Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography

by Theodore Roosevelt

I suppose every man tends to brag about his regiment; but it does seem to me that there never was a regiment better worth bragging about than ours. Wood was an exceptional commander, of great power, with a remarkable gift for organization. The rank and file were as fine natural fighting men as ever carried a rifle or rode a horse in any country or any age. We had a number of first-class young fellows from the East, most of them from colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; but the great majority of the men were Southwesterners, from the then territories of Oklahoma, Indian Territory, Arizona, and New Mexico. They were accustomed to the use of firearms, accustomed to taking care of themselves in the open; they were intelligent and self-reliant; they possessed hardihood and endurance and physical prowess; and, above all, they had the fighting edge, the cool and resolute fighting temper. They went into the war with full knowledge, having deliberately counted the cost. In the great majority of cases each man was chiefly anxious to find out what he should do to make the regiment a success. They bought, first and last, about 800 copies of the cavalry drill regulations and studied them industriously. Such men were practically soldiers to start with, in all the essentials. It is small wonder that with them as material to work upon the regiment was raised, armed, equipped, drilled, sent on trains to Tampa, embarked, disembarked, and put through two victorious offensive—not defensive—fights in which a third of the officers and one-fifth of the men were killed or wounded, all within sixty days. It is a good record, and it speaks well for the men of the regiment; and it speaks well for Wood.[*]

[*] To counterbalance the newspapers which ignorantly and
indiscriminately praised all the volunteers there were
others whose blame was of the same intelligent quality. The
New York Evening Post, on June 18, gave expression to the
following gloomy foreboding: "Competent observers have
remarked that nothing more extraordinary has been done than
the sending to Cuba of the First United States Volunteer
Cavalry, known as the 'rough riders.' Organized but four
weeks, barely given their full complement of officers, and
only a week of regular drill, these men have been sent to
the front before they have learned the first elements of
soldiering and discipline, or have even become acquainted
with their officers. In addition to all this, like the
regular cavalry, they have been sent with only their
carbines and revolvers to meet an enemy armed with long-range
rifles. There have been few cases of such military
cruelty in our military annals." A week or so after this not
wholly happy prophecy was promulgated, the "cruelty" was
consummated, first at Las Guasimas and then in the San Juan
fighting.

Wood was so busy getting the regiment ready that when I reached San Antonio he turned most of the drilling of it over to me. This was a piece of great good fortune for me, and I drilled the men industriously, mounted and unmounted. I had plenty to learn, and the men and the officers even more; but we went at our work with the heartiest good will. We speedily made it evident that there was no room and no mercy for any man who shirked any duty, and we accomplished good results. The fact is that the essentials of drill and work for a cavalry or an infantry regiment are easy to learn, which of course is not true for the artillery or the engineers or for the navy. The reason why it takes so long to turn the average civilized man into a good infantryman or cavalryman is because it takes a long while to teach the average untrained man how to shoot, to ride, to march, to take care of himself in the open, to be alert, resourceful, cool, daring, and resolute, to obey quickly, as well as to be willing, and to fit himself, to act on his own responsibility. If he already possesses these qualities, there is very little difficulty in making him a soldier; all the drill that is necessary to enable him to march and to fight is of a simple character. Parade ground and barrack square maneuvers are of no earthly consequence in real war. When men can readily change from line to column, and column to line, can form front in any direction, and assemble and scatter, and can do these things with speed and precision, they have a fairly good grasp of the essentials. When our regiment reached Tampa it could already be handled creditably at fast gaits, and both in mass and extended formations, mounted and dismounted.

I had served three years in the New York National Guard, finally becoming a captain. This experience was invaluable to me. It enabled me at once to train the men in the simple drill without which they would have been a mob; for although the drill requirements are simple, they are also absolutely indispensable. But if I had believed that my experience in the National Guard had taught me all that there was to teach about a soldier's career, it would have been better for me not to have been in it at all. There were in the regiment a number of men who had served in the National Guard, and a number of others who had served in the Regular Army. Some of these latter had served in the field in the West under campaign conditions, and were accustomed to long marches, privation, risk, and unexpected emergencies. These men were of the utmost benefit to the regiment. They already knew their profession, and could teach and help the others. But if the man had merely served in a National Guard regiment, or in the Regular Army at some post in a civilized country where he learned nothing except what could be picked up on the parade ground, in the barracks, and in practice marches of a few miles along good roads, then it depended purely upon his own good sense whether he had been helped or hurt by the experience. If he realized that he had learned only five per cent of his profession, that there remained ninety-five per cent to accomplish before he would be a good soldier, why, he had profited immensely.

