Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/497

Rh

who were in sympathy with insurrection, produced the necessary food. It was then that General Weyler conceived the brilliant idea of destroying the peasant farmers to prevent their giving aid and comfort to the insurrectionists. This he hoped to effect by the issuing of his famous "reconcentrado order," whose terms compelled the old men, women and children to leave their homes and come within the nearest Spanish fortified lines, pains being taken after they were driven from their little farms to burn their houses, tear up their plant beds, and drive off and confiscate the few cattle, hogs and chickens that they were obliged to leave.

The United States was naturally shocked at the brutality of this order and saw, with great indignation, some 400,000 of these poor innocent war victims forced away from where they could subsist, to the Spanish lines where they could obtain nothing and within which nothing was tendered. As a consequence, over 200,000 (principally women and children and non-combatants) died from starvation and starvation alone. History presents nowhere such an appalling record; nor do the military annals anywhere furnish such a horrible spectacle, the result of a military order, based upon a supposed military necessity.

General Weyler, if anything, is a soldier, trained to no other career, and one who believes that everything is fair in war and every means justifiable which will ultimately write success upon his standards. He did