I saw the Eighth United States Infantry, just plain regulars from nowhere, before El Caney, and again I saw them in Havana patrolling the streets night and day, with two nights a week in bed. The regiment had by no means recovered from the Santiago campaign, and every day some one would be taken with that bone-racking fever that burns the life slowly out unless checked by a transfer to a Northern clime. But with it all there was no complaining, and they were soldiers in these times as well as in the field. Every private seemed to have the success of the commanding general at heart, and every officer watched with pride the daily improvement in the capital city.
[Illustration: The Lieutenant-Governor's Palace. Two of the largest sewers of the city empty into the harbor at this point.]
The staff shares the danger with the line, and their work is the same steady, uninteresting grind. The engineers face death just as surely constructing sewers as they do digging trenches during an advance, the aides whether carrying despatches to a brigade on the firing line or reporting on some infested quarter in the city, and the surgeons whether attending the wounded at the front or Yellow Jack in some charity hospital. There is no glory for them if they succeed in this fight against death and disease, and they will get no thanks, for it is simply their duty.
The work has been going steadily on and is now well in hand, but it will be a long time before we shall be able to turn the island over to the Cuban people, and we cannot withdraw our forces until every detail of the new government has been thoroughly tested. A generation of education seems to be the only solution of the Cuban problem that confronts the American people, that they may keep the promise made to the civilized world to establish a stable form of government for an excitable little nation that does not know its own mind, and that is so divided that internal strife is always inevitable. Not merely an education of letters is needed, but an education in cleanliness, in religion, and in respect for superior knowledge of affairs; and it is that education that the American army officer has been giving since the first day of January, in the face of obstacles thrown in the way by the very people who will eventually reap the benefits of his labors. That the American people should for any other object than personal gain want to cleanse their city, organize their government, and teach them how to rule themselves, does not seem possible to them, and it is on account of this distrust that the work of establishing order is made difficult and at many times disagreeable.