When we returned from the front on July 9, we found the condition of the village worse than ever. No attempt, apparently, had been made to clean or disinfect it; no sanitary precautions had been taken or health regulations enforced; hundreds of incredibly dirty and ragged Cubans--some of them employed in discharging the government transports and some of them merely loafers, camp-followers, and thieves--thronged the beach, evacuating their bowels in the bushes and throwing remnants of food about on the ground to rot in the hot sunshine; there was a dead and decomposing mule in one of the stagnant pools behind the village, and the whole place stank. If, under such conditions, an epidemic of fever had not broken out, it would have been so strange as to border on the miraculous. Nature alone would probably have brought it about, but when nature and man coöperated the result was certain. On July 8 the army surgeons reported three cases of yellow fever among the sick in the abandoned Spanish houses on shore. On the 10th the number of cases had increased to thirty, and included Dr. Lesser, chief surgeon of the Red Cross, and his wife, two Red Cross nurses, and Mrs. Trumbull White, wife of the correspondent of the Chicago "Record," who had been working as a nurse in the Red Cross hospital.
On the 11th General Miles arrived from Washington, and on ascertaining the state of affairs ordered the burning of every house in the village. I doubt very much whether this step was necessary or judicious, for the reason that it was taken too late. If there was any reason to believe, when the army first began to disembark at Siboney, that the houses of the village were likely to become sources of infection, they should have been burned or fumigated at once. To burn them after they had set yellow fever afloat in that malarious and polluted atmosphere was like locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen. But it is very questionable whether they should have been burned at any time. In a country like eastern Cuba, where at intervals of two or three days throughout the wet season there is a tropical downpour of rain which deluges the ground and beats through the most closely woven tent, a house with a tight zinc roof and a dry floor is a most valuable possession, and it should not be destroyed if there is any way of disinfecting it and making it a safe place of human habitation. All the evidence obtainable in Santiago was to the effect that these houses were not infected with yellow fever; but even if they had been, it was quite possible, I think, to save them and make them useful. If, when the army landed, the best of the buildings had been thoroughly cleaned and then fumigated by shutting them up tightly and burning sulphur and other suitable chemical substances in them, the disease-germs that they contained might have been destroyed. Convict barges saturated with the germs of smallpox, typhus, dysentery, and all sorts of infectious and contagious diseases are treated in this way in Siberia, and there is no reason why houses should not be so purified in Cuba. General Miles and his chief surgeon decided, however, that the whole village should be burned, and burned it was. The postal, telegraph, and signal-service officers were turned out of their quarters and put into tents; a yellow-fever camp was established in the hills about two miles north of Siboney; more hospital tents and tent-flies were pitched along the sea-coast west of the notch; and as fast as sick and wounded soldiers could be removed from the condemned houses and put under canvas or sent to the yellow-fever camp, the houses were destroyed.