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The name "Rough Riders" will forever mean to those who read American history the spontaneous joy of patriotism and the high hearts of youth in this land. It was the modern reality of the adventurous musketeers--of those who loved romance and who were ready for a call to arms in support of their country. They came from the cowboys of the west, from the stockbrokers' offices of Wall Street, from the athletic field, from youth wherever real youth was to be found. Something over 20,000 men applied for enrollment. None of them knew anything of war. None of them wanted to die, but they all wanted to try the great adventure under such leaders. And they have left an amazing record of the joyousness of the fight and the recklessness that goes with it.
Now and then there have been organizations of a similar character in our history, but only here and there. It was the first outburst of that day {78} of the spirits filled with high adventure; and the record cheers the rest of us as we plod along our way, just as it cheers us when we are ill in bed with indigestion to read again the old but ever-young Dumas.
It would have been impossible for any one to have organized and controlled such a group without the enthusiasm of men like Roosevelt and Wood, as well as the knowledge these two had of the West, the Southwest and the South.
It detracts nothing from Roosevelt's greatness of spirit to say that it was Wood who did the organizing, the equipping of the regiment. In fact Roosevelt declined to be the Rough Riders' first Colonel, but consented to be the second in command only if Wood were made its commander. The fact that Roosevelt was not only known in the East but in the Northwest, and that Wood was quite as well known in the Southwest and the South meant that men of the Rough Riders type all over the country knew something of one or the other of the regiment's organizers.
It detracts nothing from Wood's amazing activity in organization and capacity for getting {79} things done, to say that had it not been for Roosevelt's wonderful popularity amongst those of the youthful spirit of the land the regiment would never have had its unique character or its unique name.
This is not the place to tell the story of that famous band of men. But its organization is so important a part of Wood's life that it comes in for mention necessarily.
In the Indian campaign with the regulars he had known the great importance of being properly outfitted and ready for those grilling journeys over the desert. In the Spanish War he learned, as only personal experience can teach, the amazing importance of preparation for volunteers and inexperienced men. The whole story of the getting ready to go to Cuba was burned into his brain so deeply that it formed a second witness in the case against trusting to luck and the occasion which has never been eradicated from his mind. Yet this episode brought strongly before him also the fact that prepared though he might be there was no success ahead for such an organization without the sense of subordination to the {80} state and the nation which not only brought the volunteers in, but carried them over the rough places through disease and suffering and death to the end.
Eight days after the telegram calling upon the Governors of New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma and Indian Territory for men to form the regiment, the recruits gathered at San Antonio where Wood was waiting to meet them. The most important thing about them for the moment was that they knew nothing of military life. Wood believed with Old Light-Horse Harry Lee "That Government is a murderer of its citizens which sends them to the field uninformed and untaught, where they are meeting men of the same age and strength mechanized by education and disciplined for battle."
Furthermore during the years that he had been in Washington Wood had used some of his spare time in studying parts of American history that are not included in school books. He knew that the volunteer system in the Revolutionary War had worn General Washington sick with discouragement and fear lest all that he had built up be {81} broken down through lack of discipline. He knew also that in the Civil War the volunteer system proved inadequate on both sides and that it was not until the war had gone on for two years that either the North or the South had what could properly be called an army.
To aid him in the training of these troops he had the assistance of a number of officers who had seen service in the Regular Army, and together they mapped out a course of drills and maneuvers that worked the men from a valueless mob into a regiment trained for battle. The human material that they had to work with was the best; for these men had been selected from many applicants. The lack of discipline and the ignorance of military etiquette led to many amusing incidents. Colonel Roosevelt in his history of the Rough Riders tells of an orderly announcing dinner to Colonel Wood and the three majors by remarking genially:
"If you fellers don't come soon, everything'll get cold."
The foreign attachés said: "Your sentinels do not know much about the Manual of Arms, but {82} they are the only ones through whose lines we could not pass. They were polite; but, as one of them said, 'Gents, I'm sorry, but if you don't stop I shall kill you.'"
The difficulties to be surmounted were enormous; and any officers less democratic and understanding might have made a mess of it. Both Roosevelt and Wood understood the frontiersmen too well to misjudge any breaches of etiquette or to humiliate the extremely sensitive natures of men long used to life in the open.
