August 19, 2025 • 24 mins
Join Theodore Roosevelt as he recounts his thrilling experiences with The Rough Riders, the legendary 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry formed in 1898 for the Spanish-American War. As Lt. Colonel and second-in-command, Roosevelt vividly portrays the brave men and their spirited horses, the challenges they faced, and the fierce battles they fought in Cuba. He paints a picture of soldiers forged from the rugged wilderness, accustomed to the wild and the unpredictable. With a passion for adventure and an eagerness for action, these “grim hunters of the mountains” were ready to face any foe. Roosevelt’s account is a stirring tribute to their courage and camaraderie, making it a compelling listen for history enthusiasts.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section eleven of The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by William Peck,
Chapter six, Part one, the return Home. Two or three
days after the surrender, the Cavalry Division was marched back
to the foothills west of Alcaney, and there went into
(00:22):
camp together with the Autoi. It was a most beautiful
spot beside a stream of clear water, but it was
not healthy. In fact, no ground in the neighborhood was
healthy for the tropics. The climate was not bad, and
I have no question but that a man who was
able to take good care of himself could live there
all year round with comparative impunity. But the case was
(00:44):
entirely different with an army which was obliged to suffer
great exposure and to live under conditions which almost ensure
being attacked by the severe malarial fever of the country.
My own men were already suffering badly from fever, and
they got worse rather than better in the new camp.
The same was true of the other regiments in the
Cavalry Division. A curious feature was that the coward troops
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seemed to suffer as heavily as the White. From week
to week there were slight relative changes, but on the
average all the six cavalry regiments, the rough Riders, the
White Regulars, and the Coward Regulars seemed to suffer about alike,
and we were all very much weakened, about as much
as the regular infantry, although naturally not as much as
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the volunteer infantry. Yet even under such circumstances, adventurous spirits
managed to make their way out to us. In the
fortnight following this last bombardment of the city, I enlisted
no less than nine such recruits, six being from Harvard, Yale,
or Princeton, and Bull, the former Harvard or who had
been back to the States crippled after the first fight,
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actually got back to us as a stowaway on one
of the transports, bound to share the luck of the
regiment even if it met yellow fever. There were but
twelve ambulances with the army, and these were quite inadequate
for their work. But the conditions in the large field
hospitals were so bad that as long as possible, we
kept all our sick men in the regimental hospital at
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the front. Doctor Church did splendid work, although he himself
was suffering much more than half the time from fever.
Several of the men from the ranks did equally well,
especially a young doctor from New York, Harry Thorpe, who
had enlisted as a trooper but who was now made
acting assistant surgeon. It was with the greatest difficulty that
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Church and Thorpe were able to get proper medicine for
the sick, and it was almost the last day of
our stay before we were able to get cots for them.
Up to that time they lay on the ground. No
food was issued suitable for them or for the half
sick men who were not on the doctor's list. The
two classes by this time included the bulk of the command.
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Occasionally we got hold of a wagon or some Cuban carts,
and at other times I used my improvised pack train
the animals at which however, were continually being taken away
from us by our superiors, and went or sent back
to the sea coast at Sibony or in Santiago itself
to get rice, flour, corn meal, oatmeal, condensed milk, potatoes,
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and canned vegetables. The rice I brought in Santiago, the
best of the other stuff I got from the Red
Cross through mister George Kennon and Miss Clara Barton and
doctor Lesser, but some of it I got from our
own transports. Colonel Weston, the Commissary General, as always rendered
us every service in his power. This additional and varied
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food was of the utmost service, not merely to the sick,
but in preventing the well from becoming sick. Throughout the campaign,
the Division Inspector General, Lieutenant Colonel Garlington, and Lieutenant's west
End Dickman, the acting Division Quartermaster and Commissary, had done
everything in their power to keep us supplied with food.
But where there were so few mules and wagons, even
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such able and zealous officers could not do them possible.
We had the camp police thoroughly, and I made the
men build little bunks of poles to sleep on. By
July twenty third, we had been ashore a month. We
were able to get fresh meat, and from that time
on we fared well, but the men were already sickening.
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The chief trouble was the malarial fever, which was recurrent
for a few days. The man would be very sick, indeed,
then he would partially recover and be able to go
back to work, but after a little time he would
be again struck down. Every officer other than myself except one,
was down with sickness at one time or another. Even
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Greenway and Goodrich succumbed to the fever and were knocked
out for a few days. Very few of the men
indeed retained their strength and energy, and though the percentage
actually on the sick list never got over twenty, there
were less than fifty percent who were fit for any
kind of work. All the clothes were in rags. Even
the officers had neither socks nor underwear. College athletes had
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lost their spring. The tall, gaunt hunters and cowpunchers lounged
listlessly in their dog tents, which were steaming morasses during
the torrential rains, and then ovens when the sun blazed down,
but there were no complaints. Through some blunder our march
from the entrenchments to the camp on the foothills after
the surrender was made during the heat of the day,
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and though it was only some five miles or thereabouts,
very nearly half the men of the Cavalry Division dropped out.
Captain Llewellyn had come back and led his troop. On
the march, he carried a pick and shovel for one
of his sick men, and after we reached camp, walked
back with a mule to get another trooper who had
fallen out from heat exhaustion. The result was that the
captain himself went down and became exceedingly sick. We at
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last succeeded in sending him to the States. I never
thought he would live, but he did, and when I
met him again at Montauk Point, he had practically entirely recovered.
