. It was a prodigious task for anybody to undertake, but it was undertaken, and in the following manner: Simultaneously certain main lines of work were mapped out by Wood and officers put in charge of each subject, the commanding officer reserving for himself the planning, the general supervision, the watching, as well as the instituting of new laws based upon the existing system of the Code Napoleon. It was first necessary to feed the people and to bury the dead. There were so many of the latter that they had to be collected in lots of ninety or a hundred, placed between railway irons, soaked in petroleum and burned outside the city. It was such dreadful work, this going into deserted homes and collecting dead bodies for the flames, that men had to be forced to it. All were {111} paid regularly, however, and the job was done. General Wood's own account of this task is better than any second-hand description can even hope to be.