[Transcriber's note]

Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book.
Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" spelling is left unchanged. Apparently conflicting spelling is not resolved, as in "Gouraud" and "Gourand".

[End Transcriber's note]

LEONARD WOOD

THE CAREER OF LEONARD WOOD

BY
JOSEPH HAMBLEN SEARS

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
LONDON
1920

Copyright 1919 by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America

TO GENERAL LEONARD WOOD
By Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

Your vision keen, unerring when the blind,
Who could not see, turned, groping, from the light.
Your sentient knowledge of the wise and right
Have won to-day the freedom of mankind.
Honor to whom the honor be assigned!
Mightier in exile than the men whose might
Is of the sword alone, and not of sight.
You march beside the victor host aligned.
Had not your spirit soared, our ardent youth
Had faltered leaderless; their eager feet
Attuned to effort for the valiant truth
Through your command rushed swiftly to compete
To hold on high the torch of Liberty--
Great-visioned Soul, yours is the victory!
November 11, 1918
From "Service and Sacrifice: Poems"
Copyright. 1915. 1916. 1917. 1918. 1919. by
Charles Scribner's Sons.
By permission of the publishers.

CONTENTS

THE SUBJECT

{11}

[I]
THE SUBJECT

In these days immediately following the Great War it is well upon beginning anything--even a modest biographical sketch--to consider a few elementals and distinguish them from the changing unessentials, to keep a sound basis of sense and not be led into hysteria, to look carefully again at the beams of our house and not be deceived into thinking that the plaster and the wall paper are the supports of the building.

Let us consider a few of these elementals that apply to the subject in hand as well as to the rest of the universe--elemental truths which do not change, which no Great War can alter in the least, which serve as guides at all times and will help at every doubtful point. They range themselves somewhat as follows:

The human being is entitled to the pursuit of happiness--happiness in the very broadest sense of the word. No one can approach this object {12} unless he is in some way subordinated to something and unless he is responsible for something. No man can get satisfaction out of life unless he is responsible for what he does to some authority higher than himself and unless there is some one or something that looks to him for guidance. Perhaps the existence of religion has much to do with this. Perhaps prayer and all that it means to us belongs in the category of the first of these elementals. Certainly the family is an example of the second.

The family is the unit of civilization--always has been and always will be. The father and the mother have their collective existence, and their children looking to them for guidance, support and growth, both physical and moral. The moment the family begins to exist it becomes a responsibility for its head, and around it centers a large part of the life and happiness of the human being.

In like manner the state is the unit to which we are subordinated.

These constitute two examples of responsibility and subordination which are necessary to the {13} acquirement of civilization, of happiness and of the rewards of life.

Wherever the state has presumed to enter too far into the conduct of the family it has overstepped its bounds and that particular civilization has degenerated. Wherever the family has presumed to give up its subordination to the state and gather unto itself the responsibility through special privilege, that particular state has begun to die.

In modern civilization it is as impossible to conceive of a state without the unit of the family, as it is to consider groups of families without something that we call a state. It is ludicrous to think of a strong and virile nation composed of one hundred million bachelors. We must go back to the feudal days of the middle ages to get a picture of the family without a state.

In other words, a man, to approach happiness, must have his family in support of which it is his privilege to take off his coat and work, and--if fate so decree--live; and he must have his country's flag in honor of which it is his privilege to take off his hat, and--if need be--die.

{14}

Love and patriotism--these are the names of two of the sturdy beams of the house of civilization.

These old familiar laws have been brought forward again by the outbreak of the Great War. There is a letter in existence written by a young soldier who volunteered at the start, a letter which he wrote to his unborn son as he sat in a front line trench in France. It tells the whole great truth in a line. It says: "My little son, I do not fully realize just why I am fighting here, but I know that one reason is to make sure that you will not have to do it by and by." That lad was responsible for a new family, and was the servant of his state--and he began his approach to the great happiness when he thought of writing that letter.

It will be well for us to remember these simple laws as we proceed.

Fifty-eight years ago these laws and several more like them were just as true as they are now. Fifty-eight years hence they will still be true, as they will be five thousand eight hundred years hence. Fifty-eight years ago--to be exact, {15} October 9, 1860--there was born up in New Hampshire a man child named Leonard Wood, in the town of Winchester, whence he was transferred at the age of three months to Massachusetts and finally at the age of eight years to Pocasset on Cape Cod. This man child is still alive at the time of writing, and during his fifty-eight years he has stood for these elemental truths in and out of boyhood, youth and manhood in such a fashion that his story--always interesting--becomes valuable at a time when, the Great War being over, many nations, to say nothing of many individuals, are forgetting, in their admiration of the new plaster and the wall paper, that the beams of the house of civilization are what hold it strong and sturdy as the ages proceed.

This place, Cape Cod, where the formative years of Leonard Wood's life were passed, is a sand bank left by some melting glacier sticking out into the Atlantic in the shape of a doubled-up arm with a clenched fist as if it were ready at any moment to strike out and defend New England against any attack that might come from the eastward. Those who call it their native place have acquired {16} something of its spirit. They have ever been ready to oppose any aggression from the eastward or any other direction, and they have ever been ready to stand firmly upon the conviction that the integrity of the family and of the state must be maintained. And young Wood from them and from his Mayflower Pilgrim ancestors absorbed and was born with a common sense and a directness of vision that have appeared throughout his life under whatever conditions he found himself.

There seems to have been nothing remarkable about him either in his boyhood or in his youth. He achieved nothing out of the ordinary through that whole period. But there has always been in him somewhere, the solid basis of sense and reason which kept him to whatever purpose he set himself to achieve along the lines of the great elemental truths of life and far away from visionary hallucinations of any sort. If it was Indian fighting, he worked away at the basis of the question and got ready and then carried out. If it was war, the same. If it was administration, he {17} studied the essentials, prepared for them, and then carried them out.

Like all great achievements, it is simplicity itself and can be told in words of one syllable. In all lines of his extraordinarily varied career extending over all the corners of the globe he respected and built up authority of government and protected and encouraged the development of the family unit. One might say "Why not? Of course." The answer is "Who in this country in the last thirty years has done it to anything like the same extent?"

Many minds during this time have advanced new ideas; many men have invented amazing things; many able people have opened up new avenues of thought and vision to the imagination of the world, sometimes to good and lasting purpose, sometimes otherwise. But who has taken whatever problem was presented to him and invariably, no matter what quality was required, brought that problem to a successful conclusion without upheaval, or chaos, or even much excitement for any one outside the immediately interested group?

It is not genius; it is organization. It is not {18} the flare of inventive ability; it is the high vision of one whose code rested always on elemental, sound and enduring principles and who has not swerved from these to admire the plaster and the paper on the wall. It is finally the great quality that makes a man keep his feet on the ground and his heart amongst the bright stars.

Of such stuff are the men of this world made whom people lean on, whom people naturally look to in emergency, who guide instinctively and unerringly, carrying always the faith of those about them because they deal with sound things, elemental truths and sane methods--because they give mankind what Leonard Wood's greatest friend called "a square deal."

It is difficult to treat much of his youth because he is still living and the family life of any man is his own and not the public's business. But there is a certain interest attaching to his life-work for his country in knowing that his great-great-grandfather commanded a regiment in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill and that his father was a doctor who served in the Union army during the Civil War. Out of such heredity has {19} come a doctor who is a Major General in the United States Army.

At the same time his own life on Cape Cod outside of school at the Middleboro Academy was marked by what might distinguish any youngster of that day and place--a strong liking for small boating, for games out of doors, for riding, shooting and fishing. These came from a fine healthy body which to this day at his present age is amazing in its capacity to carry him through physical work. He can to-day ride a hundred miles at a stretch and walk thirty miles in any twenty-four hours.

Later in life this was one of the many points of common interest that drew him and Theodore Roosevelt so closely together. It has no particular significance other than to make it possible for him in many lands at many different limes to do that one great thing which makes men leaders--to show his men the way, to do himself whatever he asked others to do, never to give an order whether to a military, sanitary, medical or administrative force that he could not and did not do himself in so far as one man could do it.

