The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (127 page)

Yet the Colonel did not hesitate to exercise authority over his subordinate when he deemed it necessary. Roosevelt was still inexperienced in matters of military discipline, and when Wood heard that he had treated an entire squadron to unlimited beer—apparently as a reward for their improvement in drill—he made a pointed remark over supper “that, of course, an officer who would go out with a large batch of men and drink with them was quite unfit to hold a commission.” There was a dead silence. Later Roosevelt visited Wood privately in his tent and confessed to the crime. “I wish to say, sir, that I agree with what you said. I consider myself the damndest ass within ten miles of this camp. Good night.”
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Toward the end of May it was evident that the Rough Riders had already been forged into a warlike cavalry regiment. In the modest opinion of its Lieutenant Colonel, “it could whip Caesar’s Tenth Legion.”
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The speed of this transformation was not altogether surprising, considering the administrative efficiency of the Wood/Roosevelt team, and the fitness and equestrian skills of the troopers (over twenty applicants had been rejected for every one accepted).
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A local newspaper reported the men “sunburned and … impatient to get away.” There was not the slightest hint as to where the War Department intended to send them next, or indeed if they would ever get to Cuba. Outbursts of bellicose fervor began to disturb the peace of San Antonio. Two Texan troopers shot a mirrored saloon into smithereens, and the proprietor was too scared to ask for damages. On 26 May, a party of concertgoing Rough Riders were asked to discharge their revolvers discreetly during an outdoor performance of
The Cavalry Charge
, and responded with such gusto that the lights blew out, causing instant pandemonium.
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“If we don’t get them to Cuba quickly to fight Spaniards,” Wood remarked, “there is great danger that they’ll be fighting one another.”
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A day or two later the Colonel received a telegram from Washington. He read it expressionlessly, then turned and looked at his second-in-command. Suddenly the two men were hugging each other like schoolboys, while war-whoops resounded through the camp. The Rough Riders had been ordered to proceed to Tampa, Florida, for immediate embarkation on transport ships, “destination unknown.”
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B
EFORE LEAVING
S
AN
A
NTONIO
the Rough Riders dressed in full uniform and posed in formation for the official regimental photograph. Spread out across the plain, their mounts obedient now and immaculately groomed, they made a majestic military display. But the picture was marred by a slight irregularity of drill: Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt had absentmindedly allowed his horse to stand a few feet in advance of Colonel Wood’s.
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T
HE
R
OUGH
R
IDERS STRUCK CAMP
at 5:00 A.M. on 29 May 1898. They expected to be off in a matter of hours, but so great was the difficulty of coaxing twelve hundred horses and mules aboard seven different trains that it was after midnight when the last door clanged shut. Somebody then discovered that the passenger cars were missing, and would not be available until dawn; so officers and men lay down in the brush beside the tracks to snatch what sleep they could.
³⁸

At 6:00
A.M
. next morning the Rough Rider convoy finally pulled out of San Antonio. “I doubt,” Roosevelt wrote afterward, “if anybody who was on the trip will soon forget it.”
³⁹
For four sweltering days the seven trains chugged eastward and southward, strewing a trail of cinders, vomit, and manure across the face of the old Confederacy. Roosevelt, who was in charge of the rear sections, punished all cases of drunkenness severely, “in order to give full liberty to those who would not abuse it.”
⁴⁰
Two or three times a day, as he read his way steadily through Demolins’s
Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons
, he sent buckets of hot coffee back to his men to compensate for lack of hot food.
⁴¹
But the most eagerly awaited
refreshments were free watermelons and jugs of iced beer at stopping-places en route. These were passed through the car windows by “girls in straw hats and freshly starched dresses of many colors,” whose beauty some troopers would remember for half a century.
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No Louisiana village or Mississippi cotton-depot was so remote as to have escaped Rough Rider newspaper publicity: exotic celebrities like Woodbury Kane and Hamilton Fish were requested to appear so often that the cowpunchers took to impersonating them. Everywhere, of course, there were gap-toothed cries for “Teddy.”
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As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union.
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It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?

