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Home  »  Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen  »  Page 189

Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.

Page 189

crawled back to the front as best he could. He fought beside his Colonel all through the Santiago fight.
  It was predicted that, with their antecedents, the Rough-Riders could not be disciplined so as to become effective in the field; but exactly the opposite happened. They showed the world the new spectacle of a body of men who could think and yet be soldiers; who obeyed, not because they had to, but because it was right they should, and they liked to. They might not have been perfect in what the Chaplain would have called the fringes of soldiering. The pipe-clay and the regulations, and all that, they knew nothing about. But they kept order in their camp, and they knew the command Forward, when it was given. In their brief campaign they had no opportunity to learn any other. Their soldiers’ manual was brief. It forbade grumbling, and there was none. Three days they camped out in the sun and rain on the San Juan hills, fighting by day and digging burrows by night, with little to eat and only the ditches to sleep in, but not a complaint was heard. When the enemy attacked, suddenly and in full force, at three