{20}

There was little or no money in the Wood family and the young man had to plan early to look out for himself. He wanted to go to sea--probably because he lived on Cape Cod and came from a long line of New Englanders. He wanted to go into the Navy. He even planned to join an Arctic expedition at the age of twenty and began to collect material for his outfit. But finally, following his father's lead, he settled upon the study of medicine.

This led to the Harvard University Medical School and to his graduation in 1884. There then followed the regular internship of a young physician and the beginning of practice in Boston.

Then came the change that separated Wood from the usual lot of well educated, well prepared doctors who come out of a fine medical school and begin their lifework of following their profession and building up a practice, a record, a family and the history which is the highest ideal man can have and the collective result of which is a sound nation.

Wood wanted action. He wanted to do {21} something. He had a strong inclination to the out-of-doors. And it is probably this, together with his inheritance and the chances of the moment, that led him to enter the army as a surgeon. As there was no immediate vacancy in the medical corps he took the job of contract surgeon at a salary of $100 a month and was first ordered to duty at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor where he stayed only a few days. His request for "action" was granted in June, 1885, and he wais ordered to Arizona to report to General Crook on the Mexican border near Fort Huachuca.

And here begins the career of Leonard Wood.

{22}

{23}

THE INDIAN FIGHTER

{24}

{25}

[II]
THE INDIAN FIGHTER

The problem was what turned out to be the last of the Indian fighting, involving a long-drawn-out campaign. For over a hundred years, as every one knows, the unequal struggle of two races for this continent had been in progress and the history of it is the ever tragic story of the survival of the fittest. No one can read it without regret at the destruction, the extermination, of a race. No one, however, can for a moment hesitate in his judgment of the inevitableness of it, since it is and always will be the truth that the man or the race or the nation which cannot keep up with the times must go under--and should go under. Education, brains, genius, organization, ability, imagination, vision--whatever it may be called or by how many names--will forever destroy and push out ignorance, incompetence, stupidity.

The Indians were not able--tragic as the truth {26} is--to move onward, and so they had to move out and give place to the more worthy tenant.

The end of this century of struggle was the campaign against the Apaches in the Southwest along the Mexican border, where they made their last stand under their able leader Geronimo.

The young doctor was detailed at once for duty on a broiling fourth of July under Captain--afterwards General--Henry W. Lawton, and the next day he rode a horse over thirty-five miles. That incident to the initiated is noteworthy, but even more so is the fact that shortly afterwards in a hard drive of five succeeding days he averaged eighteen hours a day either in the saddle or on foot, leading the horses. It was a stiff test. To make it worse he was given the one unassigned horse--that is to say, a horse that was known as an "outlaw"--whose jerky gait made each saddle-sore complain at every step. The sun beat down fiercely; but, burned and blistered fore and aft, Leonard Wood could still smile and ask for more action.

The stoicism of the tenderfoot who had come to play their game was not lost on the troopers {27} with whom he was to spend the next two years fighting Indians. He "healed in the saddle" at once and a few weeks later was out-riding and out-marching the best of Captain Lawton's command, all of whom were old and experienced Indian fighters.

This was not to be the last time that Leonard Wood was to find himself faced at the outset by tacit suspicion and lack of confidence on the part of the men he was to command. Years later in the Philippines he was put up against a similar hostility, with responsibilities a thousandfold more grave, and in the same dogged way he won confidence--unquestioning loyalty--by proving that he was better than the best. "Do it and don't talk about it," was his formula for success. It was this quality in him that made it possible for Captain Lawton to write to General Nelson A. Miles, who had then succeeded General Crook, after the successful Geronimo campaign: "... I can only repeat that I have before reported officially and what I have said to you: that his services during the trying campaign were of the highest order. I speak particularly of services {28} other than those devolving upon him as a medical officer; services as a combatant or line officer voluntarily performed. He sought the most difficult work, and by his determination and courage rendered a successful issue of the campaign possible."

General Crook, who commanded the troops along the border, characterized the Apaches as "tigers of the human race." Tigers they were, led by Geronimo, the man whose name became a by-word for savagery and cruelty. For a time these Indians had remained subdued and quiet upon a reservation, and there can be no question but what the subsequent outbreaks that led to the long campaign in which Wood took part were due largely to the lack of judgment displayed by the officials in whose charge they were placed. Both the American settlers and the Mexicans opposed the location of the Indians on the San Carlos reservation and lost no opportunity to show their hostility. When General Crook took command of that district he found he had to deal with a mean, sullen and treacherous band of savages.

The American forces were constantly embroiled with the Chiricahuas. Treaties and agreements {29} were made only to be broken whenever blood lust or "tiswin"--a strong drink made from corn--moved the tribe to the warpath and fresh depredations. Due to General Crook's tireless efforts there were several occasions when the Indians remained quietly on their reservation, but it was only a matter of months at the best before one of the tribes, usually the Chiricahuas, would break forth again. Not until the treaty of 1882 with Mexico was it possible for our troops to pursue them into the Mexican mountains where they took refuge after each uprising. In 1883 General Crook made an expedition into Mexico which resulted in the return of the Chiricahuas and the Warm Springs tribes under Geronimo and Natchez to the Apache reservation.

Two years of comparative quiet followed. The Indians followed agricultural pursuits and the settlers, who had come to establish themselves on ranches along the border, went out to their plowing and fence building unarmed. In May, 1886, the Indians indulged in an extensive and prolonged "tiswin" drunk. The savagery that lurked in their hearts broke loose and they escaped from {30} their reservation in small bands, leaving smoking trails of murder, arson and pillage behind them. Acts of ugly violence followed. General Crook threatened to kill the last one of them, if it took fifty years, and at one moment it seemed as though he had them under control. "Tiswin" once again set them loose and they stampeded.

Their daring and illusiveness kept the American and Mexican troops constantly in action. One band of eleven Indians crossed into the United States, raided an Apache reservation, killed Indians as well as thirty-eight whites, captured two hundred head of stock and returned to Mexico after having traveled four weeks and covered over 1,200 miles.

It was into such warfare that Wood was plunged. No sooner had he arrived and begun his work than he put in a request for line duty in addition to his duties as a medical officer. This was granted immediately, because the need of men who could do something was too great to admit of much punctiliousness in the matter of military custom. Before the arrival of his commission as Assistant Surgeon, January, 1886, he {31} had served as commanding officer of infantry in a desperately hard pursuit in the Sierra Madres, ending in an attack on an Indian camp. He was repeatedly assigned to the most strenuous, fatiguing duty. After having marched on foot one day twenty-five miles with Indian scouts he rode seventy-three miles with a message at night, coming back at dawn the next day, just in time to break camp and march thirty-four miles to a new camp. He was given at his own request command of infantry under Captain Lawton, and this assignment to line duty was sanctioned by General Miles, who had recently taken over the command of the troops along the border.

General Miles was one of the greatest Indian fighters the country has ever known. He was peculiarly fitted to assume this new job of suppressing the Apache. He judged and selected the men who were to be a part of this campaign by his own well-established standards. As its leader he selected Captain Lawton, then serving with the Fourth United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, primarily because Captain Lawton believed that these Indians could be subjugated. {32} He had met their skill and cunning and physical strength through years of such warfare under General Crook, and possessed the necessary qualifications to meet the demands of the trying campaign that faced him. After speaking of Captain Lawton, General Miles says in his published recollections:

"I also found at Fort Huachuca another splendid type of American manhood, Captain Leonard Wood, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army. He was a young officer, age twenty-four, a native of Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great intelligence, sterling, manly qualities and resolute spirit. He was also perhaps as fine a specimen of physical strength and endurance as could easily be found."

"... His services and observations and example were most commendable and valuable, and added much to the physical success of the enterprise."

General Field Orders No. 7, issued April 20, 1886, by General Miles for the guidance of the troops in his command, tell clearly and concisely the character and demands of the time.

{33}

"The chief object of the troops will be to capture or destroy any band of hostile Apache Indians found in this section of the country, and to this end the most vigorous and persistent efforts will be required of all officers and soldiers until this object is accomplished.

"... The cavalry will be used in light scouting parties with a sufficient force held in readiness at all times to make the most persistent and effective pursuit.

