The San Francisco call., 1898-12-15
HORRORS OF
 THE MANILA
 HOSPITALS Awful Sufferings of Sick Soldiers. MANY DEATHS FROM NEGLECT STATEMENT MADE BY A RE- TURNING RED CROSS NURSE. Gould Save Dozens of Lives on Five Cents Day, Though the Gov ernment Makes Liberal
 Provision.
MANY DEATHS FROM NEGLECT
STATEMENT MADE BY A RE-
 TURNING RED CROSS NURSE.
Correspondence of The Call.

HONOLULU, Dec. 1.-The Scandia arrived yesterday morning from Ma nila, having sailed from there on No vember 15. She brings a number of officers. ninety-one discharged and fur loughed men and two Red Cross nurses. She brings the largest mail that ever left Manila, 213 sacks for San Francisco and one for Honolulu. She will sail for San Francisco on or about Decem- Der 10.
 One of the returning Red Cross nurses said: Scores of the soldier boys are dying in the hospitals at Ma nila for want of proper nourishment. They say the Government allows 60 cents a day for each patient. l could save dozens of lives on cents day. Oh, the utter woe of the hospitals, the helplessness of them. Men as bright and noble as God ever made, giving up to death, hoping for it, seeking it, talk ing poison, doing anything that will end the despair that comes upon them.
 Seeing nothing before them but days of pain and nights of wretchedness, without proper care, without proper food, with no one to give them sym pathy, to write to friends, to soothe aching brows or moisten parched lips, if by sheer endurance of nature or ob- stinacy of vitality they do get better there is before them nothing but the still more cheerleSS period of Conyales- cence with the probability of relapse, and the old weariness of despair to be suffered again. No wonder there are six or seven funerals a day. No won- der the dead house Is never empty
 And outside the hospital and even in 1t, such indifference. Petty consid- eration of rank and position, squabbles about precedence, lack of consideration in prescribing and preparing food, while men are dying, not merely of hearthunger, but for want of nourish- ment.
 T have gone through the wards day after day, and as I spoke to this one and that, and they poured out their sorrows, men who do not wear their hearts on their sleeves cried from pure agony of their loneliness. and despair, made poignant and vivid by their own telling of 1t.
 T got so I simply could not go through the wards. What could I do? I saw the need of care, of proper nour- ishment, of the most ordinary hospital treatment, and was utterly helpless to do anything; just one cog in the great, remorseless, grinding machine whose maternal was nODle men ana whose grist was death."
 Miss Schaefer was one of the first Red Cross nurses to go to Manila. She went from here on the Arizona, arriving at Manila on September 26. She returned as attending nurse to the sick among the ninety wrecks of robust manhood who are returning as invalided soldiers She went strong woman in good health She left Manila November 15 O yxyho she started from San Francisco
 T do not mean that all In the hospi- tals are careless or indifferent" she continued. Many are trying to do their best. There Is lot of worthiness and unselfishness among the attendants at the hospitals. But there Is so much inexperience and so many clogs to an attendant going through a ward with pail of beef broth, ladling out to the fifty or sixty patients indiscrimi- nately tin cup full of 1t. In the whole pailful there was not enough nourish- ment for one, even If it were made of the best material. But what it really was made of I shut my eyes and refuse to imagine. In whole ward there is not more than one nurse of experience, and for helpers only one or two awk- ward boys who perhaps never saw sickroom before. Do their best and what can they accomplish? Let no one speak slightingly of the women who have lately gone on to Manila as army nurses. Any woman who works as she will have to work if she goes into the tents at all will deserve the tear of the recording angel which will blot out all she may have transgressed in the past or all she may be guilty of in the fu- ture"
 Colonel George w Macfarlane re- turned by the Coptic and brings word that the Comptroller of the Currency has guaranteed to Perry s. Heath. First Assistant Postmaster General. and his associates that he will issue the char ter for the new bank in which James Campbell and himself are interested as soon as Congress extends the territor- ial laws to Hawaii. That will probably be very soon.
 Private John V. Springsteen, Com pany G, First New York, died at the military hospital of pneumonia on the 9th. He had been sick but short fiy,oo