r actions. People anxious.

To which the following reply is returned:

  Dispatch received. Lesser's force attending wounded here constantly
  coming in. Elwell and force landing supplies in the surf at night,
  without dock, under great difficulties and dangers. An urgent appeal
  from the front for medicines and food. None there. Will try to get
  two four-mule wagons full to them to-night and go ourselves. Have
  reported all we could. No telegraph here till to-day. No dispatch
  boats. No post-office. We also anxious.

July 3 opened clear and bright, the commencement of a hard and busy day,
to be long remembered. Our shippers had been landing supplies all night
and keeping such guard over them on the sandy beach as was possible.

The daily record of our movements kept always up and open, like the log
of the ship, must now fall to the hands of our faithful stenographer,
Miss Lucy Graves, and taking up her duties bravely that day, she
commences with this paragraph:

"Miss Barton, with Dr. and Mrs. Gardner, Dr. Hubbell and Mr. McDowell,
leave for the front to-day, taking two six-mule wagon loads of hospital
supplies." To the young writer it was a simple note in the records of
the day, having no special significance. As my eye glanced over it it
seemed very strange--passing strange, that after all this more than a
quarter of a century I should be again taking supplies to the front of
an army in the United States of America; that after all these years of
Red Cross instruction and endeavor, it was still necessary to
promiscuously seize an army wagon to get food to wounded men.

I hope in some way it may be made apparent to any one who follows these
notes how difficult a thing it was to get this food from our ship to the
shore. In a surf which after ten o'clock in the morning allowed no small
boat to touch even the bit of a pier that was run out without breaking
either the one or the other, and nothing in the form of a lighter save
two dilapidated flat boat scows which had been broken and cast away by
the engineer c