"To avoid any advantage the Indians may have by a relay of horses, where a troop or squadron commander is near the hostile Indians, he will be justified in dismounting one half of his command and selecting the lightest and best riders to make pursuit by the most vigorous forced marches until the strength of all the animals of his command shall have been exhausted.

"In this way a command should, under a judicious leader, capture a band of Indians or drive them from 160 to 200 miles in forty-eight hours through a country favorable for cavalry movements; and the horses of the troops will be trained for this purpose."

{34}

To get a picture of young Wood at this time it is necessary to look at the situation through the eyes of that day and through the eyes of youth as well.

A young man of twenty-four had been brought up by the sea in what we will call for the sake of politeness conservative New England. He had all the sound and sane basis of character that comes from what in this country was an old and established civilization. He had been educated in his profession at the most academic and conservative institution in the United States; a profession which while not an exact science is nevertheless a science requiring sane methods and the elimination of risks. He had begun the regular work of this profession. He possessed also what every young man with a healthy body of that day possessed-- and still possesses--a passion for romance, for the road, for the great adventure which at that time in this country still centered around the pistol shooting, broncho riding, Indian fighting cowboy.

We who are old have forgotten the paper covered stories we used to read surreptitiously {35} about the "Broncho Buster's Revenge," or "The Three-Fingered Might of the West." But we did read them and long for the great life of the plains. Even Jesse James was a hero to many of us.

But for a New Englander educated at Harvard to the practice of medicine to pick up his deeply driven stakes and actually go into this realm of romance was unusual in the extreme; and to be so well trained and in such good condition, with such high courage as to make good at once amongst those men who looked down on an Eastern tender-foot was sufficiently rare to promise much for the future.

The young man had the love of romance that all young lives have, but he had the unusual stimulus to it that led him to make it for the moment his actual life. And those who study his whole life will find again and again that when the parting of the ways came he invariably took the road of adventure, provided that it was always in the service of his country. Such then was the makeup and the condition of this young man when in the spring of 1886 Captain Lawton, having {36} received orders to assume command of the expedition into Mexico against the hostile Apache, included Wood as one of his four officers. The force consisted of forty-five troopers, twenty Indian scouts, thirty infantrymen and two pack trains. And thus began the two-thousand-mile chase into the fastnesses of Sonora and Chihuahua which ended with the surrender of Geronimo.

General Miles' campaign methods differed from those of General Crook in many ways. He always assumed the aggressive. His motto was, "Follow the Indian wherever he goes and strike him whenever you can. No matter how bad the country, go on." Under these instructions the troops went over the border and down into the depths of the Sonora, jumping the Indian whenever an opportunity offered, never giving him any rest. Wherever he went the troops followed. If he struck the border, a well arranged system of heliostat stations passed the word along to a body of waiting or passing scouts. General Miles' methods differed from those of General Crook also in the matter of the use of the heliostat, a system of signaling based on flashes of the sun's rays from {37} mirrors. He had used them experimentally while stationed in the Department of the Columbia, and now determined to make them of practical use at his new station. Over the vast tracts of rough, unpopulated land of Arizona and Mexico the signals flashed, keeping different detachments in touch with their immediate commands, and the campaign headquarters in touch with its base.

Even before Captain Lawton's command could be made ready the Indians themselves precipitated the fight. Instead of remaining in the Sierra Madres, where they were reasonably safe from assault, they commenced a campaign of violence south of the boundary. This gave both the American troops and the Mexicans who were operating in conjunction with them exact knowledge of their whereabouts. On the 27th of April they came northward, invading the United States. Innumerable outrages were committed by them which are now part of the history of that heart-breaking campaign. One, for example, typical of the rest was the case of the Peck family. Their ranch was surrounded, the family captured and a number of the ranch hands killed. The husband {38} was tied and compelled to witness the tortures to which his wife was submitted. His daughter, thirteen years old, was abducted by the band and carried nearly three hundred miles. In the meantime Captain Lawton's command with Wood in charge of the Apache scouts was pursuing them hotly. A short engagement between the Mexican troops and the Indians followed. On the heels of this the American troops came up and the little Peck girl was recaptured. Nightfall, however, prevented any decisive engagement, and before daybreak the Indians had, slipped away.

The Indians found it better to divide into two bands, one under Natchez, which turned to the north, and the other under Geronimo, which went to the west. The first band was intercepted by Lieutenant Brett of the Second Cavalry after a heartbreaking pursuit. At one time the pursuing party was on the trail for twenty-six hours without a halt, and eighteen hours without water. The men suffered so intensely from thirst that many of them opened their veins to moisten their lips with their own blood. But the Indians suffered far more. In Geronimo's story of those {39} days, published many years later, he wrote: "We killed cattle to eat whenever we were in need of food, but we frequently suffered greatly for need of water. At one time we had no water for two days and nights, and our horses almost died of thirst." Finally on the evening of June 6th the cavalry came into contact with Geronimo's band and the Indians were scattered.

For four months Captain Lawton and Leonard Wood pursued the savages over mountain ranges and through the canyons. During this time the troops marched 1,396 miles. The conditions under which they worked were cruel. The intense heat, the lack of water, and the desperately rough country covered with mountains and cactus hindered the command, but the men had the consolation of knowing that the Indians were in worse plight. Furthermore, the trustworthiness of the Indian scouts, a tattered, picturesque band of renegades, was coming under suspicion. Perhaps it was because of their unreliability that an attack made upon the 18th of July was not an entire success. The Indians escaped, but their most valued {40} possessions, food and horses, fell into the hands of our troopers.

It was the beginning of the end. A month later they received word that the Indians were working towards Santa Teresa, and Captain Lawton moved forward to head them off. Leonard Wood's personal account of this engagement follows:

"On the 13th of July we effected the surprise of the camp of Geronimo and Natchez which eventually led to their surrender and resulted in the immediate capture of everything in their camps except themselves and the clothes they wore. It was our practice to keep two scouts two or three days in advance of the command, and between them and the main body four or five other scouts. The Indian scouts in advance would locate the camp of the hostiles and send back word to the next party, who in their turn would notify the main command; then a forced march would be made in order to surround and surprise the camp. On the day mentioned, following this method of procedure, we located the Indians on the Yaqui River in a section of the country almost impassable for man or beast and {41} in a position which the Indians evidently felt to be perfectly secure. The small tableland on which the camp was located bordered on the Yaqui River and was surrounded on all sides by high cliffs with practically only two points of entrance, one up the river and the other down. The officers were able to creep up and look down on the Indian camp which was about two thousand feet below their point of observation. All the fires were burning, the horses were grazing and the Indians were in the river swimming with evidently not the slightest apprehension of attack. Our plan was to send scouts to close the upper opening and then to send the infantry, of which I had the command, to attack the camp from below.

"Both the Indians and the infantry were in position and advanced on the hostile camp, which, situated as it was on this tableland covered with canebrake and boulders, formed an ideal position for Indian defense. As the infantry moved forward the firing of the scouts was heard, which led us to believe that the fight was on, and great, accordingly, was our disgust to find, on our arrival, that the firing was accounted for by the fact that {42} the scouts were killing the stock, the Apaches themselves having escaped through the northern exit just a few minutes before their arrival. It was a very narrow escape for the Indians, and was due to mere accident. One of their number, who had been out hunting, discovered the red headband of one of our scouts as he was crawling around into position. He immediately dropped his game and notified the Apaches, and they were able to get away just before the scouts closed up the exit. Some of these Indians were suffering from old wounds. Natchez himself was among this number, and their sufferings through the pursuit which followed led to their discouragement and, finally, to their surrender."

The persistent action of our troops was beginning to have its effect, and when the Indians ceased to commit depredations it was good evidence to those who knew Indians and Indian nature that they were beginning to think of surrender.

