Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
rifles, and horses, which were the essentials, were coming in fast, and
the saddles, blankets, and the like were also accumulating. Thanks to
Wood's exertions, when we reached Tampa we were rather better equipped
than most of the regular regiments. We adhered strictly to field
equipment, allowing no luxuries or anything else unnecessary, and so
we were able to move off the field when ordered, with our own
transportation, leaving nothing behind.
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