The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (128 page)

Half-aware that he was witnessing the last great mounted maneuvers in American military history, Davis regretted that more of his countrymen could not be there to enjoy the spectacle. For over an hour two thousand riders galloped back and forth, sweeping through the spindly trees as waves comb through reeds. A cool onshore breeze seemed at times to drive them on, at others to break them up into eddies and ripples of faster and slower motion. The air rang with cheers and the steely percussion of swords (the Rough Riders, flamboyant as ever, brandishing Cuban machetes instead of regulation sabers), and finally, in response to a barked order, the regiments deployed into shoulder-to-shoulder file abreast. “There
will be few such chances again,” Davis wrote, “to see a brigade of cavalry advancing through a forest of palms in a line two miles long.…”
⁵⁸

Later that morning Roosevelt received the shocking news that General Shafter had decided to send no horses to Cuba except those belonging to senior officers.
⁵⁹
What was more, there would be room on the ships for only eight of the twelve Rough Rider troops. If the remaining volunteers wished to charge to glory, they would have to do it on foot.

T
HE NEXT THIRTY-SIX HOURS
were not pleasant for Wood or Roosevelt. They had to decide who would go and who would stay, and had to endure the sight of officers and troopers alike bursting into tears on receiving the bad news. The lucky ones, numbering some 560 men, could hardly bemoan the loss of their horses. “We would rather crawl on all fours than not go.”
⁶⁰

Coffee was being served at the Tampa Bay Hotel on the evening of Tuesday, 7 June, when General Shafter was summoned to the Western Union office by order of the President of the United States. His instructions, tapped out on a direct line from the White House, were terse: “You will sail immediately as you are needed at destination.”
⁶¹

McKinley’s urgency was prompted by an agonized cable from Admiral Sampson, who had been blockading the Spanish Cuba Squadron in Santiago Harbor since 1 June
:
“If 10,000 men were here, city and fleet would be ours within 48 hours.” Shafter could only tap back, “I will sail tomorrow morning. Steam cannot be gotten up earlier.”
⁶²

Notwithstanding this guarded reply, the words “sail immediately” ran like an electric shock through the Fifth Corps. By midnight the Rough Riders were packed and waiting with their baggage at the track which had been assigned to them. No train appeared, and after a long period of waiting new orders arrived to proceed to another track. There was no train there, either; but just after dawn some filthy coal-cars hove into sight, and, to quote Roosevelt, “these we seized.” The fact that the locomotive was
pointing the wrong way did not deter them. “By various arguments” the engineer was persuaded to steam the nine miles to Port Tampa in reverse gear.
⁶³

Wednesday’s sun disclosed what appeared to be a black regiment descending from the coal-cars and jostling for space on the already overcrowded quay. More men kept arriving every few minutes, until the boards groaned with a swarming mass of human freight. Thirty transport ships were taking on the last bales of food and equipment, but it was anybody’s guess which regiments were to follow onto what vessel. While the Rough Riders (now mockingly called “Wood’s Weary Walkers”)
⁶⁴
stood sweating patiently in the sun, Wood and Roosevelt fanned out in search of Shafter’s chief quartermaster, Colonel C. F. Humphrey. “After an hour’s rapid and industrious search” they happened upon him almost simultaneously. Humphrey said they were welcome to a transport named
Yucatán
, which had not yet come in to the quay. Wood, sensing a certain lack of interest in the quartermaster’s voice, jumped into a passing launch and hijacked the
Yucatán
in midstream. Meanwhile Roosevelt learned that the ship had already been assigned to two other regiments—the 2nd Regular Infantry and the 71st New York Volunteers.

Roosevelt listened with polite sympathy to the protests from the quay, but his final argument was conclusive: “Well, we seem to have it.”
⁶⁵
The 71st marched off in a huff, accompanied by a shower of coal from the
Yucatán’s
bunkers.

Presently Roosevelt noticed two photographers standing beside a huge tripod and camera. “What are you young men up to?”

“We are the Vitagraph Company, Colonel Roosevelt, and we are going to Cuba to take moving pictures of the war.”

