Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
to shirk it. No brave and good man can properly shirk death; and no
criminal who has earned death should be allowed to shirk it.
One of the best men with our regiment was the British military attache,
Captain Arthur Lee, an old friend. The other military attaches were
herded together at headquarters and saw little. Captain Lee, who had
known me in Washington, escaped and stayed with the regiment. We grew to
feel that he was one of us, and made him an honorary member. There were
two other honorary members. One was Richard Harding Davis, who was with
us continually and who performed valuable service on the fighting line.
The other was a regular officer, Lieutenant Parker, who had a battery
of gatlings. We were with this battery throughout the San Juan fighting,
and we grew to have the strongest admiration for Parker as a soldier and
the strongest liking for him as a man. During our brief campaign we were
closely and intimately thrown with various regular officers of the type
of Mills, Howze, and Parker. We felt not merely fondness for them as
officers and gentlemen, but pride in them as Americans. It is a
fine thing to feel that we have in the army and in the navy modest,
efficient, gallant gentlemen of this type, doing such disinterested work
for the honor of the flag and of the Nation. No American can overpay the
debt of gratitude we all of us owe to the officers and enlisted men of
the army and of the navy.
Of course with a regiment of our type there was much to learn both among
the officers and the men. There were all kinds of funny incidents. One
of my men, an ex-cow-puncher and former round-up cook, a very good
shot and rider, got into trouble on the way down on the transport.
He understood entirely that he had to obey the officers of his own
regiment, but, like so many volunteers, or at least like so many
volunteers of my regiment, he did not understand that this obligation
extended to officers of other regiments. One of the regular officers on
the transport ordered him to do something which he declined to do. When
the officer told him to consider himself under arrest, he responded
by offering to fight him for a trifling consideration. He was brought
before a court martial which sentenced him to a year's imprisonment at
hard labor with dishonorable discharge, and the major-general commanding
the division approved the sentence.
We were on the transport. There was no hard labor to do; and the prison
consisted of another cow-puncher who kept guard over him with his
carbine, evidently divided in his feelings as to whether he would like
most to shoot him or to let him go. When we landed, somebody told the
prisoner that I intended to punish him by keeping him with the baggage.
He at once came to me in great agitation, saying: "Colonel, they say
you're going to leave me with the baggage when the fight is on. Colonel,
if you do that, I will never show my face in Arizona again. Colonel, if
you will let me go to the front, I promise I will obey any one you say;
any one you say, Colonel," with the evident feeling that, after this
concession, I could not, as a gentleman, refuse his request. Accordingly
I answered: "Shields, there is no one in this regiment more entitled to
be shot than you are, and you shall go to the front." His gratitude was
great, and he kept repeating, "I'll never forget this, Colonel, never."
Nor did he. When we got very hard up, he would now and then manage to
get hold of some flour and sugar, and would cook a doughnut and bring it
round to me, and watch me with a delighted smile as I ate it. He behaved
extremely well in both fights, and after the second one I had him
formally before me and remitted his sentence--something which of course
I had not the slightest power to do, although at the time it seemed
natural and proper to me.
When we came to be mustered out, the regular officer who was doing the
mustering, after all the men had been discharged, finally asked me where
the prisoner was. I said, "What prisoner?" He said, "The prisoner,
the man who was sentenced to a year's imprisonment with hard labor
and dishonorable discharge." I said, "Oh! I pardoned him"; to which he
responded, "I beg your pardon; you did what?" This made me grasp the
fact that I had exceeded authority, and I could only answer, "Well, I
did pardon him, anyhow, and he has gone with the rest"; whereupon the
mustering-out officer sank back in his chair and remarked, "He was
sentenced by a court martial, and the sentence was approved by the
major-general commanding the division. You were a lieutenant-colonel,
and you pardoned him. Well, it was nervy, that's all I'll say."
The simple fact was that under the circumstances it was necessary for me
to enforce discipline and control the regiment, and therefore to reward
and punish individuals in whatever way the exigencies demanded. I often
explained to the men what the reasons for an order were, the first time
it was issued, if there was any trouble on their part in understanding
what they were required to do. They were very intelligent and very eager
to do their duty, and I hardly ever had any difficulty the second time
with them. If, however, there was the slightest willful shirking of duty
or insubordination, I punished instantly and mercilessly, and the whole
regiment cordially backed me up. To have punished men for faults and
shortcomings which they had no opportunity to know were such would have
been as unwise as to have permitted any of the occasional bad characters
to exercise the slightest license. It was a regiment which was sensitive
about its dignity and was very keenly alive to justice and to courtesy,
but which cordially approved absence of mollycoddling, insistence upon
the performance of duty, and summary punishment of wrong-doing.