One night the troops ran into a Mexican pack-train, which brought the first reports that Indians were near Fronteras, a little village in Sonora. Two of their women had come into town to find the {43} wife of an old Mexican who was with the Americans as a guide, hoping, through her, to open up communications looking to a surrender. As soon as the report was received Captain Lawton sent Lieutenant Gatewood of the Sixth Cavalry, who had joined the command, with two friendly Apaches of the same tribe as those who were out on the warpath, to go ahead and send his men into the hostile camp and demand their surrender. This he eventually succeeded in doing, but the Indians refused to surrender, saying that they would talk only with Lawton, or, as they expressed it, "the officer who had followed them all summer." This eventually led to communication being opened and one morning at daybreak Geronimo, Natchez and twelve other Indians appeared, in camp. Their inclinations seemed at least to be peaceful enough to allow the entire body of Indians to come down and camp within two miles of the Americans. It was agreed that they should meet General Miles and formally surrender to him and that the Indians and the troops should move further north to a more convenient meeting place. To give confidence to the Indians in this new state {44} of affairs, Captain Lawton, Leonard Wood and two other officers agreed to travel with them. Due to a mistake in orders, the American troopers started off in the wrong direction, and Captain Lawton was obliged to leave in search of them. This left the three remaining officers practically as hostages in the Indian camp. Speaking of this incident. General Wood says:

"Instead of taking advantage of our position, they assured us that while we were in their camp it was our camp, and that as we had never lied to them they were going to keep faith with us. They gave us the best they had to eat and treated us as well as we could wish in every way. Just before giving us these assurances, Geronimo came to me and asked to see my rifle. It was a Hotchkiss and he had never seen its mechanism. When he asked me for the gun and some ammunition, I must confess I felt a little nervous, for I thought it might be a device to get hold of one of our weapons. I made no objection, however, but let him have it, showed him how to use it, and he fired at a mark, just missing one of his own men, which he regarded as a great joke, rolling on the {45} ground, laughing heartily and saying 'good gun.'

"Late the next afternoon we came up with our command, and we then proceeded toward the boundary line. The Indians were very watchful, and when we came near any of our troops we found the Indians were always aware of their presence before we knew of it ourselves."

For eleven days Captain Lawton's command moved north, with Geronimo's and Natchez's camps moving in a parallel course. During these last days of Geronimo's leadership his greatest concern was for the welfare of his people. The most urgent request that he had to make of Captain Lawton was to ask repeatedly for the assurance that his people would not be murdered.

Captain Lawton in his official report says of Wood's work in the campaign:

"No officer of infantry having been sent with the detachment ... Assistant Surgeon Wood was, at his own request, given command of the infantry. The work during June having been done by the cavalry, they were too much exhausted to be used again without rest, and they were left in camp at Oposura to recuperate.

{46}

"During this short campaign, the suffering was intense. The country was indescribably rough and the weather swelteringly hot, with heavy rains for day or night. The endurance of the men was tried to the utmost limit. Disabilities resulting from excessive fatigue reduced the infantry to fourteen men, and as they were worn out and without shoes when the new supplies reached me July 29th, they were returned to the supply camp for rest, and the cavalry under Lieutenant A. L. Smith, who had just joined his troop, continued the campaign. Heavy rains having set in, the trail of the hostiles, who were all on foot, was entirely obliterated.

"I desire particularly to invite the attention of the Department Commander to Assistant Surgeon Leonard Wood, the only officer who has been with me through the whole campaign. His courage, energy and loyal support during the whole time; his encouraging example to the command when work was the hardest and prospects darkest; his thorough confidence and belief in the final successes of the expedition, and his untiring efforts to make {47} it so, have placed me under obligations so great that I cannot even express them."

Through the formal language of a military report crops out the respect of a commanding officer who knew whereof he spoke, the acknowledgment that here was a young subordinate who never despaired, never gave up, who always did his part and more than his part, and who placed his commanding officer under obligations which he was unable "even to express." That was a great deal for any young man to secure. To-day, after the Great War, there are many such extracts from official reports and all are unquestionably deserved. But they are the result of a nation awakened to patriotism when all went in together. In 1886, when the nation was at peace, when commercial pursuits were calling all young men to make their fortune, young Leonard Wood answered a much less universal call to do his work in a fight that had none of the flare or glory of the front line trench in Flanders.

Out of it all came to him at a very early age practice in handling men in rough country in rough times--men who were not puppets even {48} though they were regular army privates. They had to be handled at times with an iron hand, at times with the softest of gloves; and an officer to gain their confidence and respect had to show them that he could beat them at their own game and be one of them--and still command.

The Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him years later for this Indian work is a fair return of what he accomplished, for this Medal of Honor, the then only prize for personal bravery and high fighting qualities which his country could give him, has always been the rare and much coveted award of army men.

It was in Wood's case the mark of conspicuous fighting qualities, conspicuous bravery and marked attention to duty--a sign of success of a high order for a New England doctor of twenty-five.

{49}

THE OFFICIAL

{50}

{51}

[III]
THE OFFICIAL

Chance no doubt at times plays an important part in the making of a man. Yet perhaps Cassias' remark, through the medium of Shakespeare, that "The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings," has the truer ring. Chance no doubt comes to all of us again and again, but it is the brain that takes the chance which deserves the credit and not the accidental event, opportunity or occasion offering.

It was not chance that sent Leonard Wood to Arizona to fight Indians. It was the result of long hours of meditation in Boston when, as a young doctor, he decided finally to leave the usual routine of a physician's career and strike out in another and less main-traveled road. There was nothing of luck or chance in this decision, the carrying out of which taught him something that he used later to the advantage of himself and his country.

Out of the Indian experiences came to him in {62} the most vigorous possible way through actual observation the necessity for bodily health. No man could ride or walk day in and day out across waterless deserts and keep his courage and determination, to say nothing of his good common sense, without being in the best of physical condition. No man could get up in the morning after a terrific night's march, and collect his men and cheer and encourage them unless he was absolutely fit and in better condition than they.

He learned, too, that all matters of outfit, care of person, of equipment, of horses required the most constant attention day by day, hour by hour. He had to deal with an enemy who belonged to this country, who knew and was accustomed to its climatic conditions as well as its topography, and he had to beat him at his own game, or fail.

He learned that preparation, while it should never delay action, can never be overdone. This must have been drilled into the young man by the hardest and most grueling experiences, because it has been one of the gospels of his creed {53} since that time and is to this day his text upon all occasions.

He learned, too, something deeper than even these basic essentials of the fighting creed. He developed what has always been a part of himself--the conviction that authority is to be respected, that allegiance to superior officers and government is the first essential of success, that organization is the basis of smoothly running machinery of any kind, and that any weakening of these principles is the sign of decay, of failure, and of disintegration.

He learned that a few men, well trained, thoroughly organized, fit and ready, can beat a host of individualists though each of the latter may excel in ability any of the former, and there is in this connection a curiously interesting significance in the man's passionate fondness throughout his whole life for the game of football. At Middleboro, in California, in service in the South and in Washington, he was at every opportunity playing football, because in addition to its physical qualities, this game above all others depends for {54} its success upon organization, preparation and what is called "team play."

Through these early days it is to be noted, therefore, as a help in understanding his great work for his country which came later that his sense of the value of organization grew constantly stronger and stronger along with a solid belief in the necessity for subordination to his superior officers and through them to his state and his flag. The respect which he acquired for the agile Indians went hand in hand with the knowledge that in the end they could not fail to be captured and defeated, because they had neither the sense of organization, nor the intelligence to accept and respect authority which not only would have given them success, but would in reality have made the whole campaign unnecessary, had the Indian mind been able to conceive them in their true light and the Indian character been willing to observe their never-changing laws.

The result, however, was that the spirit of the Indians was broken by the white man's relentless determination.

The hostile Apaches were finally disposed of by {55} sending them out of the territory. They were treated as prisoners of war and the guarantees that General Miles had given them as conditions of surrender were respected by the Government, although there was a great feeing in favor of making them pay the full penalty for their outrages. President Grover Cleveland expressed himself as hoping that "nothing will be done with Geronimo which will prevent our treating him as a prisoner of war, if we cannot hang him, which I would much prefer."

At the end of the campaign General Miles set about reorganizing his command. For several months Wood was engaged in practice maneuvers. The General wished to expand his heliographic system of signaling, and to that end commenced an extensive survey of the vast unpopulated tracts of Arizona, which his troops might have to cover in time of action. Wood was one of the General's chief assistants in this survey, and in 1889, when he was ordered away, he probably knew as much of Arizona and the southwestern life as any man ever stationed there.

