The order, apart from being unprecedented in warfare, proved an
exceedingly short-sighted one, and acted almost immediately after the
manner of a boomerang. The able-bodied men of each family who had
remained loyal or at least neutral, so long as they were permitted to
live undisturbed on their few acres, were not content to exist on the
charity of a city, and they swarmed over to the insurgent ranks by the
hundreds, and it was only the old and infirm and the women and children
who went into the towns, where they at once became a burden on the
Spanish residents, who were already distressed by the lack of trade and
the high prices asked for food.

The order failed also in its original object of embarrassing the
insurgents, for they are used to living out of doors and to finding
food for themselves, and the destruction of the huts where they had
been made welcome was not a great loss to men who, in a few minutes,
with the aid of a machete, can construct a shelter from a palm tree.

So the order failed to distress those against whom it was aimed, but
brought swift and terrible suffering to those who were and are
absolutely innocent of any intent against the government, as well as to
the adherents of the government.

It is easy to imagine what happened when hundreds of people, in some
towns thousands, were herded together on the bare ground, with no food,
with no knowledge of sanitation, with no covering for their heads but
palm leaves, with no privacy for the women and young girls, with no
thought but as to how they could live until to-morrow.

It is true that in the country, also, these people had no covering for