There was one worthy bureau chief who was continually refusing applications of mine as irregular. In each case I would appeal to Secretary Alger—who helped me in every way—and get an order from him countenancing the irregularity. For instance, I found out that as we were nearer the July date than the January date for the issuance of clothing, and as it had long been customary to issue the winter clothing in July, so as to give ample leisure for getting it to all the various posts, it was therefore solemnly proposed to issue this same winter clothing to us who were about to start for a summer campaign in the tropics. This would seem incredible to those who have never dealt with an inert officialdom, a red-tape bureaucracy, but such is the fact. I rectified this and got an order for khaki clothing. We were then told we would have to advertise thirty days for horses. This meant that we would have missed the Santiago expedition. So I made another successful appeal to the Secretary. Other difficulties came up about wagons, and various articles, and in each case the same result followed. On the last occasion, when I came up in triumph with the needed order, the worried office head, who bore me no animosity, but who did feel that fate had been very unkind, threw himself back in his chair and exclaimed with a sigh: "Oh, dear! I had this office running in such good shape—and then along came the war and upset everything!" His feeling was that war was an illegitimate interruption to the work of the War Department.
There were of course department heads and bureau chiefs and assistants who, in spite of the worthlessness of the system, and of the paralyzing conditions that had prevailed, remained first-class men. An example of these was Commissary-General Weston. His energy, activity, administrative efficiency, and common sense were supplemented by an eager desire to help everybody do the best that could be done. Both in Washington and again down at Santiago we owed him very much. When I was President, it was my good fortune to repay him in part our debt, which means the debt of the people of the country, by making him a major-general.
The regiment assembled at San Antonio. When I reached there, the men, 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.4
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