The orders which took him from the border {56} country made him one of the staff surgeons at Headquarters in Los Angeles. This post promised to be inactive and uninteresting but Captain Wood managed to distinguish himself in two respects, first as a surgeon and second as an athlete. This period of his life varied from month to month in some instances, but in the main it was the usual existence of an army official in the capacity of military surgeon. It extended over a period of eleven years, from 1887 to 1898. These were the eleven years between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven--very critical years in the existence of a man. It was during these years that he met Miss Louise A. Condit Smith, a niece of Chief Justice Field, who afterwards became his wife and began with him a singularly simple and homelike family life that is the second of his vital interests in this world. He has never allowed his family life to interfere with his service to his country. And, paradoxical as it may seem, he has never allowed his lifework for his state to interfere with the happy and even tenor of his home existence. Children came in due course and the family unit became complete--that quiet, straightforward {57} existence of the family which is the characteristic of American life to-day, as it is of any other well-organized civilized nation.

In the practice of his profession he was able to do a lasting service to his commanding officer. General Miles suffered a grave accident to his leg when a horse fell upon it. It was the opinion of the surgeon who attended him that amputation would be necessary. But the General was of no mind to beat a one-legged retreat in the midst of a highly interesting and successful career. Captain Wood had inspired confidence in him as an Indian fighter--a confidence so strong that he thought it might not be misplaced if it became confidence in him as a doctor--and so Wood was summoned.

"They say they will have to cut off this leg, but they are not going to do it," said the General. "I am going to leave it up to you. You'll have to save it."

A few weeks later General Miles was up and about, and under his young surgeon's care the wound healed and the leg was saved.

While stationed at Los Angeles headquarters {68} Wood found himself with enough time for much hard sport. It was a satisfying kind of life after the strenuous months of border service.

In 1888 he was ordered back to the border where he served with the 10th Cavalry in the Apache Kid outbreak. After a few months of active service, he was ordered to Fort McDowell and then, in 1889, to California again.

From California he was ordered to Fort McPherson, near Atlanta, Georgia, where he again distinguished himself at football. He trained the first team in the Georgia Institute of Technology, became its Captain and during the two years of his Captaincy lost but one game and defeated the champion team of the University of Georgia.

An incident has been told by his fellow players at Fort McPherson which shows exceedingly well a certain Spartan side to Wood's nature. One afternoon at a football game he received a deep cut over one eye. He returned to his office after the game and, after coolly sterilizing his instrument and washing the wound, stood before a mirror and calmly took four stitches in his eyelid.

Such were the characteristics, such the {59} experience, of the young man when in 1896 he was ordered to Washington--that morgue of the government official--to become Assistant Attending Surgeon. The holder of this position often shares with the Navy Surgeons the responsibility of medical attention to the President, and in addition he acts as medical adviser to army officers and their families and is the official physician to the Secretary of War.

It was not an office that appealed to Captain Wood. It could not; since he was a man essentially of out-of-doors, of action and of administration. Yet he seems to have made such a success of the work that he became the personal friend of both Cleveland and McKinley. His relations with President Cleveland were of the most intimate sort, resulting from mutual respect and liking as well as a mutual understanding on the part of both men of the other's good qualities. He saw him in the White House at all hours of the day and night; saw him with his family and his children about him; noted their fondness for their father and his devotion to them. It was a quality so marked in Lincoln, so strong in most great men {60} of the sound, calm, fearless, administrative sort. Wood himself has exhibited the same quality in his own family. And in those days the perfect understanding of the father and his children, the simple family life that went on in the splendid old house in Washington which combined the dignity of a State and the simplicity of a home unequaled by any great ruler's house upon this earth--all tended to bring out this native quality in the President's medical adviser.

It was at the conclusion of Cleveland's second term that Wood was assigned to this position. On one of the President's trips for recreation and rest--a shooting expedition on the inland waters near Cape Hatteras--he was one of the party which included also Admiral Evans and Captain Lamberton. The hours spent in shooting boxes or in the evenings in the cabin of the lighthouse tender gave opportunity for him to study Cleveland off duty when the latter liked to sit quietly and talk of his early life, of his political battles, of fishing, shooting, and of the urgent questions which beset him as President. And Wood brought away with him a profound respect for the {61} combination of simplicity and unswerving love and devotion to his country, coupled with rugged uncompromising honesty which seem to have been the characteristics of Grover Cleveland.

This particular trip was immediately after the inauguration ceremonies of President McKinley, and Cleveland was not only tired from the necessary part which he himself had taken in them, but also from the first natural let-down after four years of duty in the White House. Wood has given a little sketch of the man:

"I remember very well his words, as he sat down with a sigh of relief, glad that it was all over. He said: 'I have had a long talk with President McKinley. He is an honest, sincere and serious man. I feel that he is going to do his best to give the country a good administration. He impressed me as a man who will have the best interests of the people at heart.'

"Then he stopped, and said with a sigh: 'I envy him to-day only one thing and that was the presence of his own mother at his inauguration. I would have given anything in the world if my mother could have been at my inauguration,' {62} and then, continuing: 'I wish him well. He has a hard task,' and after a long pause: 'But he is a good man and will do his best.'"

He has spoken often, too, of Cleveland's love of sport, of the days which Jefferson, the actor, and Cleveland spent together fishing and shooting on and near Buzzard's Bay--the same spot where he himself as a boy spent his days in like occupations. The sides of Cleveland's character that appealed to him were the frankness with which he expressed his views on the important questions of the day, the sterling worth and high ideals which emphasized his sense of duty, his love of country and his desire to do the best possible for his fellow citizens, coupled with his perfectly unaffected family feelings and the amazing devotion and affection which he invariably elicited from all those who came into association with him, even to the most humble hand on the light house tender. Jeffersonian simplicity could have gone no further, nor could any man have been more definite, far-sighted and fearless than was Cleveland in his Venezuelan Message. These two extremes made a vivid and lasting impression upon {63} the young man, because both sides struck a sympathetic chord in his own nature.

There followed, then, the same association with McKinley, growing out of the necessary intimacy of physician and patient. But in this latter case two events, vital to this country as well as to the career of Leonard Wood, changed the quiet course of Washington official life to a life of intense interest and great activity.

These two events were Wood's meeting with Theodore Roosevelt and the Spanish War.

One night in 1896 at some social function at the Lowndes house Wood was introduced to Roosevelt, then assistant Secretary of the Navy. It seems strange that two men so vitally alike in many ways, who were in college at about the same time, should never have met before. But when they did meet the friendship, which lasted without a break until Roosevelt's death, began at once.

That night the two men walked home together and in a few days they were hard at it, walking, riding, playing games and discussing the affairs of the day.

This strange fact of extraordinary similarities {64} and vivid differences in the two men doubtless had much to do with bringing them together and keeping them allied for years. Both were essentially men of physical action, both born fighters, both filled with an amazing patriotism and both simple family men.

On the one hand, Roosevelt was a great individualist. He did things himself. He no sooner thought of a thing than he carried it out himself. When he was President he frequently issued orders to subordinates in the departments without consulting the heads of the departments. Wood, on the other hand, is distinctly an organizer and administrator. When he later filled high official positions, he invariably picked men to attend to certain work and left them, with constant consultation, to do the jobs whatever they were. If a road was to be built, he found the best road builder and laid out the work for him leaving to him the carrying out of the details.

Yet again both men had known life in the West, Roosevelt as a cowboy and Wood as an Indian fighter. Both had come from the best old American stock, Roosevelt from the Dutch of {65} Manhattan and Wood from New England. They were Harvard men and lovers of the outdoor, strenuous life. Their ideals and aspirations had much in common and they were both actuated by the intense feeling of nationalism that brought them to the foreground in American life.

Soon they were tramping through the country together testing each other's endurance in good-natured rivalry. When out of sight of officialdom, they ran foot races together, jumped fences and ran cross-country. Both men had children and with these they played Indians, indulging in most exciting chases and games. They explored the ravines and woods all about Washington, sometimes taking on their long hikes and rides various army officers stationed at Washington. Few of these men were able to stand the pace set by the two energetic athletes, and it was of course partially due to this fact that Roosevelt in later years when he was President ordered some of the paunchy swivel-chair Cavalry and Infantry officers out for cross-country rides and sent them back to their homes sore and blistered, and with {66} every nerve clamoring for the soothing restfulness of an easy chair.

