The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [337]
IN HIS SPEECH to the Naval War College a year before, Roosevelt had urged America to prepare for “blood, sweat, and tears” when war came. The Battle of Las Guásimas gave the Rough Riders ample opportunity to wallow in all three. Regimental surgeon Bob Church looked, that evening, “like a kid who had gotten his hands and arms into a bucket of thick red paint.”70 Gouts of blood trembled on the leaves along the trail, and plastered whole sheaves of grass together. Fresh blood flowed as Church snipped open Mauser holes in order to dress them. Wherever a casualty lay, the predators of Cuba collected in rings: huge land-crabs shredding corpses with their clattering claws, vultures tearing off lips and eyelids, then the eyeballs, and finally whole faces.71 But the most despised predators were Cubans themselves, who invariably materialized from the jungle to strip the dead of clothing, equipment, and jewelry, and rummage around for jettisoned food-cans. Was it for these squat, dull-eyed peasants that the flower of America had died?
Compassion, never one of Theodore Roosevelt’s outstanding characteristics, was notably absent from his written accounts of Las Guásimas and its aftermath—unless the perfunctory phrase “poor Capron and Ham Fish”72 can be counted to mean anything. His only recorded emotion as the Rough Riders buried seven of their dead next morning, in a common grave darkened with the shadows of circling buzzards, was pride in its all-American variety: “—Indian and cowboy, miner, packer, and college athlete, the man of unknown ancestry from the lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the crest of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes.” When Bucky O’Neill turned to him and asked, “Colonel, isn’t it Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes of princes, and tear the flesh of kings’?” Roosevelt answered coldly that he could not place the quotation.73
His duty, as he saw it, lay with those who were still standing and able to fight. Since landing in Cuba, his men had had nothing to eat or drink but hardtack, bacon, and sugarless coffee. What was left of these heavy comestibles had been dumped during their two forced marches, and due to General Shafter’s “maddening” mismanagement of the unloading operation (still in process at Siboney), no fresh supplies were expected for several days. Soon the Rough Riders were forced to scrounge, like Cubans, in the bags of dead Spanish mules.74
On the morning of 26 June, Roosevelt got wind of a stockpile of beans on the beach, and marched a squad of men hastily down to investigate. There were, indeed, at least eleven hundred pounds of beans available, so he went into the commissary and demanded the full amount for his regiment. The commissar reached for a book of regulations and showed him that “under sub-section B of section C of article 4, or something like that,” beans were available only to officers. Roosevelt had learned enough during his six years as Civil Service Commissioner not to protest this attitude. He merely went outside for a moment, then returned and demanded eleven hundred pounds of beans “for the officer’s mess.”
COMMISSAR But your officers cannot eat eleven hundred pounds of beans.
ROOSEVELT You don’t know what appetites my officers have.
COMMISSAR (wavering) I’ll have to send the requisition to Washington.
ROOSEVELT All right, only give me the beans.
COMMISSAR I’m afraid they’ll take it out of your salary.
ROOSEVELT That will be all right, only give me the beans.75
So the Rough Riders got their beans, and the requisition went to Washington. “Oh! what a feast we had, and how we enjoyed it!”76
“THE AVERAGE HEIGHT among the Americans,” reported a Barcelona newspaper, “is 5 feet 2 inches. This is due to their living almost entirely upon vegetables as they ship all their beef out of the country, so eager are they to make money. There is no doubt that one full-grown Spaniard can defeat any three men in America.”77
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