Upon Colonel Wood fell practically all the details of organization. There were materials and supplies of many kinds to be secured from the War Department; there were men to be drilled in the bare rudiments of military life; non-commissioned officers and officers to be schooled, and a thousand and one other details. At first the men were drilled on foot, but soon horses were purchased and mounted drill commenced, much to the delight of many of the cowpunchers who by years of training had become averse to walking a hundred yards if they could throw their legs over a horse. There was no end to the {83} excitement when the horses arrived. Most of them were half-broken, but there were some that had never seen, much less felt, a saddle. The horses were broken to the delight of every one in camp, because training them meant bucking contests, and the more vicious the animal the better they liked it.
From simple drills and evolutions the men advanced to skirmish work and rapidly became real soldiers--not the polished, smartly uniformed military men of the Regular type, but hard fighters in slouch hats and brown canvas trousers with knotted handkerchiefs round their necks.
The commander of any military unit at that time had much to worry about. It depended solely on him personally whether his men were properly equipped, whether they had food; and when orders came to move whether they had anything to move on. The advice that he could get, if he was willing to listen to it, was lengthy and worthless, and the help he could get from Washington amounted to little or nothing.
In May the regiment was ordered to proceed to Tampa. After a lengthy struggle with the {84} railway authorities cars were put at the disposal of Colonel Wood, who left San Antonio on the 29th with three sections, the remaining four sections being left to proceed later in charge of Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt. The confusion of getting started was reduced to a minimum by Wood, who had worked out a scheme for embarkation; but due to delay on the part of the railway authorities in providing proper facilities for handling the troops and equipment they were delayed four days. Everywhere along the line of travel they were cheered enthusiastically by people who came to greet the train on its arrival in towns and cities.
Tampa was in chaos. There seemed to be no order or system for the disembarkation of troops. Every one asked for information and no one could give it. Officers, men, railroad employees and longshoremen milled about in a welter of confusion. The troops were dumped out with no prearranged schedule on the part of the officers in charge of the camp. There were no arrangements for feeding the men and no wagons in which to haul impedimenta. In such conditions it {85} required all the native vigor characteristic of their Colonel to bring some sort of order--all the knowledge he had gained from his Indian campaign. And even then there was still needed an unconquerable spirit that did not know what impossibilities were.
After a few days at Tampa, Colonel Wood was notified that his command would start for destination unknown at once, leaving four troops and all the horses behind them. On the evening of June 7th notification came that they would leave from Port Tampa, nine miles away, the following morning, and that if the troops were not aboard the transport at that time they could not sail. No arrangements were made by the port authorities for the embarkation. No information could be obtained regarding transportation by rail to the port. There was no information regarding the transport that the troops were to use. In an official report made to the Secretary of War Colonel Roosevelt had the following remarks to make about the conditions that confronted them in Tampa:
". . . No information was given in advance {86} what transports we should take, or how we should proceed to get aboard, nor did any one exercise any supervision over the embarkation. Each regimental commander, so far as I know, was left to find out as best he could, after he was down at the dock, what transport had not been taken, and then to get his regiment aboard it, if he was able, before some other regiment got it. Our regiment was told to go to a certain switch and take a train for Port Tampa at twelve o'clock, midnight. The train never came. After three hours of waiting, we were sent to another switch, and finally at six o'clock in the morning got possession of some coal cars and came down in them. When we reached the quay where the embarkation was proceeding, everything was in utter confusion. The quay was piled with stores and swarming with thousands of men of different regiments, besides onlookers, etc. The Commanding General, when we at last found him, told Colonel Wood and myself that he did not know what ship we were to embark on, and that we must find Colonel Humphrey, the Quarter-master General. Colonel Humphrey was not in his office, and nobody knew where he was. The {87} commanders of the different regiments were busy trying to find him, while their troops waited in the trains, so as to discover the ships to which they were allotted--some of these ships being at the dock and some in mid-stream. After a couple of hours' search, Colonel Wood found Colonel Humphrey and was allotted a ship. Immediately afterward I found that it had already been allotted to two other regiments. It was then coming to the dock. Colonel Wood boarded it in midstream to keep possession, while I double-quicked the men down from the cars and got there just ahead of the other two regiments. One of these regiments, I was afterward informed, spent the next thirty-six hours in cars in consequence."
The conditions at Tampa provided material for a spirited exchange of letters and telegrams between General Miles, who had taken command, and Secretary of War Alger.
