Having accomplished his duty as Assistant Secretary—a post which he felt was primarily for a civilian—he thought that he had a right to retire from it, and to gratify his long-cherished desire to take part in the actual warfare. He did not wish, he said, to have to give some excuse to his children for not having fought in the war. As he had insisted that we ought to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny and cruelty, he could not consistently refuse to join actively in the liberation. A man who teaches the duty of fighting should pay with his body when the fighting comes.
General Alger, the Secretary of War, had a great liking for Roosevelt, offered him a commission in the Army, and even the command of a regiment. This he prudently declined, having no technical military knowledge. He proposed instead, that Dr. Leonard Wood should be made Colonel, and that he should serve under Wood as Lieutenant-Colonel. By profession, Wood was a physician, who had graduated at the Harvard Medical School, and then had been a contract surgeon with the American Army on the plains. In this service he went through the roughest kind of campaigning and, being ambitious, and having an instinct for military science, he studied the manuals and learned from them and through actual practice the principles of war. In this way he became competent to lead troops. He was about two years younger than Roosevelt, with an iron frame, great tenacity and endurance, a man of few words, but of clear sight and quick decision.
While Roosevelt finished his business at the Navy Department, Colonel Wood hurried to San Antonio, Texas, the rendezvous of the First Regiment of Volunteer Cavalry. A call for volunteers, issued by Roosevelt and endorsed by Secretary Alger, spread through the West and Southwest, and it met with a quick response. Not even in Garibaldi's famous Thousand was such a strange crowd gathered. It comprised cow-punchers, ranchmen, hunters, professional gamblers and rascals of the Border, sports men, mingled with the society sports, former football players and oarsmen, polo-players and lovers of adventure from the great Eastern cities. They all had one quality in common—courage—and they were all bound together by one common bond, devotion to Theodore Roosevelt. Nearly every one of them knew him personally; some of the Western men had hunted or ranched with him; some of the Eastern had been with him in college, or had had contact with him in one of the many vicissitudes of his career. It was a remarkable spectacle, this flocking to a man not yet forty years old, whose chief work up to that time had been in the supposed commonplace position of a Civil Service Commissioner and of a New York Police Commissioner! But Roosevelt's name was already known throughout the country: it excited great admiration in many, grave doubts in many, and curiosity in all. His friends urged him not to go. It seemed to some of us almost wantonly reckless that he should put his life, which had been so valuable and evidently held the promise of still higher achievement, at the risk of a Spanish bullet, or of yellow fever in Cuba, for the sake of a cause which did not concern the safety of his country. But he never considered risks or chances. He felt it as a duty that we must free Cuba, and that every one who recognized this duty should do his share in performing it. No doubt the excitement and the noble side of our war attracted him. No doubt, also, that he remembered that the reputation of a successful soldier had often proved a ladder to political promotion in our Republic. Every reader of our history, though he were the dullest, understood that. But that was not the chief reason, or even an important one, in shaping his decision. He went to San Antonio in May, and worked without respite in learning the rudiments of war and in teaching them to his motley volunteers, who were already called by the public, and will be known in history, as the "Rough Riders." He felt relieved when "Teddy's Terrors," one of the nicknames proposed, did not stick to them. At the end of the month the regiment proceeded to Tampa, Florida, whence part of it sailed for Cuba on the transport Yucatan. It sufficiently indicates the state of chaos which then reigned in our Army preparations, that half the regiment and all the horses and mules were left behind. Arrived in Cuba,, the first troops, accustomed only to the saddle, had to hobble along as best they could, on foot, so that some wag rechristened them " Wood's Weary Walkers." The rest of the regiment, with the mounts, came a little later, and at Las Guasimas they had their first skirmish with the Spaniards. Eight of them were killed, and they were buried in one grave. Afterward, in writing the history of the Rough Riders, Roosevelt said: "There could be no more honorable burial than that of these men in a common grave—Indian and cowboy, miner, packer, and college athlete—the man of unknown ancestry from the lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the crests of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes, one in the way they had met death, just as during life they had been one in their daring and their loyalty." *
* The Rough Riders, 120.
I shall not attempt to follow in detail the story of the Rough Riders, but shall touch only on those matters which refer to Roosevelt himself. Wood, having been promoted to Brigadier-General, in command of a larger unit, Theodore became Colonel of the regiment. On July 1 and 2 he commanded the Rough Riders in their attack on and capture of San Juan Hill, in connection with some colored troops. In this engagement, their nearest approach to a battle, the Rough Riders, who had less than five hundred men in action, lost eighty-nine in killed and wounded. Then followed a dreary life in the trenches until Santiago surrendered; and then a still more terrible experience while they waited for Spain to give up the war. Under a killing tropical sun, receiving irregular and often damaged food, without tent or other protection from the heat or from the rain, the Rough Riders endured for weeks the ravages of fever, climate, and privation. To realize that their sufferings were directly owing to the blunders and incompetence of the War Department at home, brought no consolation, for the soldiers could see no reason why the Department should not go on blundering indefinitely. One of the Rough Riders told me that, when stricken with fever, he lay for days on the beach, and that anchored within the distance a tennis-ball could be thrown was a steamer loaded with medicines, but that no orders were given to bring them ashore!
The Rough Riders were hard hit by disease, but not harder than the other regiments in the Army. Every one of their officers, except the Colonel and another, had yellow fever, and at one time more than half of the regiment was sick. A terrible depression weighed them down. They almost despaired, not only of being relieved, but of living. To face the entire Spanish Army would have been a great joy, compared with this sinking, melting away, against the invisible fever.
The Administration at Washington, however, although it knew the condition of the Army in Cuba, seemed indifferent rather than anxious, and talked about moving the troops into the interior, to the high ground round San Luis. Thereupon, Roosevelt wrote to General Shafter, his commanding officer:
To keep us here, in the opinion of every officer commanding a division or a brigade, will simply involve the destruction of thousands. There is no possible reason for not shipping practically the entire command North at once ….
All of us are certain, as soon as the authorities at Washington fully appreciate the conditions of the army, to be sent home. If we are kept here it will in all human probability mean an appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.
This is not only terrible from the standpoint of the individual lives lost, but it means ruin from the standpoint of military efficiency of the flower of the American Army, for the great bulk of the regulars are here with you. The sick-list, large though it is, exceeding four thousand, affords but a faint index of the debilitation of the army. Not ten per cent are fit for active work.