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bullets themselves made a small clean hole, with the result that the wound healed in a most astonishing manner.” Much of the time “the wounds from the minute steel-coated bullet, with its very high velocity, were certainly nothing like as serious as those made by the old large-caliber, low-power rifle. If a man was shot through the heart, spine, or brain he was, of course, killed instantly; but very few of the wounded died—even under the appalling conditions which prevailed.” One of his Rough Riders, for instance, was shot no fewer than seven times over the course of half an hour, but only when he was at last hit in the neck and losing blood quickly did he consent to leave the battlefield.50 Captain Munson, one of the surgeons at the field hospital, confirmed that “wounds by the Mauser bullet were apparently either immediately fatal on the field or trivial in their subsequent course.” Exit wounds were “scarcely larger than [those] of entrance,” and the jacketed bullets “did not make the ghastly wounds that were expected.”51 Unfortunately, the Mausers’ lack of killing power inspired an element of hubris among some Americans. “There is no Spanish bullet made that can kill me,” boasted Captain O’Neill of the Rough Riders a few heroic seconds before realizing that, yes, in fact, there was.52

Hard figures confirmed the anecdotal evidence of reduced morbidity and mortality from Mauser bullets. During the war U.S. troops incurred 1,320 cases of gunshot wounds in combat; of them, more than nine in ten were caused by rifle bullets—a figure tracking with the Civil War’s average of 90.1 percent. Slightly more than a quarter of these battle wounds were in the upper extremities, and a third were in the lower ones; owing to the likelihood of rapid blood loss if the major femoral and popliteal arteries were holed, death from being hit in the legs was commoner than if shot in the arms (2.6 percent to 1.1 percent). Even so, that percentage was not high, and had been hugely reduced from the Civil War figures of 13.8 percent and 6.5 percent respectively. Compared against the wounds men suffered in the Civil War, the Spanish-American casualties showed impressive improvements in survivability when they were shot in the rectum, genitals, bladder, prostate, and back (excluding spine): 1.9 percent, down from 11.7 percent. Abdominal injuries still remained by far the most lethal ones, accounting for about half of all deaths by gunshot, but in the Civil War 89.5 percent had proved fatal. Usually these remarkable improvements are attributed to prompt and antiseptic first aid, the increasing popularity of “surgical conservatism” (leaving wounds to heal rather than amputating at the first opportunity), and the advent of X-rays. These factors, of course, made a great difference in after-battle care. But in fact the diminished lethality of small-caliber Krag and Mauser rounds relative to the Civil War’s heavy .45s was primarily responsible for the decline in mortality during combat.53

Roosevelt may have been astonished that the much-feared Mauser’s high-velocity bullet inflicted so little damage, but he was by no means the only one. Until then virtually every ordnance expert, casual shooter, gunsmith, and soldier in the world had assumed that the faster a bullet traveled, and the greater its mass, the more shocking would be its impact as it thudded into the victim, pierced his skin, ripped his innards, and emerged on the other side. Thus caliber (which primarily determined projectile mass) and velocity were key to inflicting the kinds of gruesome wounds likeliest to result in the death of a bullet’s recipient. Centuries of ammunition development and rifle technology had been based on precisely this principle, thereby partly explaining why armies had been obsessed with increasing muzzle velocity and sticking fast to large calibers for so long.

Number 1 is the traditional lead .45 powered by 69 grains of black powder (penetrating just 3.3 inches into oak); Number 2 is the same but the lead has been jacketed by German silver (penetrating 5.3 inches);