My orderly Henry Barchar was down, and though he ultimately recovered,
he was a mere skeleton, having lost over eighty pounds.
Yellow fever also broke out in the rear, chiefly among
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the Cubans. It never became epidemic, but it caused a
perfect panic among some of our own doctors, and especially
in the minds of one or two generals and of
the home authorities. We found that whenever we sent a
man to the rear, he was decreed to have yellow fever,
whereas if we kept them at the front, it always
turned out that he had malarial fever, and after a
few days he was back at work again. I doubt
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if there were ever more than a dozen genuine cases
of yellow fever in the whole cavalry division. But the
authorities at Washington, misled by the reports they received from
one or two of their military and medical advisers at
the front, became panic struck, and under the influence of
their fears, hesitated to bring the army home lest it
might import yellow fever into the United States. Their panic
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was absolutely groundless, as shown by the fact that when
brought home, not a single case of yellow fever developed
upon American soloh Our real foe was not yellow fever
at all, but malarial fever, which was not infectious, but
which was certain if the troops were left throughout the
summer in Cuba, to destroy them, either killing them outright
or weakening them so that they would have fallen victims
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to any disease that attacked them. However, for a time,
our prospects were gloomy, as the Washington authorities seemed determined
that we should stay in Cuba. They unfortunately knew nothing
of the country, nor of the circumstances of the army,
and the plans that were there from time to time
formulated in the Department and even by an occasional general
or surgeon at the front, for the management of the
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army would have been comic if they had not possessed
such tragic possibilities. Thus, at one period it was proposed
that we should shift camp every two or three days. Now,
our transportation, as I have pointed out before, was utterly inadequate.
In theory, under the regulations of the War Department, each
regiment should have had at least twenty five wagons. As
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a matter of fact, our regiment often had none, sometimes one,
rarely two, and never three. Yet it was better off
than any other in the cavalry division. In consequence, it
was impossible to carry much of anything save what the
men had on their backs, and half of the men
were too weak to walk three miles with their packs.
Whenever we shifted camp. The exertion among the half sick
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caused our sick roll to double next morning, and it
took at least three days even when the shift was
for but a short distance before we were able to
bring up the officer's luggage, the hospital spare of food,
the ammunition, and so forth. Meanwhile, the officers slept wherever
they could, and those men who had not been able
to carry their own bedding slept as the officers did.
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In the weak condition of the men, the labor of
pitching camp was severe and told heavily upon them. In short,
the scheme of continually shifting camp was impossible. With fulfillment,
it would merely have resulted in the early destruction of
the army. Again proposed that we should go up the
mountains and make our camps there. The palm in the
bamboo grew to the summits of the mountains, and the
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soil along their sides was deep and soft, while the
rains were very heavy, much more so than immediately on
the coasts, every mile or two inland, bringing with it
a great increase in the rainfall. We could, with much
difficulty have got our regiments up the mountains, but not
half the men could have got up with their belongings,
and once there it would have been an impossibility to
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feed them. It was all that could be done with
the limited number of wagons and mule trains on hand
to feed the men in the existing camps, where the
travel and rain gradually rendered each road in succession wholly impassable.
To have gone up the mountains would have meant early starvation.
The third plan of the department was even more objectionable
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than either of the others. There was some twenty five
miles in the interior what was called a high interior plateau,
and at one period we were informed that we were
to be marched thither. As a matter of fact, this
so called high plateau was the sugar cane country, where
during the summer the rainfall was prodigious. It was a rich,
deep soil covered with a rank tropic growth, the guinea
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grass being higher than the head of a man on horseback.
It was a perfect hotbed of malaria, and there was
no dry ground whatever in which to camp. To have
sent the troops there would have been simple butchery. Under
these circumstances. The alternative to leaving the country altogether was
to stay where we were, with the hope that half
the men would live through the cool season. We did
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everything possible to keep up the spirits of the men,
but it was exceedingly difficult because there was nothing for
them to do. They were weak and languid, and in
the wet heat they had lost energy, so that it
was not possible for them to indulge in sports or pastimes.
There were exceptions, but the average man who went off
to shoot guinea hens or tried some vigorous game, always
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felt much the worse for his exertions. Once or twice
I took some of my comrades with me and climbed
up one or another of the surrounding mountains, but the
result generally was that half of the party were down
with some kind of sickness. Next day. It was impossible
to take a heavy exercise in the heat of the day.
The evening usually saw a rainstorm, which made the country
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a quagmire, and in the early morning the drenching dew
and wet, slimy soil made walking but little pleasure. Chaplin
Brown held service every Sunday under a low tree outside
my tent, and we always had a congregation of a
few score troopers lying or sitting round, their strong, hard
faces turned toward the preacher. I let a few of
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the men visit Santiago, but the long walk in and
out was very tiring, and moreover, wise restrictions had been
put as to either officers or men coming in. In
any event, there was very little to do in the quaint,
dirty old Spanish city, though it was interesting to go
in once or twice, and wander through the narrow streets
with their curious little shops and low houses of stained stucco,
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with elaborately wrought iron trellises to the windows and curiously
carved balconies, Or to sit in the central plaza where
the cathedral was, and the clubs and the cafe venues,
and a low, bare rambling building which was called the
Governor's Palace. In this palace, Wood had now been established
as military governor, and Luna and two or three of
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my other officers from the Mexican border who knew Spanish
were sent in to do duty under him. A great
many of my men knew Spanish, and some of the
new Mexicans were of Spanish origin. Although they behaved precisely
like the other members of the regiment, we should probably
have spent the summer in our sick camps, losing half
the men and hopelessly shattering the health of the remainder
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if General Shafter had not summoned a council of officers,
hoping by united action of a more or less public character,
to wake up the Washington authorities to the actual conditions
of things. As all the Spanish forces in the province
of Santiago had surrendered, and as so called immune regiments
were coming to garrison the conquered territory there were There's
literally not one thing of any kind whatsoever for the
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army to do, and no purpose to serve by keeping
it at Santiago. We did not suppose that peace was
at hand, being ignorant of the negotiations. We were anxious
to take part in the Puerto Rico campaign, and would
have been more than willing to suffer any amount of
sickness if by so doing we could get into action.