O
N THE EVENING OF 2
June the seven trains ground to a halt on the pine flats of western Florida, six miles short of Tampa. For some reason railroad employees refused to haul the regiment any farther, so the Rough Riders were forced to complete their journey on horseback, dragging their equipment behind in commandeered wagons. No official welcome awaited them at the sleep-shrouded Fifth Corps campground outside of town; Roosevelt and Wood had to ride through acres of dim tents before stumbling, almost by accident, upon their allotted space.
⁴⁵

Next morning they awoke to see the largest gathering of the U.S. Army in four decades. For miles in every direction a pitched city spread out across the savanna. Under the moss-hung pines twenty-five thousand troops, mostly Regulars, were enduring what one of them called “the bane of a soldier’s life—waiting for something to happen.” Tampa itself lay a mile or so away, shimmering in coastal haze: it looked like some Middle Eastern mirage, with silver domes and minarets.
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Half an hour’s ride into the freshening sea breeze disclosed that the mirage was real. Here, among mosquito-swamps, derelict shacks, and ankle-deep drifts of sand, stood Henry B. Plant’s
famous “folly,” a five-hundred-room hotel in authentic Moorish style, with its own casino, ballroom, swimming pool, and peacock park. On its street-wide verandah, Army and Navy officers, newspaper correspondents, foreign attachés, and pretty Cuban women rocked in elegant bentwoods, sipping iced tea and champagne.
⁴⁷

“This was the rocking-chair period of the war,” wrote Richard Harding Davis of the
New York Herald
, himself an indefatigable rocker. “It was an army of occupation, but it occupied the piazza of a big hotel.”
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Roosevelt dismissed the Tampa Bay Hotel with a single haughty sentence in his own memoir of those days: “We spent very little time there.”
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Actually he spent three nights in its luxurious accommodations, for Edith came down to Tampa, and Colonel Wood discreetly allowed him leave “from before dinner to after breakfast each day.”
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Having attended Edith through much of her recent illness, that gentlemanly officer must have sensed her need to be with Theodore now that she was returned to health and strength.

C
ONSPICUOUS AMONG THE ELITE
who daily crossed the Tampa Bay Hotel lobby was dropsical, gouty old Brigadier General William Rufus Shafter, commander of the Fifth Corps. At three hundred pounds, or one-seventh of a ton, Shafter was barely able to heave himself up the grand stairway;
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yet President McKinley had chosen him to lead an expeditionary force over the hills of southern Cuba, showing equal faith in the Army’s seniority system and its ability to transport ponderous cargo.

“Not since the campaign of Crassus against the Parthians,” in Roosevelt’s later opinion, “has there been so criminally incompetent a General as Shafter.”
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Yet it was hard in the early days of June 1898 not to sympathize with that harassed officer, for President McKinley was proving an exceedingly erratic Commander-in-Chief. Bent, apparently, on acting as his own Secretary of War, he had been sending Shafter contradictory orders ever since the Battle of Manila. Dewey’s overwhelming victory had turned both the President and Secretary Long into war-hawks overnight; their first reaction to the news had been to endorse Roosevelt’s naval/military invasion plan,
over the objection of Commanding General Miles, on 2 May.
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General Shafter was ordered to prepare for immediate departure from Tampa (although the Volunteers were still in training), and on 8 May the President had increased the project landing force from ten thousand to seventy thousand. But then McKinley discovered that there was not enough ammunition in the United States to keep such an army firing for one hour in battle, and an urgent cancellation order flew to Tampa.
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Shafter’s force was scaled down to twenty-five thousand by the end of May, and the telegrams from Washington became querulous: “When will you leave? Answer at once.” Shafter wired back that he could not sail before 4 June.
⁵⁵

Roosevelt happened to ride into town that day, the morning after his midnight arrival in camp. One look at the half-empty transport ships swinging idly at anchor in Tampa Bay—nine miles away at the end of a single railroad track—was enough to convince him, if not General Shafter, that the Fifth Corps would not sail for another few days at least. “No words can paint the confusion,” he wrote in his diary on 5 June. “No
head;
a breakdown of both the railroad and military system of the country.”
⁵⁶

While train after overloaded train jostled for possession of the track, and desperate quartermasters broke open dozens of unmarked cars to see if they contained guns, uniforms, grain, or medicinal brandy, the Rough Riders joined other cavalry regiments at drill on the limitless flats. Richard Harding Davis escorted Edith Roosevelt and a party of foreign attachés to watch some formal exercises on 6 June.
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