To start with five per cent handicap was a very great advantage; and if the man was really a good man, he could not be overtaken. But if the man thought that he had learned all about the profession of a soldier because he had been in the National Guard or in the Regular Army under the conditions I have described, then he was actually of less use than if he had never had any military experience at all. Such a man was apt to think that nicety of alignment, precision in wheeling, and correctness in the manual of arms were the ends of training and the guarantees of good soldiership, and that from guard mounting to sentry duty everything in war was to be done in accordance with what he had learned in peace. As a matter of fact, most of what he had learned was never used at all, and some of it had to be unlearned. The one thing, for instance, that a sentry ought never to do in an actual campaign is to walk up and down a line where he will be conspicuous. His business is to lie down somewhere off a ridge crest where he can see any one approaching, but where a man approaching cannot see him. As for the ceremonies, during the really hard part of a campaign only the barest essentials are kept.

Almost all of the junior regular officers, and many of the senior regular officers, were fine men. But, through no fault of their own, had been forced to lead lives that fairly paralyzed their efficiency when the strain of modern war came on them. The routine elderly regular officer who knew nothing whatever of modern war was in most respects nearly as worthless as a raw recruit. The positions and commands prescribed in the text-books were made into fetishes by some of these men, and treated as if they were the ends, instead of the not always important means by which the ends were to be achieved. In the Cuban fighting, for instance, it would have been folly for me to have taken my place in the rear of the regiment, the canonical text-book position. My business was to be where I could keep most command over the regiment, and, in a rough-and-tumble, scrambling fight in thick jungle, this had to depend upon the course of events, and usually meant that I had to be at the front. I saw in that fighting more than one elderly regimental commander who unwittingly rendered the only service he could render to his regiment by taking up his proper position several hundred yards in the rear when the fighting began; for then the regiment disappeared in the jungle, and for its good fortune the commanding officer never saw it again until long after the fight was over.

After one Cuban fight a lieutenant-colonel of the regulars, in command of a regiment, who had met with just such an experience and had rejoined us at the front several hours after the close of the fighting, asked me what my men were doing when the fight began. I answered that they were following in trace in column of twos, and that the instant the shooting began I deployed them as skirmishers on both sides of the trail. He answered triumphantly, "You can't deploy men as skirmishers from column formation"; to which I responded, "Well, I did, and, what is more, if any captain had made any difficulty about it, I would have sent him to the rear." My critic was quite correct from the parade ground standpoint. The prescribed orders at that time were to deploy the column first into a line of squads at correct intervals, and then to give an order which, if my memory serves correctly, ran: "As skirmishers, by the right and left flanks, at six yards, take intervals, march." The order I really gave ran more like this: "Scatter out to the right there, quick, you! scatter to the left! look alive, look alive!" And they looked alive, and they scattered, and each took advantage of cover, and forward went the line.

Now I do not wish what I have said to be misunderstood. If ever we have a great war, the bulk of our soldiers will not be men who have had any opportunity to train soul and mind and body so as to meet the iron needs of an actual campaign. Long continued and faithful drill will alone put these men in shape to begin to do their duty, and failure to recognize this on the part of the average man will mean laziness and folly and not the possession of efficiency. Moreover, if men have been trained to believe, for instance, that they can "arbitrate questions of vital interest and national honor," if they have been brought up with flabbiness of moral fiber as well as flabbiness of physique, then there will be need of long and laborious and faithful work to give the needed tone to mind and body. But if the men have in them the right stuff, it is not so very difficult.

At San Antonio we entrained for Tampa. In various sociological books by authors of Continental Europe, there are jeremiads as to the way in which service in the great European armies, with their minute and machine-like efficiency and regularity, tends to dwarf the capacity for individual initiative among the officers and men. There is no such danger for any officer or man of a volunteer organization in America when our country, with playful light-heartedness, has pranced into war without making any preparation for it. I know no larger or finer field for the display of an advanced individualism than that which opened before us as we went from San Antonio to Tampa, camped there, and embarked on a transport for Cuba. Nobody ever had any definite information to give us, and whatever information we unearthed on our own account was usually wrong. Each of us had to show an alert and not overscrupulous self-reliance in order to obtain food for his men, provender for his horses, or transportation of any kind for any object. One lesson early impressed on me was that if I wanted anything to eat it was wise to carry it with me; and if any new war should arise, I would earnestly advise the men of every volunteer organization always to proceed upon the belief that their supplies will not turn up, and to take every opportunity of getting food for themselves.

Tampa was a scene of the wildest confusion. There were miles of tracks loaded with cars of the contents of which nobody seemed to have any definite knowledge. General Miles, who was supposed to have supervision over everything, and General Shafter, who had charge of the expedition, were both there. But, thanks to the fact that nobody had had any experience in handling even such a small force as ours—about 17,000 men—there was no semblance of order. Wood and I were bound that we should not be left behind when the expedition started. When we were finally informed that it was to leave next morning, we were ordered to go to a certain track to meet a train. We went to the track, but the train never came. Then we were sent to another track to meet another train. Again it never came. However, we found a coal train, of which we took possession, and the conductor, partly under duress and partly in a spirit of friendly helpfulness, took us down to the quay.