But if we were not to take part in the
Puerto Rico campaign, then we knew it was absolutely indispensable
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to get our commands north immediately if they were to
be in trim for the great campaign against Havana, which
would surely be the main event of the winner. If
peace were not declared in advance. Our army included the
great majority of the regulars, and was therefore the flower
of the American force. It was on every account imperative
to keep it in good trim, and to keep it
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in Santiago meant its entirely purposeless destruction. As soon as
the surrender was an accomplished fact that taking away of
the army to the north should have begun. Every officer,
from the highest to the especially among the regulars, realized
all of this, and about the last day of July,
General Shafter called a conference in the palace of all
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the division and brigade commanders. By this time, owing to
Woods having been made governor General, I was in command
of my brigade, so I went to the conference, too,
riding in with Generals Sumner and Wheeler, who were the
other representatives of the Cavalry Division. Besides the line officers,
all the chief medical officers were present at the conference.
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The telegrams from the Secretary stating the position of himself
and the Surgeon General were read, and then almost every
line and medical officer present expressed his views in turn.
They were almost all regulars, and had been brought up
to lifelong habits of obedience without protests. They were ready
to obey still, but they felt quite rightly that it
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was their duty to protest, rather than to see the
flower of the United States forces destroyed, as the culminating
act of a campaign in which the blunders that had
been committed had been retrieved only by de vour and
splendid soldierly qualities of the officers and enlisted men of
the infantry and dismounted cavalry. There was not a dissenting
voice where there could not be. There was not but
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one side to the question. To talk of continually shifting camp,
or of moving up the mountains, or of moving into
the interior was idle. But not one of the plans
could be carried out with our utterly insufficient transportation, and
at that season and in that climate, they would merely
have resulted in aggravating the sickliness of the soldiers. It
was deemed best to make some record of our opinion
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in the shape of a letter or report, which would
showed that to keep the army in Santiago meant its
absolute and objectless ruin, and that it should at once
be recalled. At first, there was naturally some hesitation on
the part of the regular officers to take the initiative
where their entire future career might be sacrificed. So I
wrote a letter to General shafter reading over a rough
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draft to the various generals and adopting their corrections. Before
I had finished making these corrections, it was determined that
we should send a circular letter on behalf of all
of us to General Shafter. And when I returned from
presenting him mine, I found this circular letter already prepared,
and we all assigned it. Both letters were made public.
The result was immediate. Within three days, the army was
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ordered to be ready to sail for home. As soon
as it was known that we were to sail for home,
the spirits of the men changed for the better. In
my regiment, the officers began the plan methods of drilling
the men on horseback so as to fit them for
use against the Spanish cavalry if we should go against
Havana in December. We had all of us eyed the
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captured Spanish cavalry with particular interests. The men were small,
and the horses, though well trained and well built, were
diminutive ponies, very much smaller than cow ponies. We were
certain that if we ever got a chance to try
shock tactics against them, they would go down like nine pins,
provided only that our men could be trained to charge
in any kind of line. And we made up our
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minds to devote our time to this dismounted work. With
the we already felt thoroughly competent to perform. My time
was still much occupied with looking after the health of
my brigade. But the fact that we were going home,
where I knew that their health would improve, lighten my mind,
and I was able thoroughly to enjoy the beauty of
the country, and even of the storms, which hitherto I
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had regarded purely as enemies. The surroundings of the city
of Santiago are very grand. The circling mountains rise sheer
and high. The plains are threaded by rapid winding brooks,
and are dotted here and there with quaint villages, curiously
picturesque from their combining traces of an outworn old world
civilization with new and raw barbarism. The tall, graceful, feathery
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bamboos rise by the water's edge and elsewhere, even on
the mountain crest, where the soil is wet and rank enough,
and the splendid royal palms and coconut palms tower high
above the matted green jungle. Generally the thunderstorms came in
the afternoon, but once I saw one at sunrise, driving
down the high mountain valleys toward us, it was a
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very beautiful and almost terrible sight, where the sun rose
behind the storm and shone through the gusty rifts, lighting
the mountain crest here and there, while the plain below
lay shrouded in the lingering night. The angry level rays
edged the dark clouds with crimson and turned the downpour
into sheets of golden rain. In the valleys, the glimmering
mists were tinted every wild hue, and the remotest heavens
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were lit with flaming glory. One day General Lawton, General
Wood and I, with Ferguson and poor Tiffany, went down
the bay to visit Morral Castle. The shores were beautiful,
especially where there were groves of palms and of the
scarlet flower tree, and the castle itself, on a jutting headland,
overlooking the sea and guarding the deep, narrow entrance to
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the bay, showed just what it was, the splendid relic
of a vanished power and a vanished age. We wandered
all through it, among the castlated battlements and in the dungeons,
where we found hideous, rusty empl comments of torture, and
looked at the guns, some modern and some very old.
