“I have done what I could to bring about the war,” he said; “now I have no right to ask others to fight it out while I stay home.”
He resigned to go to the front.
VIII
Roosevelt’s Rough Riders
When America went to war with Germany she was in her typical state of unpreparedness. In spite of her handicaps, the world admits that she did her tremendous job efficiently.
The same state of confusion and unpreparedness existed when America went to war with Spain. The thing that saved the day in both cases was the latent fighting strength of the nation. At the beginning of the Spanish war, just as at the beginning of the war with Germany, the young men thronged the enlistment centers. Regiments and ships were besieged with applicants. Men who had deserted in peace times returned, begging for a chance to fight.
ROOSEVELT AND WOOD
Typical examples of this true American spirit were Theodore Roosevelt and his comrade, Army Surgeon Leonard Wood. Roosevelt saw in Wood a man after his own heart. Wood traced his ancestry back to the “Mayflower”; he was directly descended from Susanna White, whose son, Peregrine White, was the first white child born in New England. Wood was born at Winchester, New Hampshire, on October 9, 1860. His father was Dr. Charles Jewett Wood, who followed the profession of a country doctor. The boy Leonard went to the district school and later attended an old-fashioned academy at Middleboro.
Upon the death of his father in 1880, Wood entered the Harvard Medical School. When he graduated he became an intern at the Boston City Hospital. At twenty-four he began the practice of medicine in Staniford Street, Boston. He was located in a poor neighborhood and had all he could do to make ends meet.