On June 4th, General Miles filed by telegraph the following report to the Secretary of War:
"Several of the volunteer regiments came here without uniforms; several came without arms, and some without blankets, tents, or camp equipage. {88} The 32d Michigan, which is among the best, came without arms. General Guy V. Henry reports that five regiments under his command are not fit to go into the field. There are over three hundred cars loaded with war material along the roads about Tampa. Stores are sent to the Quartermaster at Tampa, but the invoices and bills of lading have not been received, so that the officers are obliged to break open seals and hunt from car to car to ascertain whether they contain clothing, grain, balloon material, horse equipments, ammunition, siege guns, commissary stores, etc. Every effort is being made to bring order out of confusion. I request that rigid orders be given requiring the shipping officers to forward in advance complete invoices and bills of lading, with descriptive marks of every package, and the number and description of car in which shipped. To illustrate the embarrassment caused by present conditions, fifteen cars loaded with uniforms were sidetracked twenty-five miles from Tampa, and remained there for weeks while the troops were suffering for clothing. Five thousand rifles, which were discovered yesterday, were needed by {89} several regiments. Also the different parts of the siege train and ammunition for same, which will be required immediately on landing, are scattered through hundreds of cars on the sidetracks of the railroads. Notwithstanding these difficulties, this expedition will soon be ready to sail."
In answer to this dispatch was sent the following reply from Secretary Alger:
"Twenty thousand men ought to unload any number of cars and assort contents. There is much criticism about delay of expedition. Better leave a fast ship to bring balance of material needed, than delay longer."
This slight difference of opinion which a shrewd observer can discover between the lines was characteristic of the whole preparation of the United States army that undertook to carry on the war with Spain. As one remembers those days, or reads of them in detail, it seems as if every one did something wrong regularly, as if no one of ability was anywhere about. As a matter of fact, however, the organizing and shipping of a suddenly acquired expeditionary volunteer force has never been accomplished in any other way. The truth {90} of the matter is that it can never be run properly at the start for the simple reason that there is no organization fitted to carry out the details.
The officials in Washington who had to do with the army--good men in many cases, poor men in some cases--if they had been in office long had been handling a few hundred men here and there in the forts, on the plains, or at the regular military posts. They could no more be molded into a homogeneous whole than could the cowboys, stockbrokers, college athletes, and southern planters maneuver until they had been drilled.
To Colonel Wood, busy most of the hours of the day and night trying to get order out of chaos in his small part of the great rush, the whole episode was a graphic demonstration of the need of getting ready. Many years later a much-advertised politician of our land said that an army was not necessary since immediately upon the need for defense of our country a million farmers would leave their plows and leap to arms. To an officer trying to find a transport train in the middle of the night with a thousand hungry, tired, half-trained men under him such logic aught well have {91} caused a smile, if nothing worse. Leave his plow at such a call the American Citizen will--and by the millions, if need be. He has done just that in the last two years. He will leap to arms--to continue the rhetoric--but what can he do if he finds no arms, or if they do not exist and cannot be made for nine months?
But the thing was not new to Wood even in those days. As he talks of that period now he says that it was not so bad. There was food, rough, but still food, and enough. There were transports. It only needed that they be found. If you could not get uniforms of blue, take uniforms of tan. If you could not find sabers, go somewhere, in or out of the country, and buy them or requisition them and put in the charge later.
Yet, even so, no man in such a position, going through what he went through, worrying hour by hour, could fail to see the object lesson and take the first opportunity when peace was declared to begin to preach the necessity for getting ready for the next occasion. And it was largely due to Leonard Wood, as the world well knows, that what {92} little preparation was made in 1915 and 1916 in advance of the United States declaring war was made at all. It was the lessons acquired in the Spanish War and in the study of other wars that made of him the great prophet of preparedness.
For several days the troops remained aboard the transport in Tampa harbor awaiting orders. The heat and discomfort told upon the men, but on the evening of June 13th orders came to start and the next morning found them at sea. On the morning of the 20th the transport came off the Cuban coast; but it was not until the 22d that the welcome order for landing came. The troops landed at the squalid little village of Daiquiri in small boats, while the smaller war vessels shelled the town.
In the afternoon of the next day, the Rough Riders received orders to advance; and Wood, leading his regiment, pushed on so as to be sure of an engagement with the enemy the next morning. It was due to his energy that the Rough Riders did not miss the first fight. Under General Young's orders the Rough Riders took up a {93} position at the extreme left of the front. The next day the action of "Las Guasimas" began.
"Shoot--don't swear" growled Wood as the fighting began. He strolled about encouraging his men and urging them to action. Under his quiet, cool direction they advanced slowly, forcing the enemy back, and finally driving him to his second line of defense. Soon the Rough Riders' right joined the left of the main body and in a concerted attack the Spaniards were routed, leaving much of their equipment in their hasty retreat.
At this juncture it was reported to Roosevelt, whose detachment was separate from that of Wood, that Wood had been killed. Roosevelt immediately began taking over the command of the entire regiment, since it naturally devolved upon him. As he was consolidating his troops he came upon Wood himself very much alive.
