llop and quite alone, made you feel that
you would like to cheer. He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot
handkerchief, a la Havelock, which, as he advanced, floated out straight
behind his head, like a guidon. Afterward, the men of his regiment who
followed this flag, adopted a polka-dot handkerchief as the badge of the
Rough Riders. These two officers were notably conspicuous in the charge,
but no one can claim that any two men, or any one man, was more brave or
more daring, or showed greater courage in that slow, stubborn advance,
than did any of the others. Some one asked one of the officers if he had
any difficulty in making his men follow him. "No," he answered, "I had
some difficulty in keeping up with them." As one of the brigade generals
said: "San Juan was won by the regimental officers and men. We had as
little to do as the referee at a prize-fight who calls 'time.' We called
'time' and they did the fighting."

I have seen many illustrations and pictures of this charge on the San
Juan hills, but none of them seem to show it just as I remember it. In
the picture-papers the men are running uphill swiftly and gallantly, in
regular formation, rank after rank, with flags flying, their eyes aflame,
and their hair streaming, their bayonets fixed, in long, brilliant lines,
an invincible, overpowering weight of numbers. Instead of which I think
the thing which impressed one the most, when our men started from cover,
was that they were so few. It seemed as if some one had made an awful
and terrible mistake. One's instinct was to call to them to come back.
You felt that some one had blundered and that these few men were blindly
following out some madman's mad order. It was not heroic then, it seemed
merely absurdly pathetic. The pity of it, the folly of such a sacrifice
was what held you.

They had no glittering bayonets, they were not massed in regular array.
There were a few men in advance, bunched together, and creeping up a
steep, sunny hill, the tops of which roared and flashed with flame. The
men held their guns pressed across their chests and stepped heavily as
they climbed. Behind these first few, spreading out like a fan, were
single lines of men, slipping and scrambling in the smooth grass, moving
forward with difficulty, as though they were wading waist high through
water, moving slowly, carefully, with strenuous effort. It was much more
wonderful than any swinging charge could have been. T