The Spanish army is governed with an iron hand. Military law knows no mercy, and it is always more or less a lapse into barbarism where it takes precedence. The ranks are filled by conscription in Spain, and when the men first arrive at Havana they are the rawest recruits imaginable. Soldiers who have been doing garrison duty are sent inland to fill the decimated ranks of various stations, and room is thus made for the recruits, who are at once put to work, enduring a course of severe discipline and drill. They land from the transports, many of them, hatless, barefooted, and in a filthy condition, with scarcely a whole garment among a regiment of them. The writer could hardly believe, on witnessing the scene, that they were not a set of criminals being transported for penal servitude. Fatigue dresses no doubt awaited them at the barracks, and after a while they would be served with a cheap uniform, coarse shoes, and straw hats. They are like sheep being driven to the shambles, and are quite as helpless. Twenty-five per cent, and upwards of these recruits are usually under the sod before the close of a twelve-month!
Sometimes the hardship they have to endure breeds rebellion among them, but woe betide those who commit any overt act, or become leaders of any organized attempt to obtain justice. The service requires frequent victims as examples to enforce the rigid discipline. The punishment by the garrote is a common resort. It is a machine contrived to choke the victim to death without suspending him in the air. At the same time it is fatal in another way, namely, by severing the spinal column just below its connection with the brain. The condemned man is placed upon a chair fixed on a platform, leaning his head and neck back into a sort of iron yoke or frame prepared to receive it. Here an iron collar is clasped about the throat. At the appointed moment a screw is suddenly turned by the executioner, stationed behind the condemned, and instantaneous death follows. This would seem to be more merciful than hanging, whereby death is produced by the lingering process of suffocation, to say nothing of the many mishaps which so often occur upon the gallows. This mode of punishment is looked upon by the army as a disgrace, and they much prefer the legitimate death of a soldier, which is to fall by the bullets of his comrades when condemned to die.