Major-General Joseph Wheeler made the following report of the Rough Riders:
"Colonel Wood's Regiment was on the extreme left of the line, and too far-distant for me to be a personal witness of the individual conduct of his officers and men; but the magnificent and brave {94} work done by the regiment, under the lead of Colonel Wood, testifies to his courage and skill. The energy and determination of this officer had been marked from the moment he reported to me at Tampa, Fla., and I have abundant evidence of his brave and good conduct on the field, and I recommend him for consideration of the Government."
On the 25th, General Young was stricken by the fever and Wood took charge of the brigade on the 30th, leaving Roosevelt in command of the Rough Riders. The afternoon of the 30th brought orders to march on Santiago, and the morning of July 1st found them in position three miles from the city, with Leonard Wood commanding the second dismounted cavalry brigade. During the next two days, the enemy fought fiercely to regain his lost positions, but the cool persistence of the American troops forced him constantly backward.
In endorsing Wood's report of this action, General Wheeler said, "He showed energy, courage, and good judgment. I heretofore recommended him for promotion to a Brigadier-General. He {95} deserves the highest commendation. He was under the observation and direction of myself and of my staff during the battle."
After a short siege the Spanish command capitulated on the afternoon of July 17th and the American forces entered Santiago.
Wood's promotion to Brigadier-General of the United States Volunteers came at once, and Roosevelt was made Colonel and placed in command of the 2d Cavalry Brigade.
The condition of our forces at this time, struggling against the unaccustomed and virulent dangers of the tropics, was pitiable. The "Round Robin" incident in which the commanding officers of the various divisions in the command reported to Major-General W. R. Shafter, that "the Army must be moved at once, or it will perish," has become a part of the record of the history of those times. Whether the sickness and disease they suffered could have been prevented became a matter of great controversy.
This "Round Robin" was a document signed by practically all general officers present, in order to bring to the attention of the War Department {96} the conditions existing in the army that had captured Santiago showing that it was suffering severely from malaria and yellow fever; that these men must be replaced; and that if they were not replaced thousands of lives would be lost. It was sent because instructions from Washington clearly indicated that the War Department did not understand the conditions, and it was feared that delay would cause enormous loss of life. The men had been in mud and water--the yellow fever country--for weeks and were thoroughly infected with malaria. Although he had signed the "Round Robin"' with the other officers General Wood later on gave the following testimony before the War Investigation Committee:
"We had never served in that climate, so peculiarly deadly from the effects of malaria, and in this respect my opinions have changed very much since the close of the war. If I had been called before you in the first week of August, I might have been disposed to have answered a little differently in some respects. I have been there ever since, and have seen regiments come to Cuba in perfect health and go into tents with floors and {97} with flies camped up on high hills, given boiled water, and have seen them have practically the identical troubles we had during the campaign. The losses may not have been as heavy, as we are organized to take them into hospitals protected from the sun which seemed to be a depressing cause. All the immune regiments serving in my department since the war have been at one time or another unfit for service. I have had all the officers of my staff repeatedly too sick for duty. I don't think that any amount of precaution or preparation, in addition to what we had, would have made any practical difference in the sickness of the troops of the army of invasion. This is a candid opinion, and an absolutely frank one. If I had answered this question in August, without the experience I have had since August, I might have been disposed to attribute more to the lack of tentage than I do now; but I think the food, while lacking necessarily in variety, was ample."
Only a few years later the explanation of yellow fever transmission became clear to all the world. This discovery and the definite methods of {98} protection against its spread and the spread of malaria were largely the result of Wood's administrative ability and his knowledge of medicine. For it was as the result of studies and experiments conducted under his direct supervision that it became known that yellow fever was the result of the bite of the mosquito and not of bad food or low, marshy country or bad air or any of the other factors which had so long been supposed to be its cause. The taking of Santiago practically ended the Spanish War. But for the military commander of the City of Santiago it began a new and epoch-making work.
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To understand the work accomplished by Wood in Santiago, it is necessary to renew our picture of the situation existing in Cuba at the time and to realize as this is done that the problem was an absolutely new one for the young officer of thirty-seven to whom it was presented.
Nobody can really conceive of the unbelievable condition of affairs unless he actually saw it or has at some time in his life witnessed a corresponding situation. Those who return from the battlefields on the Western Front of the Great War describe the scenes and show us pictures and we think we realize the horrors of destruction, yet one after another of us as we go there comes back with the same statement: "I had heard all about it, but I hadn't the least conception of what it really was until I saw it with my own eyes."
