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By Root 3272 0

rising to a shrill crescendo, then sinking with a moan on the eu. It was the trajectory of a high-speed Mauser bullet, standard equipment with Spanish snipers. Bloodcurdling though the sound was, with the concomitant ping and zip of perforated leaves (enabling a man to judge its approach velocity, and the utter impossibility of getting out of the way in time), the worst moment came when the z-eu was followed by a loud chug, indicating that the bullet had hit flesh. The force of impact on a man’s outstretched arm was enough to spin him around before he thumped in a flaccid heap on the ground. Often as not, a man so struck would rise again after a few minutes, none the worse but for a tiny, cauterized hole; the flaccidity was merely a shock reaction, common to all Mauser victims.49 But other men lay where they dropped.

The first soldier to be killed by these first rifleshots of the Spanish-American War was Sergeant Hamilton Fish, who fell at the feet of Captain Capron. Then another Mauser took Capron in the heart. So much for their “frames of steel.”50 Six more Rough Riders died in the hail of fire that followed—the most intense, according to one scholarly major, in the history of warfare.51 Thirty-four men were wounded, many of them repeatedly. Private Isbell of L Troop was hit three times in the neck, twice in the left hand, once in the right hand, and finally in the head.52 Roosevelt, literally jumping up and down with excitement53 as he awaited Wood’s order to deploy, made no effort to run for cover; somehow the bullets missed him, although one did smack into a tree inches from his cheek, and filled his eyes with splinters of bark.54

Wood, whose casual confidence under fire earned him the nickname “Old Icebox,” asked Roosevelt to take three troops into the jungle on the right, while three other troops fanned out on the left. Marshall remained behind, idly curious to see how the Lieutenant Colonel comported himself in battle.

Perhaps a dozen of Roosevelt’s men had passed into the thicket before he did. Then he stepped across the wire himself, and, from that instant, became the most magnificent soldier I have ever seen. It was as if that barbed-wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it he left behind him in the bridle path all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly criticized in civic life, and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness, the calm judgment, the towering heroism, which made him, perhaps, the most admired and best beloved of all Americans in Cuba.55

Where the shots were coming from even Roosevelt, with his acute hearing, could not tell; he knew only that the snipers were distant and highly placed. Evidently the Spanish, trained in guerrilla tactics by three years of fighting the Cubans, knew exactly where the trail was; but how, since the Rough Riders were camouflaged by trees, did they know where to shoot? Much later it transpired that the strange cooing and cuckoo-calls he had heard earlier came from lookouts posted in the jungle, tracking the regiment’s progress to the point of ambush.56

All at once the trees parted and Roosevelt found himself gazing out over the Santiago road to a razorback ridge on the opposite side of the valley. General Young’s men were stationed below, under heavy fire themselves by the sound of it; but thanks to the enemy’s smokeless powder he still could not see the entrenchments. It took a newspaperman to point the Spaniards out to him. “There they are, Colonel,” cried Richard Harding Davis, “look over there; I can see their hats near that glade.” Roosevelt focused his binoculars, estimated the range, and ordered his troops to “rapid fire.” Davis joined in with a carbine he had picked up somewhere.57 The woods, according to Stephen Crane, “became aglow with fighting.” In three minutes, nine men were lying on their backs in Roosevelt’s immediate vicinity.58 But the Rough Riders fired back with such blistering accuracy that the Spaniards soon quit their trenches and