On Saturday evening, the second day of the San Juan battle, a slip of paper with these penciled words was brought to the door of the hospital:
"Send food, medicines, anything. Seize wagons from the front for transportation.
"Shafter."
The call for help was at once sent over to the State of Texas, and we worked all night getting out supplies and sending them ashore with a force of Cubans, only too glad to work for food.
I wish I could make apparent how difficult a thing it was to get supplies from our ship to the shore in a surf which, after ten o'clock in the morning, allowed no small boats to touch even the bit of a pier that was run out without breaking either the one or the other, and nothing in the form of a lighter save two dilapidated flat-boat pontoons. These had been broken and