In like manner we who are accustomed to reasonably clean and well-policed cities can call up no {102} real picture of what the Cuban cities were in those days, unless we saw them, or something like them.
Yet in spite of this it is necessary to try to give some idea of the fact, in order to give some idea of the work of reorganization required.
For four hundred years Cuba had been under the Spanish rule--the rule of viceroys and their agents who came of a race that has for centuries been unable to hold its own among the nations of the earth. Ideas of health, drainage, sanitation, orderly government, systematic commercial life--all were of an order belonging to but few spots in the world to-day. Here and there in the East--perhaps in what has been called the "cesspool of the world," Guayaquil, Ecuador--and in other isolated spots there are still such places, but they are fortunately beginning to disappear as permanent forms of human life.
In Santiago there were about 50,000 inhabitants. These people had been taxed and abused by officials who collected and kept for themselves the funds of the Province. Fear of showing wealth, since it was certain to be confiscated, led all classes of families to hide what little they had. {103} Money for the city and its public works there was none, since all was taken for the authorities in Spain or for their representatives in Cuba. Spanish people in any kind of position treated the natives as if they were slaves--as indeed they were. No family was sure of its own legitimate property, its own occupation and its own basic rights. The city government was so administered as to deprive all the citizens of any respect for it or any belief in its statements, decrees or laws. Not only was this condition of affairs in existence at the time of the war but it had existed during the entire lifetime of any one living and during the entire lifetime of his father, grandfather and ancestors for ten generations.
As a result no Cuban had any conception of what honest government, honest administration, honest taxation, honest dealings were. He not only had no conception of such things but he believed that what his family for generations and he during his life had known was the actual situation everywhere throughout the world. He knew of nothing else.
The city had no drainage system except the {104} open gutter of the streets--never had had. The water system consisted of an elemental sort of dam six miles up in the hills outside the city, old, out of repair, constantly breaking down, and a single 11-inch pipe which had a capacity of 200,000 gallons a day for the city--something like four gallons to a person. This was not sufficient for more than one-quarter of each day. In other words the city at the best was receiving for years only one-quarter of the water it absolutely needed for cleanliness.
Plagues and epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, bubonic plague, typhus and tetanus followed one another in regular succession. The streets for years had contained dead animals and many times in epidemics dead human beings--sights to which the citizens had been so accustomed throughout their lives that they paid no attention to them. The authorities being accustomed to keeping the public moneys for their own use spent little or nothing upon public works, cleaning the streets or making improvements. They did not build; they did not replace; they only patched and repaired when it was absolutely necessary. It was {105} a situation difficult to conceive, impossible to realize. Yet one must constantly bear in mind that there not only appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary in this, but in reality there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the accustomed, usual thing and had been so for centuries.
The sense of personal responsibility to the community was not dormant; it did not exist. The sense of duty of those who governed to those whom they governed was not repressed by modern corruption only; it had ceased to exist altogether. No city official was expected to do anything but get what he could out of those under him. No citizen knew anything but the necessity--to him the right--of concealing anything he had, of deceiving everybody whom he could deceive and of evading any law that might be promulgated.
The integrity of the family and its right to live as it chose within restrictions required by gregarious existence had disappeared--never had existed at all so far as those living knew. The responsibility of the individual to his government was unconceivable and inconceivable.
Had all this not been so there would have been {106} no war on our part with Spain, for the whole origin of the trouble which eventually led to war grew out of the final despair of men and women in Cuba who gradually came to realize in a dim way that something was wrong and unfair. Out of this grew internal dissension which constantly spilled over to interfere with international relations.
It was the inevitable breaking down of a civilization because of the years during which civilization's laws had been disregarded, and because all this took place in close proximity to a country where the reverse was the evident fact. There are such rotten spots still upon this earth--one just across our doorstep on the Rio Grande, and somebody some day must clean that house, too.
Added to all this, and much more, was the fact that the city of Santiago had been besieged by land and by sea. Thus naturally even the conditions in this cesspool were intensely exaggerated.
Into such a plague-stricken, starving city on the 20th of July, 1898, Wood, then Brigadier General of United States Volunteers, thirty-seven {107} years of age, fresh from the job of army surgeon to the President in the White House, some Indian fighting in the Southwest and the task of getting the Rough Riders organized into fighting shape--fresh from the fighting that had taken place on and since July 1st--into this situation on July 20th General Wood was summoned by General Shafter, commanding the American forces, with the information that he had been detailed to take command of the city, secure and maintain order, feed the starving and reorganize generally.
