216 CHAPTER VI.

WEYLER IN CUBA.

difficult of access by outlying reefs and cora! " keys." At Jucaro troops and supplies were landed by lighters, which had to go six miles out to sea to meet the steamers. Once landed, they could be moved to any part of the trocha by the military railway. Ciego de Avila, in the middle of the line,was the main garrisonfrom which reinforcementswere movedto any threatened point. During the summer of 1896 thirty KING STORK had succeeded King Log at Havana. Lieutenant-General Weyler had arrived,and the Cuban rebels were warned that they were to have short shrift if they did not promptly save themselves by unconditional surrender.

To strengthen the new Captain-General's hands reinforcements continued to arrive from Spain till, even after allowing for enormous lossesby exposure and disease, he had over a hundred thousand men at his disposal. But he clung to theexisting system of trying to hold Cuba by a network of fortified lines, forts, and blockhouses. He built a double line of little forts round the towns. He increased the number of the isolated posts along therailways and at every landing place where arms might be run ashore. But it was on the two trochas that he spent money and labour most freely. The actual expenditure is said to have amounted to two millionsof dollars, much of it spent in America. As Mr. Richard soldiers (on an average)died every day ofyellow fever at Ciego, the strength of a battalion thus disappearing every month. The trocha plays so large a part in the history of the Cuban campaign that it is worth while quoting part of Mr.Da description of it,as he saw the work before Weyler had quite completedit*:— " The trocha is a cleared space,150 to 200 yards wide, which stretches forfifty miles through what is apparently an impassable jungle. The trees which have been cut downinclearingthis passage way have been piled up at each side of the cleared spaceandlaidinparallelrows, GENERAL WEYLER.

Harding Davis notes in his interesting record of impressions gathered in Cuba as an American newspaper correspondent, "Every sheet of armour plate, every corrugated zinc roof, every roll of barbed wire, every plank, beam, rafter, and girder, even the nails that hold the planks together, the forts themselves, shipped in sections, which are numbered in readiness for setting up, the ties [sleepers] for the military railroad which clings to the trocha from one sea to the other— all of these have been supplied by manufacturers in the United States." Mr. Davis was able with the help of a Spanish passport to visit and give a full description of the Moron-Jucaro trocha, the larger and more formidable of these enormous works. Thick jungle stretches for mileson both sides of the line,and at the point whereits endsreach the sea the shores are made forming a barrier of tree trunks and roots and branches as wide as Broadwayandhigher than a man'shead. It would take a man some time to pick his way over these barriers, and a horse could nomoredo it than it could cross a jamof floating logs in a river. " Between the fallen treeslies the single track of the military railroad, and on one side of that is theline of forts, and a few feetbeyond them a mazeof barbed wire. Beyond the barbed wire againis the other barrier of fallen trees and the jungle. In its unfinished state this is not an insurmountable barricade. Gomez crosseditby daylight with 600 men,and with but the lossof twenty-sevenkilled and as many wounded. Today [i.e. the beginning of 1897} it would be more difficult,and in a few months, without the " " Cuba in War Time," by Richard Harding Davis, PP 9I-93'