The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (133 page)

The freshness of the early morning had long since evaporated when Roosevelt, riding on Texas, led his men up the road. But last night’s mud was still thick and the jungle gave off insufferable clouds of dank moisture.
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The heat rose steadily to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sun drilled down with blistering force on sweaty arms and shoulders. Roosevelt’s neck, at least, was protected. He had ingeniously attached his blue polka-dot scarf—the unofficial insignia of a Rough Rider—in a semicircular screen dangling from the rim of his sombrero. It fluttered bravely as he trotted along,
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like the plumes of Alexander the Great; later in the day it would serve him to flamboyant effect.

By now the familiar
z-z-z-z-eu
of Mauser bullets could be heard overhead. They sang louder and louder “in a steady deathly static”
⁹⁸
as Kent’s 1st Regular Brigade, marching just ahead of Roosevelt, approached San Juan Creek. The trees thinned, and suddenly so many thousands of bullets came down, ripping in sheets through grass and reeds and human bodies, that the mud of the crossing turned red, and the water flowing over it ran purple. The Rough Riders wavered, then halted, horrified at the pile-up of bodies in front of them. Ever afterward, this point of deploy was known as Bloody Ford.
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As if to improve still further the marksmanship of the Spanish snipers (many of whom were hidden in the high crests of royal
palms, completely camouflaged with green uniforms and smokeless powder), an irresistible target was towed down Camino Real: the observation balloon of the Signal Corps. Glistening and wobbling in the sun, it stayed aloft long enough to reconnoiter another crossing five hundred yards to the left, relieving the gruesome bottleneck at Bloody Ford, and gave the cannons on San Juan Heights a precise indication of the position of the advance column.
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Plunging frantically across the creek, before the riddled balloon sank and smothered them, the Rough Riders found themselves crouching in a field full of waist-high grass. San Juan Hill rose up directly ahead, its blockhouse and breastworks clearly visible, as were the conical straw hats of entrenched soldiers. Roosevelt’s orders were to march to the right, along the bank of the creek, and establish himself at the foot of the little hill that Shafter had overlooked the day before.
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He
, however, had not, and saw at once that it represented the nearest and most dangerous holdout of the enemy. Already it was breathing fire at its crest, like a miniature volcano about to erupt, and spitting showers of Mausers. The bullets came whisking through the grass with vicious effectiveness as the Rough Riders crawled nearer. Every now and again a trooper would leap involuntarily into the air, then crumple into a nerveless heap.
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Roosevelt remained obstinately on horseback, determined to set an example of courage to his men. Now began the worst part of the battle. While the Rough Riders took what cover they could, in bushes and banks below the hill, and in the mosquito-bogs at the edge of the creek, other cavalry regiments fought their way slowly into specified positions to left and right and—humiliatingly—in front of them. The truth was that Roosevelt and his men were being held in reserve by General Sumner,
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and the new Colonel did not like it one bit. The 1st, 3rd, 6th, and even the black 9th had prior claim to this hill, while General Kent’s Infantry Division was awarded the supreme prize of San Juan Hill, now half a mile away on the left front. Orders were orders; Roosevelt could only scrawl an angry note to the (very senior) colonel of his immediate neighbors, the 10th Cavalry. “There is too much firing. Colonel Wood directs that there be no more shooting unless there is an advance.…”
¹⁰⁴
It is doubtful Wood said any such thing.

Mere spleen could not last through the one and a half hours of military torture that followed. General Sumner was waiting for orders to advance from General Shafter, but General Shafter assumed that any damn fool capable of leading a division would know when to do so without authority. Until this slight misunderstanding was cleared up, the cavalry regiments had to lie in stifling heat and try to stop as few Mausers as possible.
¹⁰⁵
Morale sagged as the shrieking projectiles
chugged
into groins, hearts, lungs, limbs, and eyes.
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Even Roosevelt found it prudent, in this killing hailstorm, to get off his horse and lie low; but Bucky O’Neill insisted on strolling up and down in front of his troop, smoking his perpetual cigarette, as if he were still walking along the sidewalk in Prescott, Arizona. “Sergeant,” he said to a protester, “the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.” He had hardly exhaled a laughing cloud of smoke before a Mauser shot went
z-z-z-z-eu
into his mouth, and burst out the back of his head. “The biggest, handsomest, laziest officer in the regiment” was dead by the time he hit the ground.
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It was now well past noon, and the insect-like figures of General Kent’s infantry could be seen beginning a slow, toiling ascent of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt sent messenger after messenger to General Sumner, imploring permission to attack his own hill, and was just about to do so unilaterally when the welcome message arrived: “Move forward and support the regulars in the assault on the hills in front.”
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It was not the total advancement he had been hoping for, but it was enough. “The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse, and then my ‘crowded hour’ began.”
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S
OLDIERS ARE APT TO
recollect their wartime actions, as poets do emotions, in tranquillity, imposing order and reason upon a dreamlike tumult. Roosevelt was honest enough to admit, even when minutely describing his charge up the hill, that at the time he was aware of very little that was going on outside the orbit of his ears and sweat-fogged spectacles.
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It was as if some primeval force drove him. “All men who feel any power of joy in battle,” he wrote, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.”
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Yet enough original images, visual and auditory, survive in
Roosevelt’s written account of the battle to give a sense of the rush, the roar, the pounce of that vulpine movement.
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To begin with, there was the sound of his own voice rasping and swearing as he cajoled terrified soldiers to follow him.
“Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?”
Then the sight of a Rough Rider at his feet being drilled lengthwise with a bullet intended for himself. Next, line after line of cavalry parting before his advance, like waves under a Viking’s prow. The puzzled face of a captain refusing to go farther without permission from some senior colonel, who could not be found.