Why he was selected may be easily guessed. He was a military man who had made good recently, who had made good in the Southwest, whom the President knew and trusted--and he was a doctor who had just shown great organizing ability. The job itself was as new to him as would have been the task in those days of flying. But with his inherited and acquired sense of values, of the essentials of life, with his education and his characteristic passion for getting ready he started at once to pull off the wall paper, hammer away the plaster and examine the condition of the beams which supported this leaning, tottering, {108} out-of-repair wing of the world's house of civilization.
What he found was rotten beams; no integrity of family; no respect for or responsibility to the state; no sense on the part of the citizens of what they owed to themselves, or their families, or their city--not the slightest idea of what government of the people for the people by the people meant. The government was robbing the family. The family was robbing the government. That was the fundamental place to begin, if this wing of the house was not to fall.
Naturally the immediate and crying needs had to be corrected at once. But Wood began all on the same day on the beams as well as on the plaster and wall paper--this 20th day of July, 1898. Another man might well have forgotten or never have thought of the fundamentals in the terrible condition within his immediate vision. That seems to be the characteristic of Wood--that while he started to cure the illness, he at the same time started to get ready to prevent its recurrence. And there we may perhaps discover something of the reason for his success, something of the reason why people lean on him and {109} look to him for advice and support in time of trouble.
These immediate needs were inconceivable to those who lived in orderly places and orderly times. Of the 50,000 inhabitants, 16,000 were sick. There were in addition 2,000 sick Spanish soldiers and 5,000 sick American troops. Over all in the hot haze of that tropical city hung the terror of yellow fever, showing its sinister face here and there. At the same time a religious pilgrimage to a nearby shrine taken at this moment by 18,000 people led to an immense increase in disease because of the bad food and the polluted water which the pilgrims ate and drank. In the streets piles of filth and open drains were mixed with the dead bodies of animals. Houses, deserted because of deaths, held their dead--men, women and children--whom no one removed and no one buried. All along the routes approaching the city bodies lay by the roadside, the living members of the family leaving their dead unburied because they were too weak and could only drag themselves along under the tropic sun in the hope that they {110} might reach their homes before they, too, should die.
This was enhanced by the fact of the siege and the consequent lack of food. The sick could not go for food; and if they could have done so there was little or none to be had. Horrible odors filled the air. Terror walked abroad. It was a prodigious task for anybody to undertake, but it was undertaken, and in the following manner:
Simultaneously certain main lines of work were mapped out by Wood and officers put in charge of each subject, the commanding officer reserving for himself the planning, the general supervision, the watching, as well as the instituting of new laws based upon the existing system of the Code Napoleon.
It was first necessary to feed the people and to bury the dead. There were so many of the latter that they had to be collected in lots of ninety or a hundred, placed between railway irons, soaked in petroleum and burned outside the city. It was such dreadful work, this going into deserted homes and collecting dead bodies for the flames, that men had to be forced to it. All were {111} paid regularly, however, and the job was done. General Wood's own account of this task is better than any second-hand description can even hope to be.
"Horrible deadly work it was, but at last it was finished. At the same time numbers of men were working night and day in the streets removing the dead animals and other disease-producing materials. Others were engaged in distributing food to the hospitals, prisons, asylums and convents--in fact to everybody, for all were starving. What food there was, and it was considerable, had been kept under the protection of the Spanish army to be used as rations. Some of the far-seeing and prudent had stored up food and prepared for the situation in advance, but these were few.
"All of our army transportation was engaged in getting to our own men the tents, medicines and the thousand and one other things required by our camps, and as this had to be done through seas of mud it was slow work. We could expect no help from this source in our distribution of rations to the destitute population, so we seized {112} all the carts and wagons we could find in the streets, rounded up drivers and laborers with the aid of the police, and worked them under guard, willing or unwilling, but paying well for what they did. At first we had to work them far into the night.
"Everything on wheels in the city was at work. Men who refused and held back soon learned that there were things far more unpleasant than cheerful obedience, and turned to work with as much grace as they could command. All were paid a fair amount for their services, partly in money, partly in rations, but all worked; some in removing the waste refuse from the city, others in distributing food. Much of the refuse in the streets was burned outside at points designated as crematories. Everything was put through the flames.
"In the Spanish military hospital the number of sick rapidly increased. From 2,000 when we came in, the number soon ran up to 3,100 in hospital, besides many more in their camps. Many of the sick were suffering from malaria, but among them were some cases of yellow fever. Poor devils, they all looked as though hope had {113} fled, and, as they stood in groups along the waterfront, eagerly watching the entrance to the harbor, it required very little imagination to see that their thoughts were of another country across the sea, and that the days of waiting for the transports were long days for them." [Footnote:Scribner's Magazine.]
