The hospital corps and quartermaster's and commissary departments of the army, however, were not alone in their failure to anticipate and fully provide for these difficulties. The Red Cross itself was in no better case. There was perhaps more excuse for us, because when we fitted out we did not know where the army was going nor what it proposed to do, and we had been assured by the surgeon-general and by General Shafter that, so far as the care of sick and wounded soldiers was concerned, our services would not be required. We expected, however, that they would be, and could we have known in what field and under what conditions our army was going to move and fight, we should probably have had, in some directions, a better, or at least a more suitable, equipment. If we had had at Siboney on June 26 half a dozen army wagons, an equal number of saddle-horses, and forty or fifty mules of our own, we should have been in much better condition than we were to cope with the difficulties of the situation. But for the assistance of the army, which helped us out with transportation, notwithstanding its own limited resources, we should not have been able to establish a Red Cross station at the front in time to coöperate with the hospital corps after the battle of July 1-2, nor should we have been able to send food to the fifteen thousand refugees from Santiago who fled, hungry and destitute, to the right wing of our army at Caney when General Shafter threatened to bombard the city. For the opportunity to get into the field we were indebted to the general in command, to his hospital corps, and to the officers of his army; and we desire most gratefully to acknowledge and thank them for the helping hand that they extended to us when we had virtually no transportation whatever of our own.
When we returned to the _State of Texas_ on July 9, the situation, so far as Red Cross relief-work on the southeastern coast of Cuba is concerned, was briefly as follows: We had a station in the field-hospital of the Fifth Army-Corps at the front, and a hospital of our own in Siboney, with twenty-five beds attended by six trained nurses under direction of Dr. Lesser. We also had entire charge of one ward of thirty beds in the general hospital directed by General Lagarde. We were feeding refugees at several points on a line extending east and west nearly sixty miles from the right wing of our army at Caney to the naval station at Guantanamo Bay, and at the latter place we had landed fifteen thousand rations to be distributed under the general direction of Captain McCalla, of the cruiser _Marblehead_, and General Perez, commanding the Cuban forces in the Guantanamo district. To the refugees from Santiago at Caney--about fifteen thousand in number and mostly women and children--we had forwarded, chiefly in army wagons furnished by General Shafter, six or eight tons of food, and were sending more as fast as we could land it in lighters through the surf. Mr. Elwell, of Miss Barton's staff, was taking care of two or three thousand refugees at Firmeza, a small village in the hills back of Siboney, and we hoped soon to enter the harbor of Santiago, discharge the cargo of the _State of Texas_ at a pier, assort it in a warehouse, and prosecute the work of relief upon a more extensive scale. Our sanguine anticipations, however, were not to be realized as soon as we hoped they would be, and our relief-work was practically suspended on July 10, as the result of an outbreak of yellow fever.