It had been little hurt by the bombardment of the ships. Afterward,
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I had a swim, not trusting much to the shark stories.
We passed by the sunken hawks of the Merrimack and
the Arena Mercedes, lying just outside the main channel. Our
own people had tried to sink the first, and the
Spaniards had tried to sink the second so as to
block the entrance. Neither attempt was successful. On August six,
we were ordered to embark, and next morning we sailed
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on the transport Miami. General Wheeler was with us and
a squadron of the third Cavalry under Major Jackson. The
General put the policing and management of the ship into
my hands, and I had great aid from Captain McCormick,
who had been acting with me as Adjutant general of
the brigade. I had profited by my experience coming down,
and as doctor Church knew his work well. Although he
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was very sick, we kept the ship in such good
sanitary condition that we were one of the very few
organizations allowed to land at Montauk immediately upon our arrival.
Soon after leaving the port, the captain of the ship
notified me that his stokers and engineers were insubordinate and drunken,
due he thought to liquor which my men had given them.
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I at once started a search of the ship, explaining
to the men that they could not keep the liquor,
that if they surrendered whatever they had to me, I
should return it to them when we went ashore, and
that meanwhile I would allow us sick to drink when
they really needed it, but that if they did not
give the liquor to me of their own accord, I
would throw it overboard. About seventy flasts and bottles were
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handed to me, and I found and threw overboard about twenty.
This at once put a stop to all drunkenness. The
stokers and engineers were sawing and half mutinous, so I
sent a detail of my men down to watch them
and see that they did their work under the orders
of the chief engineer, and we reduced them to obedience.
In short order, I could easily have drawn from the
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regiment's sufficient skilled men to fill every position in the
entire ship's crew, from captain to stoker. We were very
much crowded on board the ship, but rather better off
than on the Yucatan, so far as the men were concerned,
which was the important point. All the officers except General
Wheeler slept in a kind of improvised shed, not unlike
a chicken coop, with bunks on the aftermost part of
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the upper deck. The water was bad, some of it
very bad. There was no ice. The can beef proved
practically uneatable, as we knew would be the case. There
were not enough vegetables, we did not have enough disinfectants,
and there was no provision whatever for a hospital or
for isolating the sick. We simply put them on one
portion of one deck. If, as so many of the
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high authorities had insisted, there had really been a yellow
fever epidemic, and if it had broken out on shipboard,
the condition would have been frightful. But there was no
yellow fever epidemic. Three of our men had been kept
behind us suspects, all three suffering simply from malarial fever.
One of them, Lutz, a particularly good soldier, died, another
who was simply a malingerer and had nothing the matter
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with him, whatever, of course, recovered. The third was Tiffany,
who I believe would have lived had we been allowed
to take him with us, but who was sent home
later and died soon after landing, I was very anxious
to keep the men of muse and as the quarters
were so crowded that it was out of the question
for them to have any physical exercise, I did not
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interfere with their playing games of chance, so long as
no disorder followed. On shore this was not allowed. But
in the particular emergency which we were meeting, the loss
of a month salary was as nothing compared to keeping
the men thoroughly interested and diverted. By care and diligence,
we succeeded in preventing any serious sickness. One man died, however,
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he had been suffering from dysentery ever since we landed,
owing purely to his own fault, for on the very
first night ashore he obtained a lot of fiery liquor
from some of the Cubans, got very drunk, and had
the march next day through the hot sun before he
was entirely sober. He never recovered and was useless from
that time on On board ship, he died, and we
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gave him a sea burial. Wrapped in a hammock. He
was placed opposite a port and the American flag thrown
over him. The engine was stilled, and the great ship
rocked on the waves, unshaken by the screw, while the
war worn troopers clustered around with bare heads to listen
to Chaplain Brown read the funeral service, and to the
band of the Third Cavalry as it played the funeral dirge.
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Then the port was knocked free, the flag withdrawn, and
the shotted hammock plunged heavily over the side, rushing down
through the dark water to lie till the judgment day
in the ooze that holds timbers of so many gallant
ships and the bones of so many fearless adventures. We
were favored by good weather during our nine days voyage,
and much of the time when there was little to do,
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we simply sat together and talked, each man contributing from
the fund of his own experiences. Voyages around Cape horn,
yacht races for the America's Cup, experiences on football teams
which are famous in the annals of college sport, serious
feats of desperate prowess in Indian fighting and in breaking
up gangs of white outlaws, adventures in hunting big game,
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in breaking wild horses, intending great herds of cattle, and
in wandering winter and summer among the mountains and across
the lonely plains. The men who told the tales could
draw upon countless memories, such as these are the things
they had done, and the things they had seen others do.
Sometimes General Wheeler joined us and told us about the
great war, compared with which ours was such a small war,
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far reaching in their importance, though its effects were destined
to be. When we had become convinced that we would
escape an epidemic of sickness, the homeward voyage became very pleasant.