Wood was dissatisfied in Washington, bored with the inaction. He longed for the strenuous life of the West. The desire became so strong that he began a plan to leave the army and start sheep-ranching in the West. It was the life, or as near the life as he could get, that he had been leading for years; and the present contrast of those days in the open with the life he was now leading in Washington became too much for him.

Here again seemed to arise a turning point. Had it not been for his own confident conviction that war was eventually coming with Spain, Wood would probably have gone to his open life on the prairie. What this would have meant to his future career nobody can tell, nor is speculation upon the subject very profitable. But it is interesting to note that what deterred him were his ideas on patriotism and a man's duty to his country, which struck a live, vibrating chord also in Theodore Roosevelt's nature and influenced Wood to stay in his position and wait.

It is only possible to imagine now the {67} conversations of these two kindred spirits on this subject. Roosevelt, as is well known, was for war--war at once--and he did what little was done in those days to prepare. There must have been waging a long argument between the now experienced Indian fighter and doctor, and the great-hearted American who knew so little of military affairs.

These talks and arguments became so frank and outspoken that they were well-known in Washington circles. Even President McKinley used to say to Wood:

"Have you and Theodore declared war yet?"

And Wood's answer was:

"No, we think you ought to, Mr. President."

As each day passed it seemed more likely that Spain and America would become involved over the injustices Cuba and the Philippines were being forced to suffer at the hands of their greedy and none too-loving mother country. On their long walks they discussed all the phases of such a conflict and each of them became anxious for war without further delay, for delay was costing time and money, and peaceful readjustment seemed {68} quite out of the question. So keen had they become in this war question that the two of them became known in Washington as the "War Party."

It was becoming evident to many others that war was inevitable when the destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor brought the situation to a head. It found both these men prepared in their own minds as to what their courses should be. When Wood arrived at Fort Huachuca in 1885 he was asked by Lawton why he came into the army. Lawton had studied law at Harvard after the Civil War and was interested in the views of a man who had studied medicine there. Wood replied that he had come into the army to get into the line at the first opportunity; and from that moment he began systematically his preparation for transfer. As a part of this policy he took every opportunity to do line duty. The result was that when the Spanish War came he had strong letters from Lawton, General Miles, General Graham, Colonel Wagner, General Forsythe, and others, recommending him for line command. These recommendations varied from {69} a battalion to a regiment. Both Roosevelt and Wood had discussed the possibility of organizing regiments, Roosevelt in New York and Wood in Massachusetts, but as turmoil and confusion enveloped the War Office they realized that this plan was not feasible.

The efforts of Roosevelt's superiors to keep him in his official capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and away from active service were fruitless. Finally, when it became evident that he would go into the service and see active fighting, Secretary of War Alger offered him the colonelcy of a regiment of cavalry. Roosevelt, because of his lack of experience in military affairs, refused the offer but agreed to accept the position of lieutenant colonel of such a regiment if his friend, Leonard Wood, would accept the colonelcy. Secretary Alger and Leonard Wood agreed, and work was commenced at once organizing a regiment that was later to become known as the Rough Riders. The official name of the regiment was the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The name Rough Riders "just grew." The organization became known under that name among the friends {70} of its leaders, later among the newspaper correspondents and consequently the public, and finally when it appeared in official documents it was accepted as official.

Preparedness was all too unknown in those days, but Wood, who became its nation-wide champion in the days to come, was well schooled even in those days in its laws. He only learned more as time went on. The chaos and tangle of red tape, inefficiency, unpreparedness in all branches of the service blocked every effort that a few efficient and able men were making. Seeing the hopelessness of trying to accomplish anything under such conditions Wood introduced a novel method of organization into the War Department.

Instead of pestering the hopeless and dismayed functionaries of the various Government departments with requests for things they did not have and would not have been able to find if they did have them, Wood merely requested carte blanche to go ahead and get all necessary papers ready so that they might be signed at one sitting. He made requisitions for materials that he needed {71} and when these materials were not to be found in the Government stores he wrote out orders directed to himself for the purchase in the open market of the things required. Alger recognized immediately that in Wood he had a man accustomed to action and full of vision--a man whom nothing could frighten. The two men understood one another. If those who surrounded the Secretary of War in those days had been as capable of organization, the history of Washington during wartime would have been quite different. But for the most part they failed. The see-nothing, hear-nothing, do-nothing, keep-your-finger-on-your-number spirit among many of them was quite great enough to throw the War Office into chaos. The game of "passing the buck" did not appeal to Wood; neither did he stop to sympathize with a certain highly placed bureaucrat who complained:

"My office and department were running along smoothly and now this damned war comes along and breaks it all up."

When all of his papers and documents were ready. Wood appeared before Secretary Alger. {72} "And now what can I do for you?" said the Secretary.

"Just sign these papers, sir. That is all," replied the Rough Riders' Colonel.

Alger, beset by incompetence, hampered by inefficiency in his staff, was dumbfounded as he looked through the papers Wood had prepared for him to sign. There were telegrams to Governors of states calling upon them for volunteers; requisitions for supplies and uniforms; orders for mobilization and requisitions for transportation. Alger had little to say. He placed enough confidence in Wood to sign the papers and give him his blessing.

When the army depots said that they could not supply uniforms, Wood replied that his men could wear canvas working clothes. As a result the Rough Riders, fighting through the tropical country in Cuba, were far more comfortable than the soldiers in regulation blue. The new colonel seemed to know what he wanted. He wanted Krag rifles. There were few in existence, but General Flagler, Chief of Ordnance, appreciated what the young officer had done and saw that he got them. {73} He did not want sabers for the men to run through one another in the pandemonium of cavalry charges of half wild western horses. The Rough Riders therefore went into action carrying machetes, an ideal weapon for the country in which they were to see service. 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, but consented to be the second in command only if Wood were made its commander. The fact that Roosevelt was not only known in the East but in the Northwest, and that Wood was quite as well known in the Southwest and the South meant that men of the Rough Riders type all over the country knew something of one or the other of the regiment's organizers.

It detracts nothing from Wood's amazing activity in organization and capacity for getting {79} things done, to say that had it not been for Roosevelt's wonderful popularity amongst those of the youthful spirit of the land the regiment would never have had its unique character or its unique name.

This is not the place to tell the story of that famous band of men. But its organization is so important a part of Wood's life that it comes in for mention necessarily.

In the Indian campaign with the regulars he had known the great importance of being properly outfitted and ready for those grilling journeys over the desert. In the Spanish War he learned, as only personal experience can teach, the amazing importance of preparation for volunteers and inexperienced men. The whole story of the getting ready to go to Cuba was burned into his brain so deeply that it formed a second witness in the case against trusting to luck and the occasion which has never been eradicated from his mind. Yet this episode brought strongly before him also the fact that prepared though he might be there was no success ahead for such an organization without the sense of subordination to the {80} state and the nation which not only brought the volunteers in, but carried them over the rough places through disease and suffering and death to the end.

Eight days after the telegram calling upon the Governors of New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma and Indian Territory for men to form the regiment, the recruits gathered at San Antonio where Wood was waiting to meet them. The most important thing about them for the moment was that they knew nothing of military life. Wood believed with Old Light-Horse Harry Lee "That Government is a murderer of its citizens which sends them to the field uninformed and untaught, where they are meeting men of the same age and strength mechanized by education and disciplined for battle."

Furthermore during the years that he had been in Washington Wood had used some of his spare time in studying parts of American history that are not included in school books. He knew that the volunteer system in the Revolutionary War had worn General Washington sick with discouragement and fear lest all that he had built up be {81} broken down through lack of discipline. He knew also that in the Civil War the volunteer system proved inadequate on both sides and that it was not until the war had gone on for two years that either the North or the South had what could properly be called an army.

