until they were carried to the yellow fever ward of the hospital, under
the black oilskin cloth of the stretchers.

There was a very smart officers' club at Ciego well supplied with a bar
and billiard tables, which I made some excuse for not entering, but
which could be seen through its open doors, and I suggested to one of
the members that it must be a comfort to have such a place, where the
officers might go after their day's march on the mud banks of the
trocha, and where they could bathe and be cool and clean. He said there
were no baths in the club nor anywhere in the town. He added that he
thought it might be a good idea to have them.

The bath tub is the dividing line between savages and civilized beings.
And when I learned that regiment after regiment of Spanish officers and
gentlemen have been stationed in that town--and it was the dirtiest,
hottest and dustiest town I ever visited--for eighteen months, and none
of them had wanted a bath, I believed from that moment all the stories
I had heard about their butcheries and atrocities, stories which I had
verified later by more direct evidence.

From a military point of view the trocha impressed me as a weapon which
could be made to cut both ways. What the Spaniards think of it is shown
by the caricature which appeared lately in "Don Quixote," and which
shows the United States represented by a hog and the insurgents
represented by a negro imprisoned in the trocha, while Weyler stands
ready to turn the Spanish lion on them and watch it gobble them up.

It would be unkind were Spain to do anything so inconsiderate, and
besides, the United States is rather a large mouthful even without the
insurgents who taken alone seem to have given the lion some pangs of