vice. With the
saber they could do nothing; but with the machete they could do
everything from hacking through dense jungle growths to sharpening a
pencil. During the days that followed many troopers equipped with
sabers conveniently lost them, but Wood's Rough Riders found the
machetes invaluable.

The authority to raise the regiment was given late in April, and on
the twenty-fourth day of June, against heavy odds, it won its first
action in the jungles at Las Guasimas. This was quick work, when it is
remembered that two weeks of that short six or seven week period were
practically used up in assembling and transporting the men by rail and
sea. Here is where organization and well-thought-out plans made a
remarkable showing.

It was not only a question of knowing what he wanted. It was his old
slogan: "Do it and don't talk about it."

{74}

{75}

THE SOLDIER

{76}

{77}

IV

THE SOLDIER

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