A yellow fever hospital was established on an island in the harbor. The city was divided into districts and numbers of medical men put in charge, their duty being to examine each house and report sanitary conditions, sickness and food situations. As a result of these reports Wood issued orders for action in each district so that the food, the available medical force and the supplies of all kinds should be used and distributed to produce the greatest results in the shortest possible time. In one district alone just outside the city there were thousands of cases of smallpox in November. The streets were filled with filth and dead and wrecked furniture. The wells were full of refuse. The task seemed almost hopeless. Yet, under Wood's system of detailing squads to undertake the work in certain sections {114} with the system of centralized reporting, the epidemic was checked in a month, the district cleaned and scrubbed from end to end with disinfectants and the small pox cut down to a few scattering cases. In this district of Holguin the plan was adopted of vaccinating two battalions of the Second Immune Regiment. These men were then sent into the district to establish good sanitary conditions and clean up the yellow fever. The work was done successfully without the occurrence of a single case of smallpox amongst the American troops. No better demonstration of the efficacy of vaccination was ever given.
Thus the first task of feeding the starving population and cleaning the city was simultaneously undertaken by districts under the direction of officers having authority to proceed along certain established lines. Episodes illustrating these "established lines" are many, but there is space here, for only one or two of them.
It developed at the outset that there was food and meat in the city which the people could use, but which was beyond their reach on account of the high prices. General Wood no sooner heard {115} of this than he "established a line of procedure" to correct it. He sent for the principal butchers of the city and asked:
"How much do you charge for your meat?"
"Ninety cents a pound, Señor."
"What does it cost you?"
There was hesitation and a shuffling of feet; then one of the men said in a whining voice:
"Meat is very, very dear, your Excellency."
"How much a pound?"
"It costs us very much, and ..."
"How much a pound?"
"Fifteen cents, your Excellency; but we have lost much money during the war and..."
"So have your customers. Now meat will be sold at 25 cents a pound, and not one cent more. Do you understand?"
Then, turning to the alderman, he charged him to see that his order was carried out to the letter, unless he wanted to be expelled from office.
Thenceforward meat was sold in the markets at 25 cents. The same simple plan was evolved for all other kinds of supplies. Naturally such high-handed methods caused a great hue and cry {116} amongst certain of the citizens and no such method could have been carried out by any one but a military commander with absolute authority. Some of the newspapers, all of which had been given a free hand by Wood and were allowed for the first time to say what they liked, started a campaign against the new administration and its busy head. But hand in hand with this autocratic procedure went the organization of native courts, the appointment of native officials for carrying on the government, native police to catch Cuban bandits and native judges to give decisions and impose sentences. Furthermore, in these same days of autocratic action, the people gradually discovered that although everybody was forced to work all those who did got paid--something new to the Santiago-Cuban consciousness--that the invading American army was not arresting natives in the streets and thrusting them into jail, but that their own native police were doing this work. Gradually, as the city became clean, as prices fell, as payment for work came in, as illness decreased, as law became fairly administered by the Cuban officials themselves, a certain awe {117} and veneration grew for the invaders and their big, hardworking head. It was a revelation, unbelievable yet true, unknown yet a fact, which opened up to the minds of these long-suffering, incompetent people the first vision of an existence which has since through the same agency of General Wood become a fact throughout the whole island, so that Cuba is to-day a busy, healthy, self-governing state.
Parallel with the feeding and sanitation work General Wood put into effect a certain system of road building where it was necessary in order to keep the people at work and allow them to make money and at the same time to produce necessary transportation facilities. Five miles of asphalt pavement, fifteen miles of country pike, six miles of macadam were built and 200 miles of country road made usable out of funds collected from the regular taxes which had heretofore gone into the pockets of the Spanish government officials. The costs varied somewhat from the old days, as may well be guessed. A quarter of a mile of macadam pavement built by the Spaniards the year before along the water-front had cost $180,000. Wood's {118} engineers built five miles of asphalt pavement at a cost of $175,000.
At the same time a reorganization of the Custom House service was instituted which increased receipts; jails and hospitals were reorganized under the system existing in the United States; and perhaps in the end the greatest work of all was the establishment of an entirely new school system based on an adaptation of the American form. Teachers had disappeared. There were none, since nobody paid them. School houses were empty, open to any tramp for a night's lodging. In a few months this was changed so that kindergartens and schools were opened and running.
In fact the work was the making of a new community, the building of a new life--the repairing of the tottering wing of the old, old house.
