The feelings of the six thousand American troops who landed on Cuban
soil on June 22nd, 1898, may well be imagined. Although they felt the
effects of the confinement to which they had been subjected while on
shipboard, there was very little sickness among them. Again possessed
of the free use of their limbs they swarmed the beach and open space
near the landing, making themselves at home, and confronting the
difficulties and perils that lay before them with a courage born of
national pride. Before them were the mountains with their almost
impassable roads, the jungles filled with poisonous plants and the
terrible prickly underbrush and pointed grass, in which skulked the
land crab and various reptiles whose bite or sting was dangerous;
twenty miles of this inhospitable country lay between them and
Santiago, their true objective. And somewhere on the road to that city
they knew they were destined to meet a well-trained foe, skilled in
all the arts of modern warfare, who would contest their advance. The
prospect, however, did not unnerve them, although they could well
conjecture that all who landed would not re-embark. Some in that six
thousand were destined never again to set foot on shipboard. Out of
the Twenty-fifth Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry men were to fall both
before Spanish bullets and disease ere these organizations should
assemble to return to their native shores.
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