End of Chapter six, Part one
Section eleven of The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by William Peck,
Chapter six, Part one, the return Home. Two or three
days after the surrender, the Cavalry Division was marched back
to the foothills west of Alcaney, and there went into
(00:22):
camp together with the Autoi. It was a most beautiful
spot beside a stream of clear water, but it was
not healthy. In fact, no ground in the neighborhood was
healthy for the tropics. The climate was not bad, and
I have no question but that a man who was
able to take good care of himself could live there
all year round with comparative impunity. But the case was
(00:44):
entirely different with an army which was obliged to suffer
great exposure and to live under conditions which almost ensure
being attacked by the severe malarial fever of the country.
My own men were already suffering badly from fever, and
they got worse rather than better in the new camp.
The same was true of the other regiments in the
Cavalry Division. A curious feature was that the coward troops
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seemed to suffer as heavily as the White. From week
to week there were slight relative changes, but on the
average all the six cavalry regiments, the rough Riders, the
White Regulars, and the Coward Regulars seemed to suffer about alike,
and we were all very much weakened, about as much
as the regular infantry, although naturally not as much as
(01:28):
the volunteer infantry. Yet even under such circumstances, adventurous spirits
managed to make their way out to us. In the
fortnight following this last bombardment of the city, I enlisted
no less than nine such recruits, six being from Harvard, Yale,
or Princeton, and Bull, the former Harvard or who had
been back to the States crippled after the first fight,
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actually got back to us as a stowaway on one
of the transports, bound to share the luck of the
regiment even if it met yellow fever. There were but
twelve ambulances with the army, and these were quite inadequate
for their work. But the conditions in the large field
hospitals were so bad that as long as possible, we
kept all our sick men in the regimental hospital at
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the front. Doctor Church did splendid work, although he himself
was suffering much more than half the time from fever.
Several of the men from the ranks did equally well,
especially a young doctor from New York, Harry Thorpe, who
had enlisted as a trooper but who was now made
acting assistant surgeon. It was with the greatest difficulty that
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Church and Thorpe were able to get proper medicine for
the sick, and it was almost the last day of
our stay before we were able to get cots for them.
Up to that time they lay on the ground. No
food was issued suitable for them or for the half
sick men who were not on the doctor's list. The
two classes by this time included the bulk of the command.
(02:53):
Occasionally we got hold of a wagon or some Cuban carts,
and at other times I used my improvised pack train
the animals at which however, were continually being taken away
from us by our superiors, and went or sent back
to the sea coast at Sibony or in Santiago itself
to get rice, flour, corn meal, oatmeal, condensed milk, potatoes,
(03:14):
and canned vegetables. The rice I brought in Santiago, the
best of the other stuff I got from the Red
Cross through mister George Kennon and Miss Clara Barton and
doctor Lesser, but some of it I got from our
own transports. Colonel Weston, the Commissary General, as always rendered
us every service in his power. This additional and varied
(03:34):
food was of the utmost service, not merely to the sick,
but in preventing the well from becoming sick. Throughout the campaign,
the Division Inspector General, Lieutenant Colonel Garlington, and Lieutenant's west
End Dickman, the acting Division Quartermaster and Commissary, had done
everything in their power to keep us supplied with food.
But where there were so few mules and wagons, even
(03:57):
such able and zealous officers could not do them possible.
We had the camp police thoroughly, and I made the
men build little bunks of poles to sleep on. By
July twenty third, we had been ashore a month. We
were able to get fresh meat, and from that time
on we fared well, but the men were already sickening.
(04:17):
The chief trouble was the malarial fever, which was recurrent
for a few days. The man would be very sick, indeed,
then he would partially recover and be able to go
back to work, but after a little time he would
be again struck down. Every officer other than myself except one,
was down with sickness at one time or another. Even
(04:38):
Greenway and Goodrich succumbed to the fever and were knocked
out for a few days. Very few of the men
indeed retained their strength and energy, and though the percentage
actually on the sick list never got over twenty, there
were less than fifty percent who were fit for any
kind of work. All the clothes were in rags. Even
the officers had neither socks nor underwear. College athletes had
(05:01):
lost their spring. The tall, gaunt hunters and cowpunchers lounged
listlessly in their dog tents, which were steaming morasses during
the torrential rains, and then ovens when the sun blazed down,
but there were no complaints. Through some blunder our march
from the entrenchments to the camp on the foothills after
the surrender was made during the heat of the day,
(05:24):
and though it was only some five miles or thereabouts,
very nearly half the men of the Cavalry Division dropped out.
Captain Llewellyn had come back and led his troop. On
the march, he carried a pick and shovel for one
of his sick men, and after we reached camp, walked
back with a mule to get another trooper who had
fallen out from heat exhaustion. The result was that the
captain himself went down and became exceedingly sick. We at
(05:48):
last succeeded in sending him to the States. I never
thought he would live, but he did, and when I
met him again at Montauk Point, he had practically entirely recovered.
My orderly Henry Barchar was down, and though he ultimately recovered,
he was a mere skeleton, having lost over eighty pounds.