In the final fighting at San Juan, when we captured one of the trenches,
Jack Greenway had seized a Spaniard, and shortly afterwards I found Jack
leading his captive round with a string. I told him to turn him over to
a man who had two or three other captives, so that they should all be
taken to the rear. It was the only time I ever saw Jack look aggrieved.
"Why, Colonel, can't I keep him for myself?" he asked, plaintively. I
think he had an idea that as a trophy of his bow and spear the Spaniard
would make a fine body servant.
One reason that we never had the slightest trouble in the regiment was
because, when we got down to hard pan, officers and men shared exactly
alike. It is all right to have differences in food and the like in times
of peace and plenty, when everybody is comfortable. But in really hard
times officers and men must share alike if the best work is to be done.
As long as I had nothing but two hardtacks, which was the allowance to
each man on the morning after the San Juan fight, no one could complain;
but if I had had any private little luxuries the men would very
naturally have realized keenly their own shortages.
Soon after the Guasimas fight we were put on short commons; and as I
knew that a good deal of food had been landed and was on the beach at
Siboney, I marched thirty or forty of the men down to see if I could not
get some and bring it up. I finally found a commissary officer, and he
asked me what I wanted, and I answered, anything he had. So he told me
to look about for myself. I found a number of sacks of beans, I think
about eleven hundred pounds, on the beach; and told the officer that
I wanted eleven hundred pounds of beans. He produced a book of
regulations, and showed me the appropriate section and subdivision which
announced that beans were issued only for the officers' mess. This did
me no good, and I told him so. He said he was sorry, and I answered that
he was not as sorry as I was. I then "studied on it," as Br'r Rabbit
would say, and came back with a request for eleven hundred pounds of
beans for the officers' mess. He said, "Why, Colonel, your officers
can't eat eleven hundred pounds of beans," to which I responded, "You
don't know what appetites my officers have." He then said he would send
the requisition to Washington. I told him I was quite willing, so long
as he gave me the beans. He was a good fellow, so we finally effected a
working compromise--he got the requisition and I got the beans, although
he warned me that the price would probably be deducted from my salary.
Under some regulation or other only the regular supply trains were
allowed to act, and we were supposed not to have any horses or mules in
the regiment itself. This was very pretty in theory; but, as a matter of
fact, the supply trains were not numerous enough. My men had a natural
genius for acquiring horseflesh in odd ways, and I continually found
that they had staked out in the brush various captured Spanish cavalry
horses and Cuban ponies and abandoned commissary mules. Putting these
together, I would organize a small pack train and work it industriously
for a day or two, until they learned about it at headquarters and
confiscated it. Then I would have to wait for a week or so until my
men had accumulated some more ponies, horses, and mules, the regiment
meanwhile living in plenty on what we had got before the train was
confiscated.
All of our men were good at accumulating horses, but within our own
ranks I think we were inclined to award the palm to our chaplain. There
was not a better man in the regiment than the chaplain, and there could
not have been a better chaplain for our men. He took care of the sick
and the wounded, he never spared himself, and he did every duty. In
addition, he had a natural aptitude for acquiring mules, which made some
admirer, when the regiment was disbanded, propose that we should have a
special medal struck for him, with, on the obverse, "A Mule passant and
Chaplain regardant." After the surrender of Santiago, a Philadelphia
clergyman whom I knew came down to General Wheeler's headquarters,
and after visiting him announced that he intended to call on the Rough
Riders, because he knew their colonel. One of General Wheeler's aides,
Lieutenant Steele, who liked us both individually and as a regiment,
and who appreciated some of our ways, asked the clergyman, after he
had announced that he knew Colonel Roosevelt, "But do you know Colonel
Roosevelt's regiment?" "No," said the clergyman. "Very well, then, let
me give you a piece of advice. When you go down to see the Colonel,
don't let your horse out of your sight; and if the chaplain is there,
don't get off the horse!"
We came back to Montauk Point and soon after were disbanded. We had been
in the service only a little over four months. There are no four months
of my life to which I look back with more pride and satisfaction. I
believe most earnestly and sincerely in peace, but as things are yet in
this world the nation that cannot fight, the people that have lost the
fighting edge, that have lost the virile virtues, occupy a position as
dangerous as it is ignoble. The future greatness of America in no small
degree depends upon the possession by the average American citizen of
the qualities which my men showed when they served under me at Santiago.
Moreover, there is one thing in connection with this war which it is
well that our people should remember, our people who genuinely love the
peace of righteousness, the peace of justice--and I would be ashamed to
be other than a lover of the peace of righteousness and of justice. The
true preachers of peace, who strive earnestly to bring nearer the
day when peace shall obtain among all peoples, and who really do help
forward the cause, are men who never hesitate to choose righteous war
when it is the only alternative to unrighteous peace. These are the men
who, like Dr. Lyman Abbott, have backed every genuine movement for peace