The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [208]
In The Rough Riders, Roosevelt ably described the timeworn, brush-covered flat in the island village of Daiquirí where his volunteer regiment camped one evening, on one side of them the tropical jungle and on the other a stagnant, malarial pool fringed with palm trees. After the sacking of Santiago, many of his Rough Riders, a third of whom had served in the Civil War, lay wounded in ditches with flies buzzing around them. Sometimes, after an American died, local Cubans would strip the corpse of all its equipment. Humans could be scavengers, too. Roosevelt turned to images of avians and crustaceans to explain the horror of death. “No man was allowed to drop out to help the wounded,” he lamented. “It was hard to leave them there in the jungle, where they might not be found again until the vultures and the land-crabs came, but war is a grim game and there was no choice.” 75
Roosevelt then went on to tell of U.S. volunteer soldiers, comrades in arms, mortally wounded—perhaps shot through the stomach—dying without uttering a sound or gasping out a last wish. Men lucky enough to crawl propped themselves up against palm trees and expired in the dismal shade, their uniforms drenched in sweat, urine, and blood. A little field hospital was set up, and Roosevelt witnessed the pathos of men heaving for air, their lungs collapsed, broken ribs piercing vital organs. “We found all our dead and all the badly wounded,” he wrote. “Around one of the latter the big, hideous land-crabs had gathered in a grewsome ring, waiting for life to be extinct. One of our own men and most of the Spanish dead had been found by the vultures before we got to them; and their bodies were mangled, the eyes and wounds being torn.”*76
If that ghastly scene wasn’t harrowing enough, Roosevelt proceeded to tell another story. After staring at a corpse that had been mutilated by vultures, the blood having coagulated hours before, Rough Rider Bucky O’Neill, who at home was the mayor of Prescott, Arizona, came up to Roosevelt, shook his head, and said, “Colonel, isn’t it [Walt] Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes out of princes and tear the flesh of kings?” Not wanting to discuss poetry, Roosevelt muttered that he wasn’t sure about the proper attribution and walked away. Then, as if to demonstrate how tenuous life really was, Roosevelt matter-of-factly noted in The Rough Riders that O’Neill himself soon perished in the trenches of Cuba: “Just a week afterward we were shielding his own body from the birds of prey.”77
V
In his review essay “Kidd’s Social Evolution” for The North American Review, Roosevelt offered an example of when the dictates of natural selection superseded a love of wildlife. “Even the most enthusiastic naturalist,” he wrote, “if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark.” 78 By this criterion, Roosevelt was a success in Cuba in two ways. He not only thwarted the Spanish sharks but managed to make detailed diary notes about vultures and crabs, which he planned to use in his memoir The Rough Riders.
When the victorious Rough Riders returned to the United States, Roosevelt was the most acclaimed man in America. His homeward journey, in fact, had been treated as major news. In hard, good health, taut and fit, his face coppered and his hair cut short, he was living his boyhood fantasy of being a war hero. Roosevelt had endured the vicissitudes of war with commendable grit, and now it was all bouquets. “His personal view of the war was reported