Yellow fever also broke out in the rear, chiefly among
(06:09):
the Cubans. It never became epidemic, but it caused a
perfect panic among some of our own doctors, and especially
in the minds of one or two generals and of
the home authorities. We found that whenever we sent a
man to the rear, he was decreed to have yellow fever,
whereas if we kept them at the front, it always
turned out that he had malarial fever, and after a
few days he was back at work again. I doubt
(06:32):
if there were ever more than a dozen genuine cases
of yellow fever in the whole cavalry division. But the
authorities at Washington, misled by the reports they received from
one or two of their military and medical advisers at
the front, became panic struck, and under the influence of
their fears, hesitated to bring the army home lest it
might import yellow fever into the United States. Their panic
(06:53):
was absolutely groundless, as shown by the fact that when
brought home, not a single case of yellow fever developed
upon American soloh Our real foe was not yellow fever
at all, but malarial fever, which was not infectious, but
which was certain if the troops were left throughout the
summer in Cuba, to destroy them, either killing them outright
or weakening them so that they would have fallen victims
(07:15):
to any disease that attacked them. However, for a time,
our prospects were gloomy, as the Washington authorities seemed determined
that we should stay in Cuba. They unfortunately knew nothing
of the country, nor of the circumstances of the army,
and the plans that were there from time to time
formulated in the Department and even by an occasional general
or surgeon at the front, for the management of the
(07:37):
army would have been comic if they had not possessed
such tragic possibilities. Thus, at one period it was proposed
that we should shift camp every two or three days. Now,
our transportation, as I have pointed out before, was utterly inadequate.
In theory, under the regulations of the War Department, each
regiment should have had at least twenty five wagons. As
(08:00):
a matter of fact, our regiment often had none, sometimes one,
rarely two, and never three. Yet it was better off
than any other in the cavalry division. In consequence, it
was impossible to carry much of anything save what the
men had on their backs, and half of the men
were too weak to walk three miles with their packs.
Whenever we shifted camp. The exertion among the half sick
(08:22):
caused our sick roll to double next morning, and it
took at least three days even when the shift was
for but a short distance before we were able to
bring up the officer's luggage, the hospital spare of food,
the ammunition, and so forth. Meanwhile, the officers slept wherever
they could, and those men who had not been able
to carry their own bedding slept as the officers did.
(08:44):
In the weak condition of the men, the labor of
pitching camp was severe and told heavily upon them. In short,
the scheme of continually shifting camp was impossible. With fulfillment,
it would merely have resulted in the early destruction of
the army. Again proposed that we should go up the
mountains and make our camps there. The palm in the
bamboo grew to the summits of the mountains, and the
(09:07):
soil along their sides was deep and soft, while the
rains were very heavy, much more so than immediately on
the coasts, every mile or two inland, bringing with it
a great increase in the rainfall. We could, with much
difficulty have got our regiments up the mountains, but not
half the men could have got up with their belongings,
and once there it would have been an impossibility to
(09:29):
feed them. It was all that could be done with
the limited number of wagons and mule trains on hand
to feed the men in the existing camps, where the
travel and rain gradually rendered each road in succession wholly impassable.
To have gone up the mountains would have meant early starvation.
The third plan of the department was even more objectionable
(09:49):
than either of the others. There was some twenty five
miles in the interior what was called a high interior plateau,
and at one period we were informed that we were
to be marched thither. As a matter of fact, this
so called high plateau was the sugar cane country, where
during the summer the rainfall was prodigious. It was a rich,
deep soil covered with a rank tropic growth, the guinea
(10:13):
grass being higher than the head of a man on horseback.
It was a perfect hotbed of malaria, and there was
no dry ground whatever in which to camp. To have
sent the troops there would have been simple butchery. Under
these circumstances. The alternative to leaving the country altogether was
to stay where we were, with the hope that half
the men would live through the cool season. We did
(10:35):
everything possible to keep up the spirits of the men,
but it was exceedingly difficult because there was nothing for
them to do. They were weak and languid, and in
the wet heat they had lost energy, so that it
was not possible for them to indulge in sports or pastimes.
There were exceptions, but the average man who went off
to shoot guinea hens or tried some vigorous game, always
(10:56):
felt much the worse for his exertions. Once or twice
I took some of my comrades with me and climbed
up one or another of the surrounding mountains, but the
result generally was that half of the party were down
with some kind of sickness. Next day. It was impossible
to take a heavy exercise in the heat of the day.
The evening usually saw a rainstorm, which made the country
(11:16):
a quagmire, and in the early morning the drenching dew
and wet, slimy soil made walking but little pleasure. Chaplin
Brown held service every Sunday under a low tree outside
my tent, and we always had a congregation of a
few score troopers lying or sitting round, their strong, hard
faces turned toward the preacher. I let a few of
(11:37):
the men visit Santiago, but the long walk in and
out was very tiring, and moreover, wise restrictions had been
put as to either officers or men coming in. In
any event, there was very little to do in the quaint,
dirty old Spanish city, though it was interesting to go
in once or twice, and wander through the narrow streets
with their curious little shops and low houses of stained stucco,
(12:00):
with elaborately wrought iron trellises to the windows and curiously
carved balconies, Or to sit in the central plaza where
the cathedral was, and the clubs and the cafe venues,
and a low, bare rambling building which was called the
Governor's Palace. In this palace, Wood had now been established
as military governor, and Luna and two or three of
(12:20):
my other officers from the Mexican border who knew Spanish
were sent in to do duty under him. A great
many of my men knew Spanish, and some of the
new Mexicans were of Spanish origin. Although they behaved precisely
like the other members of the regiment, we should probably
have spent the summer in our sick camps, losing half
the men and hopelessly shattering the health of the remainder
(12:40):
if General Shafter had not summoned a council of officers,
hoping by united action of a more or less public character,
to wake up the Washington authorities to the actual conditions
of things. As all the Spanish forces in the province
of Santiago had surrendered, and as so called immune regiments
were coming to garrison the conquered territory there were There's
literally not one thing of any kind whatsoever for the
(13:03):
army to do, and no purpose to serve by keeping
it at Santiago. We did not suppose that peace was
at hand, being ignorant of the negotiations. We were anxious
to take part in the Puerto Rico campaign, and would
have been more than willing to suffer any amount of
sickness if by so doing we could get into action.