The photographers found themselves being escorted up the gangplank. “I can’t take care of a regiment,” said nineteenth-century America’s greatest master of press relations, “but I might be able to handle two more.”
⁶⁶

C
ONSIDERING THE LOGISTICAL
problem of moving 16,286 troops along a single stretch of track between
9:00 P.M
. Tuesday and
5:00 P.M
. Wednesday, the “criminally incompetent” General Shafter did not do too badly. He had no choice but to leave the remainder of his corps behind in Tampa, owing to wild miscalculations of available berth space; as it was the ships were so crammed with men that bodies covered every foot of deck. Convinced that he had done everything that God and gout permitted him, Shafter struggled over the side of his flagship
Segurança
at about
4:30 P.M
. and ordered her to lead the way out of the harbor. Then he went below and eased his weary bulk into bed.
⁶⁷

The
Segurança
had barely slipped her moorings when a shrilling tug halted her with a telegram:

It transpired that three unidentified warships had been sighted in the Gulf, apparently lying in wait for the invasion fleet.

While the Navy rushed to investigate, Shafter ordered his armada back to quayside. It was out of the question to disembark, since orders to proceed might be received at any minute; so for the next six days sixteen thousand men baked like sardines in their steel ovens.
⁶⁹

As if enduring some Ancient Mariner’s nightmare, Theodore Roosevelt paced the decks of the
Yucatán
, breathing the stench of dirty men and dying mules. Garbage clogged the quayside canal until it festered in the sun; the drinking-water tanks turned brackish, and Army rations of “fresh beef,” when opened, proved to be so disgusting that three out of every four cans were thrown overboard. A move out to midstream on 10 June afforded partial relief,
although sharks made swimming hazardous.
⁷⁰
In any case most of the Rough Riders, having been brought up in the desert, were too transfixed by the sight of seawater to venture into it.
⁷¹
Periodically Roosevelt went down to his cabin to vent his wrath in long letters to Henry Cabot Lodge. “I did not feel that I was fit to be Colonel of this regiment … but I am more fit to command a Brigade or a Division or attend to this whole matter of embarking and sending the army than many of those whose business it is.…”
⁷²

At last, in the late afternoon of 14 June, the Navy reported that all was safe in the Gulf. Under the bored gaze of three black women, three soldiers, and a gang of stevedores, the largest armed force ever to leave American shores swung out of the bay and steamed southeast into the gathering dusk, until Tampa Light shrank to a pinpoint, wavered, and went out.

N
IGHT FELL
, and the band of the 2nd Infantry struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Almost on cue, General Shafter’s invasion fleet lit up like a galaxy, spangling the dark sea from one horizon to the other. Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt stood with bared head on the bridge of the
Yucatán
, while soldierly emotions surged in his breast. He had no idea where he was being sent—it might not be Cuba at all, merely Puerto Rico—nor what he would be ordered to do when he got there; yet he believed “that the nearing future held … many chances of death, of honor and renown.” If he failed, he would “share the fate of all who fail.” But if he succeeded, he would help “score the first great triumph of a mighty world-movement.”
¹

Roosevelt supposed that his fellow Rough Riders could dimly feel what he was feeling, but found that only one of them had enough “soul and imagination” to articulate such thoughts. This was Captain “Bucky” O’Neill, the prematurely grizzled, chain-smoking
ex-Mayor of Prescott, Arizona, and a sheriff “whose name was a byword of terror to every wrong-doer, white or red.” O’Neill was capable of “discussing Aryan word-roots … and then sliding off into a review of the novels of Balzac.” He could demonstrate Apache signs which reminded Roosevelt curiously of those used by the Sioux and Mandans in Dakota.
²
He was, in short, a kindred soul, a man to contemplate the night sky with.

“He led these men in one of the noblest fights of the century.”
Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders atop San Juan Heights, Cuba
. (
Illustration 25.1
)

“Who would not risk his life for a star?” asked Bucky, as the two officers leaned against the railings and searched for the Southern Cross. The metaphor made up in sincerity what it lacked in originality, and it was duly recorded for quotation in Roosevelt’s war memoirs.
³