To aid him in the training of these troops he had the assistance of a number of officers who had seen service in the Regular Army, and together they mapped out a course of drills and maneuvers that worked the men from a valueless mob into a regiment trained for battle. The human material that they had to work with was the best; for these men had been selected from many applicants. The lack of discipline and the ignorance of military etiquette led to many amusing incidents. Colonel Roosevelt in his history of the Rough Riders tells of an orderly announcing dinner to Colonel Wood and the three majors by remarking genially:

"If you fellers don't come soon, everything'll get cold."

The foreign attachés said: "Your sentinels do not know much about the Manual of Arms, but {82} they are the only ones through whose lines we could not pass. They were polite; but, as one of them said, 'Gents, I'm sorry, but if you don't stop I shall kill you.'"

The difficulties to be surmounted were enormous; and any officers less democratic and understanding might have made a mess of it. Both Roosevelt and Wood understood the frontiersmen too well to misjudge any breaches of etiquette or to humiliate the extremely sensitive natures of men long used to life in the open.

Upon Colonel Wood fell practically all the details of organization. There were materials and supplies of many kinds to be secured from the War Department; there were men to be drilled in the bare rudiments of military life; non-commissioned officers and officers to be schooled, and a thousand and one other details. At first the men were drilled on foot, but soon horses were purchased and mounted drill commenced, much to the delight of many of the cowpunchers who by years of training had become averse to walking a hundred yards if they could throw their legs over a horse. There was no end to the {83} excitement when the horses arrived. Most of them were half-broken, but there were some that had never seen, much less felt, a saddle. The horses were broken to the delight of every one in camp, because training them meant bucking contests, and the more vicious the animal the better they liked it.

From simple drills and evolutions the men advanced to skirmish work and rapidly became real soldiers--not the polished, smartly uniformed military men of the Regular type, but hard fighters in slouch hats and brown canvas trousers with knotted handkerchiefs round their necks.

The commander of any military unit at that time had much to worry about. It depended solely on him personally whether his men were properly equipped, whether they had food; and when orders came to move whether they had anything to move on. The advice that he could get, if he was willing to listen to it, was lengthy and worthless, and the help he could get from Washington amounted to little or nothing.

In May the regiment was ordered to proceed to Tampa. After a lengthy struggle with the {84} railway authorities cars were put at the disposal of Colonel Wood, who left San Antonio on the 29th with three sections, the remaining four sections being left to proceed later in charge of Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt. The confusion of getting started was reduced to a minimum by Wood, who had worked out a scheme for embarkation; but due to delay on the part of the railway authorities in providing proper facilities for handling the troops and equipment they were delayed four days. Everywhere along the line of travel they were cheered enthusiastically by people who came to greet the train on its arrival in towns and cities.

Tampa was in chaos. There seemed to be no order or system for the disembarkation of troops. Every one asked for information and no one could give it. Officers, men, railroad employees and longshoremen milled about in a welter of confusion. The troops were dumped out with no prearranged schedule on the part of the officers in charge of the camp. There were no arrangements for feeding the men and no wagons in which to haul impedimenta. In such conditions it {85} required all the native vigor characteristic of their Colonel to bring some sort of order--all the knowledge he had gained from his Indian campaign. And even then there was still needed an unconquerable spirit that did not know what impossibilities were.

After a few days at Tampa, Colonel Wood was notified that his command would start for destination unknown at once, leaving four troops and all the horses behind them. On the evening of June 7th notification came that they would leave from Port Tampa, nine miles away, the following morning, and that if the troops were not aboard the transport at that time they could not sail. No arrangements were made by the port authorities for the embarkation. No information could be obtained regarding transportation by rail to the port. There was no information regarding the transport that the troops were to use. In an official report made to the Secretary of War Colonel Roosevelt had the following remarks to make about the conditions that confronted them in Tampa:

". . . No information was given in advance {86} what transports we should take, or how we should proceed to get aboard, nor did any one exercise any supervision over the embarkation. Each regimental commander, so far as I know, was left to find out as best he could, after he was down at the dock, what transport had not been taken, and then to get his regiment aboard it, if he was able, before some other regiment got it. Our regiment was told to go to a certain switch and take a train for Port Tampa at twelve o'clock, midnight. The train never came. After three hours of waiting, we were sent to another switch, and finally at six o'clock in the morning got possession of some coal cars and came down in them. When we reached the quay where the embarkation was proceeding, everything was in utter confusion. The quay was piled with stores and swarming with thousands of men of different regiments, besides onlookers, etc. The Commanding General, when we at last found him, told Colonel Wood and myself that he did not know what ship we were to embark on, and that we must find Colonel Humphrey, the Quarter-master General. Colonel Humphrey was not in his office, and nobody knew where he was. The {87} commanders of the different regiments were busy trying to find him, while their troops waited in the trains, so as to discover the ships to which they were allotted--some of these ships being at the dock and some in mid-stream. After a couple of hours' search, Colonel Wood found Colonel Humphrey and was allotted a ship. Immediately afterward I found that it had already been allotted to two other regiments. It was then coming to the dock. Colonel Wood boarded it in midstream to keep possession, while I double-quicked the men down from the cars and got there just ahead of the other two regiments. One of these regiments, I was afterward informed, spent the next thirty-six hours in cars in consequence."

The conditions at Tampa provided material for a spirited exchange of letters and telegrams between General Miles, who had taken command, and Secretary of War Alger.

On June 4th, General Miles filed by telegraph the following report to the Secretary of War:

"Several of the volunteer regiments came here without uniforms; several came without arms, and some without blankets, tents, or camp equipage. {88} The 32d Michigan, which is among the best, came without arms. General Guy V. Henry reports that five regiments under his command are not fit to go into the field. There are over three hundred cars loaded with war material along the roads about Tampa. Stores are sent to the Quartermaster at Tampa, but the invoices and bills of lading have not been received, so that the officers are obliged to break open seals and hunt from car to car to ascertain whether they contain clothing, grain, balloon material, horse equipments, ammunition, siege guns, commissary stores, etc. Every effort is being made to bring order out of confusion. I request that rigid orders be given requiring the shipping officers to forward in advance complete invoices and bills of lading, with descriptive marks of every package, and the number and description of car in which shipped. To illustrate the embarrassment caused by present conditions, fifteen cars loaded with uniforms were sidetracked twenty-five miles from Tampa, and remained there for weeks while the troops were suffering for clothing. Five thousand rifles, which were discovered yesterday, were needed by {89} several regiments. Also the different parts of the siege train and ammunition for same, which will be required immediately on landing, are scattered through hundreds of cars on the sidetracks of the railroads. Notwithstanding these difficulties, this expedition will soon be ready to sail."

In answer to this dispatch was sent the following reply from Secretary Alger:

"Twenty thousand men ought to unload any number of cars and assort contents. There is much criticism about delay of expedition. Better leave a fast ship to bring balance of material needed, than delay longer."

This slight difference of opinion which a shrewd observer can discover between the lines was characteristic of the whole preparation of the United States army that undertook to carry on the war with Spain. As one remembers those days, or reads of them in detail, it seems as if every one did something wrong regularly, as if no one of ability was anywhere about. As a matter of fact, however, the organizing and shipping of a suddenly acquired expeditionary volunteer force has never been accomplished in any other way. The truth {90} of the matter is that it can never be run properly at the start for the simple reason that there is no organization fitted to carry out the details.

The officials in Washington who had to do with the army--good men in many cases, poor men in some cases--if they had been in office long had been handling a few hundred men here and there in the forts, on the plains, or at the regular military posts. They could no more be molded into a homogeneous whole than could the cowboys, stockbrokers, college athletes, and southern planters maneuver until they had been drilled.

To Colonel Wood, busy most of the hours of the day and night trying to get order out of chaos in his small part of the great rush, the whole episode was a graphic demonstration of the need of getting ready. Many years later a much-advertised politician of our land said that an army was not necessary since immediately upon the need for defense of our country a million farmers would leave their plows and leap to arms. To an officer trying to find a transport train in the middle of the night with a thousand hungry, tired, half-trained men under him such logic aught well have {91} caused a smile, if nothing worse. Leave his plow at such a call the American Citizen will--and by the millions, if need be. He has done just that in the last two years. He will leap to arms--to continue the rhetoric--but what can he do if he finds no arms, or if they do not exist and cannot be made for nine months?

