The ready response to the President's call for volunteers was sufficient to prove that the people were eager to take up arms and ready to go to the front. But enthusiasm, patriotism and readiness never make an army. An army is a great machine, of which each individual is a part, and there even the militia men of the various States, who had spent so much time in preparing themselves for just such a struggle, lacked the one great element without which no army can hope for success: the capacity to move in unison. Few of the States had given their men the training which makes of the simple company or regiment a wheel in the brigade or division.
In the great camps at Chickamauga, at Camp Alger, at Tampa, and at San Francisco the task of making an army from men who a month before had been working in the store, the mill or the field, went on. This meant long, thorough drilling under competent instructors. Careful study of the tactics and intelligent comprehension of the meaning of an order makes the soldier. It is not possible to imagine anything more difficult than the thorough training of the arms bearer, and for this task the American seems better fitted than the men of any other country. In an analysis of the soldiers of the world an authority would place the American, combining as he does the blood of nations, at the head of the list, for the reason that with his finer sensibility, his greater capacity to think while acting and to act while thinking, all tend to produce in him that character capable of high and perfect development in the soldier.
At Chickamauga, under General Wade; at Washington, under General Graham; at Tampa, under General Shafter; at San Francisco, under General Merriam, and on the New York and New England coasts under brigadiers who had served East and West, the raw material was formed, until at length the perfect soldier was produced, the soldier of whom it could be said:
"Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die."
ABOUT THE ROUGH RIDERS.
Those who are acquainted with the nature of the service usually required of cavalry in time of war will not question the usefulness of the cowboy regiment—rough riders as they are called—that were raised in the West to take part in the invasion of Cuba.
The cowboy is a rapidly passing type. Barbed wire, the fencing in of the range, together with the irrigation and cultivation of those regions which were once marked as deserts on the maps—have been responsible for his undoing and he has made what may prove to be his last stand, as a soldier.
The cowboy regiment was the idea of the assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who had had some experience himself as a cowboy on his Wyoming ranch and who was an expert in such matters as branding, rope-throwing, broncho breaking and those other practices which are peculiar to the "cow-puncher."
Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt's regiment, which figures on the army records as the "1st regiment of rifle rangers," but which the general public from the first preferred to call "Roosevelt's rough riders," or more simply still, "Teddy's terrors," was made up almost entirely of cowboys, with a small sprinkling of society men, who had both a fondness and an aptitude for horsemanship, which had found no other outlet than that offered by the hunting field and the polo ground.