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Updated: May 26, 2025
When the conversation swung with the precision of a pendulum from clothes and love to war with Spain, her mind leapt at once to action, and she argued every advocate of war into a state of fury. She had responded heavily to the President's appeal in behalf of the reconcentrados, but her mind was no longer divided.
The house was in the center of the town, and the lamps illuminating the Spanish colors had rendered the balcony the best of targets. These Spanish officers and an innocent young English girl, a Samaritan, were murdered. And by whom? By the insurgents, who were guided to the hilltops by two of the very reconcentrados whom the victims had saved that day from starvation.
For these up-sloping fields, upon which many a rich tobacco crop has been raised, lie now under blackening ashes the work of insurgent torches. In this low-lying town 3,000 reconcentrados are naked, shelterless and starving. That aid has not come to them till now is because of the ingratitude and treachery of two of their own number.
As I rode into the town, I said to the mule: "The next artist who is given an order to illustrate Dante's 'Inferno' ought to come here. He could draw from life, pictures more infernal than a mere human mind could conceive." Reconcentrados lay everywhere under the broiling sun. The mule picked his way between human heaps that looked like so many little mounds of rags.
Skeleton legs and arms protruded from out the heaps. Soft moans of mothers and the wailing of little children gave evidence of so many living deaths. I presented my credentials to the commandante. He was the most genial Spanish official I had met between Havana and Guadaloupe. When he smiled, his face was all kindness. When he spoke of the reconcentrados, tears welled from his eyes.
In spite of their excitement they went slowly, for none of them had the strength to hurry. Fortunately, there were few prowlers within the lines, hunger having robbed the reconcentrados of the spirit to venture forth, and in consequence Spanish vigilance had relaxed; it was now confined to the far-flung girdle of intrenchments which encircled the city. The trio encountered no one.
Some of them found a melancholy pleasure in nursing the sick and wounded, others fought side by side with the men, and the fear of death was not half as strong as the thoughts of the horrors which awaited them at their homes, or among the reconcentrados in the towns. Marriages have been solemnized, and children have been born upon the fields of battle.
Between the stations, although I traveled always by daylight, as the trains do not run at night, and I was observing as carefully as possible, I saw no signs of the reconcentrados going away from the forts.
A large majority of the Spanish subjects who have commercial and business interests and own property here will not accept autonomy, but prefer annexation to the United States rather than an independent republic or genuine autonomy under the Spanish flag." The remainder of the letter is devoted to plans for the relief of the reconcentrados.
Even if his head hadn't been specially priced for more pesos than you could put in a sugar barrel, this was a hot time for any American to be lallygaggin' around the ladies in that particular burg. For the Spanish knew all about where the reconcentrados were getting their firearms from and they were good and sore on us. But little details like that don't seem to bother El Capitan Yohness a bit.
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