The Return Home 201 



land bringing with it a great increase in the rainfall. 

 We could, with much difficulty, have got our regi- 

 ments up the mountains, but not half the men could 

 have got up with their belongings; and once there 

 it would have been an impossibility to feed them. 

 It was all that could be done, with the limited num- 

 ber of wagons and mule-trains on hand, to feed the 

 men in the existing camps, for the travel and the 

 rain gradually rendered each road in succession 

 wholly impassable. To have gone up the moun- 

 tains would have meant early starvation. 



The third plan of the Department was even more 

 objectionable than either of the others. There was, 

 some twenty-five miles in the interior, what was 

 called a high interior plateau, and at one period we 

 were informed that we were to be marched thither. 

 As a matter of fact, this so-called high plateau was 

 the sugar-cane country, where, during the summer, 

 the rainfall was prodigious. It was a rich, deep 

 soil, covered with a rank tropic growth, the guinea- 

 grass being higher than the head of a man on horse- 

 back. It was a perfect hotbed of malaria, and there 

 was no dry ground whatever in which to camp. To 

 have sent the troops there would have been simple 

 butchery. 



Under these circumstances the alternative to leav- 

 ing the country altogether was to stay where we 

 were, with the hope that half the men would live 



