The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-01-16


 all the bodies, and I bought the gold for a mere trifle.'
 General Perez was in command of the government troops at Cali. One day news arrived that the Liberals had captured neighboring town. Per ez was ordered to start with his army at o'clock next morning to attack them. He went to the barracks, made patriotic speech to the soldiers and told them 10 parade at the appointed hour. Then he sauntered into the Hotel America, Calis best restaurant, and ordered coffee for 6:30 in the morn ing.
 ''The troops were lined up at that hour outside the hotel, and the general strutted to and fro, waiting for his coffee and telling everybody what ter rible things he was going to do to the enemy. But complication arose. Per- ez had not been a. general long, but he had acquired luxurious tastes. He wanted milk in his coffee, whereas nine Colombians out of ten are content with black coffee There was no milk. The cows are kept three or four hour s journey out of town, and, of course, milk cannot be kept over night in that tropical climate. The hotel folk figured that the milk could not arrive before Il o'clock.
 "The general fumed and fretted Some of his officers suggested that he would better start without the milk or the enemy would escape, but he said it was impossible to fight on black cof- fee, He sent a soldier post haste to fetch the milk, and then another after him to hurry him up. Meanwhile, the army stood in the broiling sun for hours, awaiting the order to march. It was nearly noon when the messenger returned. No milk, they reported 'Caramba. Then I won't march till to- morrow
 And the general dismissed his men and would not go until next morning, after his cafe au lait. Of course, when he reached his destination the Liberals had flown, and he was deprived of his glorious victory by a miserable spoonful of milk.
 'Two-tfirds of the women in Colom-
  erals. They bought millions of car tridges from the starving government soldies for loaves of bread, chocolate balls, fruit and other food. There was a regular tariff, and the children gen. erally carried the deal through. Every day their mother sent them to the barracks and other places where the soldiers congregated. For one car fridge they gave a small loaf of bread or a ball of chocolate; for a Mauser packet of five they had, of course, to pay higher. In the evening an officer would ask his men why their cartridge belts were empty. Of Course, they feigned ignorance and supposed they must have slipped out of the badly made belts and got lost. This seemed feasible, because the parade ground was always filtered with cartridges lost in that manner while the men drilled. But after some months the officers grasped the truth, and thereafter never allowed their men to carry cartridges except when they were actually going into battle.
 "The poor soldiers would have sold their souls, very often, for a square meal, let alone their cartridges. Their daily pay, when they got it, was only from 80 cents to Sl.20, Colombian pa- per money, which was at that time equivalent to or 12 cents in American gold. They had to feed themselves, and it cost them from 20 to 60 cents (gold) to keep body and soul together. No wonder they were glad to make some thing on the side! The policemen were paid S90 month, paper money equal to $9 in gold The breakfast of common person cost $14 (paper). Meat cost $9 in gold pound. In consequence they lived on what they could steal or extort from their unhappy prisoners.
 "When the war broke out in 1899 l tried to continue my collecting of nat ural history specimens. The country side was everywhere dotted with pick cts and small bodies of troops. When 1 shot a specimen in a wood or swamp l would hear the crack of Mauser the next moment, and bullet would whiz past my head. Then couple of sold iers would dash through the brush and say that they thought I was an enemy, and that I must please excuse them. This kind of thing happened several times, and a bullet wound in my leg is a memento of one occasion. At last it grew wearing, even to an ardent nat uralist, and I went out armed only with butterfly net, But when they saw the green net waving in the woods some government soldiers arrested me on the charge of signalling to the revolution- ists. So I gave up my collecting and started drug business in Cali, where lived until September of the present year, when I returned to the United States.
 Foreigners in Colombia have suffer- ed terribly and will suffer in the fu- ture. through the backing which Amer ica has given to the Panama Republic, It will take months to find out what has happened to them in the remote parts of the interior. It may never De found out, but from my knowledge of the Colonbians I believe that Ameri- cans and other foreigners have been