Roosevelt: “Then I am the ranking officer here and I give the order to charge.” Another refusal. Roosevelt: “Then let my men through, sir.” Grinning white faces behind him; black men throwing down a barbed wire fence before him. A wave of his hat and flapping blue neckerchief. The sound of shouting and cheering. The sound of bullets “like the ripping of a silk dress.” Little Texas splashing bravely across a stream, galloping on, and on, up, up, up. Another wire fence, forty yards from the top, stopping her in her tracks. A bullet grazing his elbow. Jumping off, wriggling through, and running. Spaniards fleeing from the
hacienda
above. Only one man with him now: his orderly, Bardshar, shooting and killing two of the enemy. And then suddenly a revolver salvaged from the
Maine
leaping into his own hand and firing: a Spaniard not ten yards away doubling over “neatly as a jackrabbit.” At last the summit of the hill—his and Bardshar’s alone for one breathless moment before the other Rough Riders and cavalrymen swarmed up to join them. One final incongruous image: “a huge iron kettle, or something of the kind, probably used for sugar-refining.”
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A
S HIS HEAD CLEARED
and his lungs stopped heaving, Roosevelt found that Kettle Hill commanded an excellent view of Kent’s attack on San Juan Hill, still in progress across the valley about seven hundred yards away. The toiling figures seemed pitifully few. “Obviously the proper thing to do was help them.”
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For the next ten minutes he supervised a continuous volley-fire at the heads of Spaniards in the San Juan blockhouse, until powerful Gatlings
took over from somewhere down below, and the infantry on the left began their final rush.
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At this the wolf rose again in Roosevelt’s heart. Leaping over rolls of wire, he started down the hill to join them, but forgot to give the order to follow, and found that he had only five companions. Two were shot down while he ran back and roared imprecations at his regiment. “What, are you cowards?” “We’re waiting for the command.” “Forward MARCH!”
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The Rough Riders willingly obeyed, as well as members of the 1st and 10th Cavalry. Again Roosevelt pounded over lower ground under heavy fire; again he surged up grassy slopes, and again he saw Spaniards deserting their high fortifications. To left and right, all along the crested line of San Juan Heights, other regiments were doing the same. “When we reached these crests we found ourselves overlooking Santiago.”
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U
NTIL NIGHT FELL
, Roosevelt was more interested in looking at the carnage behind him than ahead at the prize city. The trenches were filled with corpses in light blue and white uniforms, most of them with “little holes in their heads from which their brains were oozing”
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—proof of the killing accuracy of Rough Rider volleys from the top of Kettle Hill. “Look at all these damned Spanish dead!” he exulted to Trooper Bob Ferguson, an old family friend.
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Official tallies revealed a fair score of American casualties—656 according to one count, 1,071 according to another. The Rough Riders contributed 89, but this only increased Roosevelt’s sense of pride; he noted that it was “the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment in the cavalry division.”
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“No hunting trip so far has ever equalled it in Theodore’s eyes,” Bob Ferguson wrote to Edith. “It makes up for the omissions of many past years … T. was just revelling in victory and gore.”
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Roosevelt’s exhilaration at finding himself a hero (already there was talk of a Medal of Honor)
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and, by virtue of his two charges, senior officer in command of the highest crest and the extreme front of the American line, was so great that he could not sit, let alone lie down, even in the midst of a surprise bombardment at
3:00 A.M
. A shell landed right next to him, besmirching his skin with powder,
and killing several nearby soldiers; but he continued to strut up and down, “snuffing the fragrant air of combat,”
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silhouetted against the flares like a black lion rampant.