All this, as may be supposed, did not take place without friction, obstruction, and without at first a great deal of bad blood.
Wood's methods in dealing with disturbances were his own and can only be suggested here by isolated anecdotes and incidents. When an official who had the Spanish methods in his blood {119} did not appear after three invitations he was carried into the commanding officer's presence by a squad of soldiers in his pajamas. The next time he was invited he came at once.
"One night about eight o'clock, General Wood was writing in his office in the palace. At the outer door stood a solitary sentinel, armed with a rifle. Suddenly there burst across the plaza, from the San Carlos Club, a mob of Cubans--probably 600. Within a few minutes a shower of stones, bricks, bottles and other missiles struck the Spanish Club, smashing windows and doors. A man, hatless and out of breath, rushed up to the sentry at the palace entrance and shouted, 'Where's the General? Quick! The Cubans are trying to kill the officers and men in the Spanish Club!'
"General Wood was leisurely folding up his papers when the sentry reached him. 'I know it,' he said, before the man had time to speak. 'I have heard the row. We will go over and stop it.'
"He picked up his riding-whip, the only weapon he ever carries, and, accompanied by the one American soldier, strolled across to the scene of {120} the trouble. The people in the Spanish Club had got it pretty well closed up, but the excited Cubans were still before it, throwing things and shouting imprecations, and even trying to force a way in by the main entrance.
"'Just shove them back, sentry,' said General Wood, quietly.
"Around swung the rifle, and, in much less time than is taken in the telling, a way was cleared in front of the door.
"'Now shoot the first man who places his foot upon that step,' added the General, in his usual deliberate manner. Then he turned and strolled back to the palace and his writing. Within an hour the mob had dispersed, subdued by two men, one rifle and a riding-whip. And the lesson is still kept in good memory."
"One day about the middle of November the nativecalenturaor fever, from which General Wood suffered greatly, sent him to his home, which is on the edge of the town, earlier than usual. He had no sooner reached the house than he was notified by telephone that a bloody riot had occurred at San Luis, a town 20 miles out on the {121} Santiago Railway. The fever was raging in the General, his temperature exceeding 105, and he was so sick and dizzy that he staggered as he walked. But with that indomitable will that had served him on many a night raid against hostile Apaches, he entered his carriage and was driven back to the city. He picked up his chief signal officer, Captain J. E. Brady, at the Palace and hastened to the building occupied by the telegraph department of the Signal Corps on Calle Enramadas. Captain Brady took the key at the instrument.
"'Tell the operator to summon members of the rural guard who were fired on, and the commanding officer of the Ninth Immunes,' ordered the General, tersely. Thenceforward, for three hours General Wood sat there, questioning, listening, issuing orders, all with a promptness and certainty of judgment that would have been extraordinary in a man quite at his ease; yet all the time, as he could not help showing in mien and features, the raging fever was distressing to the point of agony. Those about him could not but marvel at the man's resolution and endurance. The {122} following day, although still racked with fever, he went by special train to San Luis and investigated the affair in person.'" [Footnote:Fortnightly Review.]
The basis of the great work, however, as General Wood has himself repeatedly said in conversation and in print, was to effect all this regeneration without causing the Cubans to look upon the American Army and the American control as they had for years looked upon the Spanish Army and the Spanish control. That his success here in the most difficult phase of the whole prodigious enterprise was absolute has been testified to in innumerable ways and instances.
Only one or two of these can be given here, but they are illuminating in the extreme and they suggest the success of the methods of the man who had been put in charge of this difficult work.
Death amongst the Spanish soldiers had been very heavy from yellow fever and pernicious malaria and the course of the troop-ships which carried them back to Spain was marked by long lists of burials at sea. These ships carried with them most of the nurses and nursing sisters to {123} care for the sick and dying during the voyage. It was a great drain on the nursing force at Wood's disposal in Santiago. He, therefore, hit upon the idea of offering to pay for the return trips of these nurses if they would come back at once; with the result that most of them gladly accepted and rendered splendid service in Santiago to the sick as a token of their appreciation of the military governor's act. This did much to establish friendly relations between Americans, Spaniards and Cubans who had so short a time before been enemies.
Another vital point was the relations of the invaders with the Church. It had never been contemplated that a Catholic viceroy should be replaced by a Protestant. This viceroy had so many intimate relations with the Catholic Church in which he represented the Catholic king that it was absolutely necessary for whatever American happened to be governor to play the game regardless of what his own religious scruples might be. As an interesting example of how well this was handled by Wood the story of Bishop Bernaba is a charming instance.