Morning brought them streaming
down from the suburban slopes where they lived, evening sent them
winding back; their days were spent in an aimless search for food.
They snatched at crumbs and combed the gutters for crusts. How
they managed to exist, whence came the food that kept life in
their miserable bodies, was a mystery, even to the citizens of the
city; no organized effort had been made to care for them and there
was insufficient surplus food for half their number. Yet somehow
they lived and lingered on.
Of course the city was not entirely peopled by the starving--as a
matter of fact they formed scarcely one-fifth of the normal civil
population--and the life of the city was going on a good deal as
usual. Stores were open, at least there was a daily train from
Habana, and the barracks were full of Spanish troops. It was from
off the wastage of this normal population that these fifteen
thousand prisoners were forced to live. Even this wastage was
woefully inadequate, merely serving to prolong suffering by making
starvation slower.
At the time of O'Reilly's arrival the sight presented by these
innocent victims of war was appalling; it roused in him a dull red
rage at the power which had wrought this crime and at the men who
permitted it to continue. Spain was a Christian nation, he
reflected; she had set up more crosses than any other, and yet
beneath them she had butchered more people than all the nations of
the earth combined.
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