But if we were not to take part in the
Puerto Rico campaign, then we knew it was absolutely indispensable
(13:26):
to get our commands north immediately if they were to
be in trim for the great campaign against Havana, which
would surely be the main event of the winner. If
peace were not declared in advance. Our army included the
great majority of the regulars, and was therefore the flower
of the American force. It was on every account imperative
to keep it in good trim, and to keep it
(13:48):
in Santiago meant its entirely purposeless destruction. As soon as
the surrender was an accomplished fact that taking away of
the army to the north should have begun. Every officer,
from the highest to the especially among the regulars, realized
all of this, and about the last day of July,
General Shafter called a conference in the palace of all
(14:08):
the division and brigade commanders. By this time, owing to
Woods having been made governor General, I was in command
of my brigade, so I went to the conference, too,
riding in with Generals Sumner and Wheeler, who were the
other representatives of the Cavalry Division. Besides the line officers,
all the chief medical officers were present at the conference.
(14:29):
The telegrams from the Secretary stating the position of himself
and the Surgeon General were read, and then almost every
line and medical officer present expressed his views in turn.
They were almost all regulars, and had been brought up
to lifelong habits of obedience without protests. They were ready
to obey still, but they felt quite rightly that it
(14:49):
was their duty to protest, rather than to see the
flower of the United States forces destroyed, as the culminating
act of a campaign in which the blunders that had
been committed had been retrieved only by de vour and
splendid soldierly qualities of the officers and enlisted men of
the infantry and dismounted cavalry. There was not a dissenting
voice where there could not be. There was not but
(15:11):
one side to the question. To talk of continually shifting camp,
or of moving up the mountains, or of moving into
the interior was idle. But not one of the plans
could be carried out with our utterly insufficient transportation, and
at that season and in that climate, they would merely
have resulted in aggravating the sickliness of the soldiers. It
was deemed best to make some record of our opinion
(15:32):
in the shape of a letter or report, which would
showed that to keep the army in Santiago meant its
absolute and objectless ruin, and that it should at once
be recalled. At first, there was naturally some hesitation on
the part of the regular officers to take the initiative
where their entire future career might be sacrificed. So I
wrote a letter to General shafter reading over a rough
(15:53):
draft to the various generals and adopting their corrections. Before
I had finished making these corrections, it was determined that
we should send a circular letter on behalf of all
of us to General Shafter. And when I returned from
presenting him mine, I found this circular letter already prepared,
and we all assigned it. Both letters were made public.
The result was immediate. Within three days, the army was
(16:15):
ordered to be ready to sail for home. As soon
as it was known that we were to sail for home,
the spirits of the men changed for the better. In
my regiment, the officers began the plan methods of drilling
the men on horseback so as to fit them for
use against the Spanish cavalry if we should go against
Havana in December. We had all of us eyed the
(16:36):
captured Spanish cavalry with particular interests. The men were small,
and the horses, though well trained and well built, were
diminutive ponies, very much smaller than cow ponies. We were
certain that if we ever got a chance to try
shock tactics against them, they would go down like nine pins,
provided only that our men could be trained to charge
in any kind of line. And we made up our
(16:56):
minds to devote our time to this dismounted work. With
the we already felt thoroughly competent to perform. My time
was still much occupied with looking after the health of
my brigade. But the fact that we were going home,
where I knew that their health would improve, lighten my mind,
and I was able thoroughly to enjoy the beauty of
the country, and even of the storms, which hitherto I
(17:18):
had regarded purely as enemies. The surroundings of the city
of Santiago are very grand. The circling mountains rise sheer
and high. The plains are threaded by rapid winding brooks,
and are dotted here and there with quaint villages, curiously
picturesque from their combining traces of an outworn old world
civilization with new and raw barbarism. The tall, graceful, feathery
(17:41):
bamboos rise by the water's edge and elsewhere, even on
the mountain crest, where the soil is wet and rank enough,
and the splendid royal palms and coconut palms tower high
above the matted green jungle. Generally the thunderstorms came in
the afternoon, but once I saw one at sunrise, driving
down the high mountain valleys toward us, it was a
(18:03):
very beautiful and almost terrible sight, where the sun rose
behind the storm and shone through the gusty rifts, lighting
the mountain crest here and there, while the plain below
lay shrouded in the lingering night. The angry level rays
edged the dark clouds with crimson and turned the downpour
into sheets of golden rain. In the valleys, the glimmering
mists were tinted every wild hue, and the remotest heavens
(18:26):
were lit with flaming glory. One day General Lawton, General
Wood and I, with Ferguson and poor Tiffany, went down
the bay to visit Morral Castle. The shores were beautiful,
especially where there were groves of palms and of the
scarlet flower tree, and the castle itself, on a jutting headland,
overlooking the sea and guarding the deep, narrow entrance to
(18:48):
the bay, showed just what it was, the splendid relic
of a vanished power and a vanished age. We wandered
all through it, among the castlated battlements and in the dungeons,
where we found hideous, rusty empl comments of torture, and
looked at the guns, some modern and some very old.
