The major land campaign of the Spanish-American War of 1898 was the American battle with Spain for the Cuban city of Santiago. Painfully aware of the mistakes made and lives needlessly lost, John Bigelow, Jr, who served as the Captain in the U.S. Calvary, wrote: "The enlisting, organizing, drilling, and equipping of an army of over two hundred and fifty thousand men, the transportation of about twenty thousand of them to a theatre of war a thousand miles or more distant, and from a temperate to a tropical climate, on less than one month's notice for preparation, involved endless confusion and an almost total disregard of the rules and precautions of scientific warfare. In this narration I have not sought to give undue prominence to, still less to disguise, any of the consequences of this want of preparation. On the contrary, if what I have to report can have any value, professionally or otherwise, and I hope it will be found to have some, it must consist mainly in the frank disclosure of everything that fell under my personal observation, the recurrence of which our Government in the future should strive to avoid." Military historians will find this an unusually candid account of a war that too often is described as an unmitigated success.

This is a new release of the original 1927 edition.

Excerpt from Reminiscences of the Santiago Campaign On my return from the Cuban campaign in July last, I found the community into which I was thrown during my convalescence intensely interested in every detail of the experience of any one who had participated in it. The space subsequently given in the public prints to the proceedings of the President's Commission for Inquiring into the Conduct of the War, has led my friends as well as some publishers to urge me to allow the general public to share such information about the campaign as my observation and experience enables me to impart. It is in deference to these considerations that these pages, revised from my correspondence with my family, are now submitted to the public. They make no pretension to be a history of the late war, nor even of the campaign of Santiago, but simply what the title implies - a narration of what an officer participating in that campaign saw, felt, and thought, with such explanations and suggestions as his observations and reflections prompted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.