Jacob A. Riis (1849–1914). Theodore Roosevelt, the Citizen. 1904.
Page 191
| war that did violence to all the traditions, and tangled up military precedent and red tape in the field in a hopeless snarl. However, enough remained over in camp, after the fighting was over, to more than make up for it. |
| The regiment was before the people almost continuously for three months. Raised, organized, equipped, and carried to Cuba within a month by the same splendid energy and executive force that fitted out the navy for its victorious fights in the East and West, it took the field at once and kept it till the army rested upon its arms under the walls of Santiago. All the way up it had been the vanguard. The dispatches from the front dealt daily with the Rough-Riders’ exploits. When, at Las Guasimas with General Young’s corps, they drove before them four times their number of Spaniards, frightened at their impetuous rush in the face of a withering fire from the shelter of an impenetrable jungle, the croakers said that they were ambushed, and, as in the old days when Roosevelt led the police phalanx, the cry was raised at home that he should be put on trial, court-martialed. The fact was that the Rough-Riders were fighting a most |