It had been little hurt by the bombardment of the ships. Afterward,
(19:08):
I had a swim, not trusting much to the shark stories.
We passed by the sunken hawks of the Merrimack and
the Arena Mercedes, lying just outside the main channel. Our
own people had tried to sink the first, and the
Spaniards had tried to sink the second so as to
block the entrance. Neither attempt was successful. On August six,
we were ordered to embark, and next morning we sailed
(19:30):
on the transport Miami. General Wheeler was with us and
a squadron of the third Cavalry under Major Jackson. The
General put the policing and management of the ship into
my hands, and I had great aid from Captain McCormick,
who had been acting with me as Adjutant general of
the brigade. I had profited by my experience coming down,
and as doctor Church knew his work well. Although he
(19:52):
was very sick, we kept the ship in such good
sanitary condition that we were one of the very few
organizations allowed to land at Montauk immediately upon our arrival.
Soon after leaving the port, the captain of the ship
notified me that his stokers and engineers were insubordinate and drunken,
due he thought to liquor which my men had given them.
(20:13):
I at once started a search of the ship, explaining
to the men that they could not keep the liquor,
that if they surrendered whatever they had to me, I
should return it to them when we went ashore, and
that meanwhile I would allow us sick to drink when
they really needed it, but that if they did not
give the liquor to me of their own accord, I
would throw it overboard. About seventy flasts and bottles were
(20:33):
handed to me, and I found and threw overboard about twenty.
This at once put a stop to all drunkenness. The
stokers and engineers were sawing and half mutinous, so I
sent a detail of my men down to watch them
and see that they did their work under the orders
of the chief engineer, and we reduced them to obedience.
In short order, I could easily have drawn from the
(20:54):
regiment's sufficient skilled men to fill every position in the
entire ship's crew, from captain to stoker. We were very
much crowded on board the ship, but rather better off
than on the Yucatan, so far as the men were concerned,
which was the important point. All the officers except General
Wheeler slept in a kind of improvised shed, not unlike
a chicken coop, with bunks on the aftermost part of
(21:16):
the upper deck. The water was bad, some of it
very bad. There was no ice. The can beef proved
practically uneatable, as we knew would be the case. There
were not enough vegetables, we did not have enough disinfectants,
and there was no provision whatever for a hospital or
for isolating the sick. We simply put them on one
portion of one deck. If, as so many of the
(21:38):
high authorities had insisted, there had really been a yellow
fever epidemic, and if it had broken out on shipboard,
the condition would have been frightful. But there was no
yellow fever epidemic. Three of our men had been kept
behind us suspects, all three suffering simply from malarial fever.
One of them, Lutz, a particularly good soldier, died, another
who was simply a malingerer and had nothing the matter
(22:00):
with him, whatever, of course, recovered. The third was Tiffany,
who I believe would have lived had we been allowed
to take him with us, but who was sent home
later and died soon after landing, I was very anxious
to keep the men of muse and as the quarters
were so crowded that it was out of the question
for them to have any physical exercise, I did not
(22:21):
interfere with their playing games of chance, so long as
no disorder followed. On shore this was not allowed. But
in the particular emergency which we were meeting, the loss
of a month salary was as nothing compared to keeping
the men thoroughly interested and diverted. By care and diligence,
we succeeded in preventing any serious sickness. One man died, however,
(22:42):
he had been suffering from dysentery ever since we landed,
owing purely to his own fault, for on the very
first night ashore he obtained a lot of fiery liquor
from some of the Cubans, got very drunk, and had
the march next day through the hot sun before he
was entirely sober. He never recovered and was useless from
that time on On board ship, he died, and we
(23:03):
gave him a sea burial. Wrapped in a hammock. He
was placed opposite a port and the American flag thrown
over him. The engine was stilled, and the great ship
rocked on the waves, unshaken by the screw, while the
war worn troopers clustered around with bare heads to listen
to Chaplain Brown read the funeral service, and to the
band of the Third Cavalry as it played the funeral dirge.
(23:24):
Then the port was knocked free, the flag withdrawn, and
the shotted hammock plunged heavily over the side, rushing down
through the dark water to lie till the judgment day
in the ooze that holds timbers of so many gallant
ships and the bones of so many fearless adventures. We
were favored by good weather during our nine days voyage,
and much of the time when there was little to do,
(23:46):
we simply sat together and talked, each man contributing from
the fund of his own experiences. Voyages around Cape horn,
yacht races for the America's Cup, experiences on football teams
which are famous in the annals of college sport, serious
feats of desperate prowess in Indian fighting and in breaking
up gangs of white outlaws, adventures in hunting big game,
(24:07):
in breaking wild horses, intending great herds of cattle, and
in wandering winter and summer among the mountains and across
the lonely plains. The men who told the tales could
draw upon countless memories, such as these are the things
they had done, and the things they had seen others do.
Sometimes General Wheeler joined us and told us about the
great war, compared with which ours was such a small war,
(24:30):
far reaching in their importance, though its effects were destined
to be. When we had become convinced that we would
escape an epidemic of sickness, the homeward voyage became very pleasant.
End of Chapter six, Part one
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