The age-herald., 1898-12-15
WANT OF PROPER ATTEN TON
TFOOpsrS Have Given Up HOpe and
 Long for Death.
UTTER WOE OF THE HOSPITALS
Nothing Before the Brave Boys But Days of Wretchedness Funer- als Each Day and the Dead House
 is Never Empty.

Honolulu, December 7.-Via San Fran cisco, December 14.-The United States transport Scandia has arrived here from Manila, which place she left November 15 She brings a number of officers ninety-one discharged and furloughed men and two Red Cross nurses. She brings the largest mail that ever left Manila, 213 sacks for San Francisco and one for Honolulu.
 Miss Schaefer, a Red Cross nurse, who went from Honolulu to Manila, arriving there September 26, returned here. She makes startling charges as to the way United States soldiers are taken care of in Manila.
 Miss Schaefer made the following state- ment for publications:
 Scores of the soldier boys are dying in the hospitals at Manila just for want of proper nourishment. They say the govern ment allows 50 cents a day for each patient. You can save dozens of lives on cents a day.
 "Oh, the utter woe of the hospitals, the helplessness of them, men as bright, as noble as God ever made given up to death hoping for it, seeking it, taking poison, do- ing anything that will end the despair that comes upon them.
 without frOper roou
 "Seeing nothing before them except days of wretchedness, without proper food, with no one to give them sympathy or cheer, they write to friends to sooth the aching brows or moisten parched lips, if by sheer endurance of nature or obstinancy of yi- tality they do get better, there is before them nothing but the still more cheeress period of convalescence with the probabi.i- ty of relapse and the old weariness of de- spair to be suffered again. No wonder there are six seven funerals a day. No wonder the dead house Is never empty.
 And outside the hospital and even in its indifference, petty consideration of rank and position, squabbles about precedence, lack of consideration In prescribing and preparing food. while men dying, not merely of heart hunger, but for want of nourishment.
 ''I have gone through the wards day after day and as I speak to this one and that, and they poured out their woes, men who do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, cried for the pure agony of their loneliness and despair, made poignant and vivid by their own telling of 1t.
 Need of Nourishment
 'I got so I could not go through the wards What could I do? saw the need of care, of proper nourishmeRtrof the most ordinary hospital treatment, and was ut terly helpless to do anything; just one cog in the great remorseless grinding machine, whose material was noble apd whose grist was death. I do not mean that attendants of the hospitals are careless or ind herent. Many are trying to their best. There are a lot of worthiness and unselfishness among the attendants at the hospitals. But there is so much inexperience, so many clogs to those who would do much.
 ITO think of the attendant going through ward with a pail of beef broth dealing it out to the fifty or sixty patients indiscrimi- nately by the cup full. In the whole pail there was not enough nourishment for one, even, if it were made of the best material. But what it really was made of, shut my eyes and try to imagine. In a whole ward there is not much more than one nurse with experience, and for helpers only one or two boys who perhaps never saw sick room before."