But the thing was not new to Wood even in those days. As he talks of that period now he says that it was not so bad. There was food, rough, but still food, and enough. There were transports. It only needed that they be found. If you could not get uniforms of blue, take uniforms of tan. If you could not find sabers, go somewhere, in or out of the country, and buy them or requisition them and put in the charge later.

Yet, even so, no man in such a position, going through what he went through, worrying hour by hour, could fail to see the object lesson and take the first opportunity when peace was declared to begin to preach the necessity for getting ready for the next occasion. And it was largely due to Leonard Wood, as the world well knows, that what {92} little preparation was made in 1915 and 1916 in advance of the United States declaring war was made at all. It was the lessons acquired in the Spanish War and in the study of other wars that made of him the great prophet of preparedness.

For several days the troops remained aboard the transport in Tampa harbor awaiting orders. The heat and discomfort told upon the men, but on the evening of June 13th orders came to start and the next morning found them at sea. On the morning of the 20th the transport came off the Cuban coast; but it was not until the 22d that the welcome order for landing came. The troops landed at the squalid little village of Daiquiri in small boats, while the smaller war vessels shelled the town.

In the afternoon of the next day, the Rough Riders received orders to advance; and Wood, leading his regiment, pushed on so as to be sure of an engagement with the enemy the next morning. It was due to his energy that the Rough Riders did not miss the first fight. Under General Young's orders the Rough Riders took up a {93} position at the extreme left of the front. The next day the action of "Las Guasimas" began.

"Shoot--don't swear" growled Wood as the fighting began. He strolled about encouraging his men and urging them to action. Under his quiet, cool direction they advanced slowly, forcing the enemy back, and finally driving him to his second line of defense. Soon the Rough Riders' right joined the left of the main body and in a concerted attack the Spaniards were routed, leaving much of their equipment in their hasty retreat.

At this juncture it was reported to Roosevelt, whose detachment was separate from that of Wood, that Wood had been killed. Roosevelt immediately began taking over the command of the entire regiment, since it naturally devolved upon him. As he was consolidating his troops he came upon Wood himself very much alive.

Major-General Joseph Wheeler made the following report of the Rough Riders:

"Colonel Wood's Regiment was on the extreme left of the line, and too far-distant for me to be a personal witness of the individual conduct of his officers and men; but the magnificent and brave {94} work done by the regiment, under the lead of Colonel Wood, testifies to his courage and skill. The energy and determination of this officer had been marked from the moment he reported to me at Tampa, Fla., and I have abundant evidence of his brave and good conduct on the field, and I recommend him for consideration of the Government."

On the 25th, General Young was stricken by the fever and Wood took charge of the brigade on the 30th, leaving Roosevelt in command of the Rough Riders. The afternoon of the 30th brought orders to march on Santiago, and the morning of July 1st found them in position three miles from the city, with Leonard Wood commanding the second dismounted cavalry brigade. During the next two days, the enemy fought fiercely to regain his lost positions, but the cool persistence of the American troops forced him constantly backward.

In endorsing Wood's report of this action, General Wheeler said, "He showed energy, courage, and good judgment. I heretofore recommended him for promotion to a Brigadier-General. He {95} deserves the highest commendation. He was under the observation and direction of myself and of my staff during the battle."

After a short siege the Spanish command capitulated on the afternoon of July 17th and the American forces entered Santiago.

Wood's promotion to Brigadier-General of the United States Volunteers came at once, and Roosevelt was made Colonel and placed in command of the 2d Cavalry Brigade.

The condition of our forces at this time, struggling against the unaccustomed and virulent dangers of the tropics, was pitiable. The "Round Robin" incident in which the commanding officers of the various divisions in the command reported to Major-General W. R. Shafter, that "the Army must be moved at once, or it will perish," has become a part of the record of the history of those times. Whether the sickness and disease they suffered could have been prevented became a matter of great controversy.

This "Round Robin" was a document signed by practically all general officers present, in order to bring to the attention of the War Department {96} the conditions existing in the army that had captured Santiago showing that it was suffering severely from malaria and yellow fever; that these men must be replaced; and that if they were not replaced thousands of lives would be lost. It was sent because instructions from Washington clearly indicated that the War Department did not understand the conditions, and it was feared that delay would cause enormous loss of life. The men had been in mud and water--the yellow fever country--for weeks and were thoroughly infected with malaria. Although he had signed the "Round Robin"' with the other officers General Wood later on gave the following testimony before the War Investigation Committee:

"We had never served in that climate, so peculiarly deadly from the effects of malaria, and in this respect my opinions have changed very much since the close of the war. If I had been called before you in the first week of August, I might have been disposed to have answered a little differently in some respects. I have been there ever since, and have seen regiments come to Cuba in perfect health and go into tents with floors and {97} with flies camped up on high hills, given boiled water, and have seen them have practically the identical troubles we had during the campaign. The losses may not have been as heavy, as we are organized to take them into hospitals protected from the sun which seemed to be a depressing cause. All the immune regiments serving in my department since the war have been at one time or another unfit for service. I have had all the officers of my staff repeatedly too sick for duty. I don't think that any amount of precaution or preparation, in addition to what we had, would have made any practical difference in the sickness of the troops of the army of invasion. This is a candid opinion, and an absolutely frank one. If I had answered this question in August, without the experience I have had since August, I might have been disposed to attribute more to the lack of tentage than I do now; but I think the food, while lacking necessarily in variety, was ample."

Only a few years later the explanation of yellow fever transmission became clear to all the world. This discovery and the definite methods of {98} protection against its spread and the spread of malaria were largely the result of Wood's administrative ability and his knowledge of medicine. For it was as the result of studies and experiments conducted under his direct supervision that it became known that yellow fever was the result of the bite of the mosquito and not of bad food or low, marshy country or bad air or any of the other factors which had so long been supposed to be its cause. The taking of Santiago practically ended the Spanish War. But for the military commander of the City of Santiago it began a new and epoch-making work.

{99}

THE ORGANIZER

{100}

{101}

[V]
THE ORGANIZER

To understand the work accomplished by Wood in Santiago, it is necessary to renew our picture of the situation existing in Cuba at the time and to realize as this is done that the problem was an absolutely new one for the young officer of thirty-seven to whom it was presented.

Nobody can really conceive of the unbelievable condition of affairs unless he actually saw it or has at some time in his life witnessed a corresponding situation. Those who return from the battlefields on the Western Front of the Great War describe the scenes and show us pictures and we think we realize the horrors of destruction, yet one after another of us as we go there comes back with the same statement: "I had heard all about it, but I hadn't the least conception of what it really was until I saw it with my own eyes."

In like manner we who are accustomed to reasonably clean and well-policed cities can call up no {102} real picture of what the Cuban cities were in those days, unless we saw them, or something like them.

Yet in spite of this it is necessary to try to give some idea of the fact, in order to give some idea of the work of reorganization required.

For four hundred years Cuba had been under the Spanish rule--the rule of viceroys and their agents who came of a race that has for centuries been unable to hold its own among the nations of the earth. Ideas of health, drainage, sanitation, orderly government, systematic commercial life--all were of an order belonging to but few spots in the world to-day. Here and there in the East--perhaps in what has been called the "cesspool of the world," Guayaquil, Ecuador--and in other isolated spots there are still such places, but they are fortunately beginning to disappear as permanent forms of human life.

In Santiago there were about 50,000 inhabitants. These people had been taxed and abused by officials who collected and kept for themselves the funds of the Province. Fear of showing wealth, since it was certain to be confiscated, led all classes of families to hide what little they had. {103} Money for the city and its public works there was none, since all was taken for the authorities in Spain or for their representatives in Cuba. Spanish people in any kind of position treated the natives as if they were slaves--as indeed they were. No family was sure of its own legitimate property, its own occupation and its own basic rights. The city government was so administered as to deprive all the citizens of any respect for it or any belief in its statements, decrees or laws. Not only was this condition of affairs in existence at the time of the war but it had existed during the entire lifetime of any one living and during the entire lifetime of his father, grandfather and ancestors for ten generations.

As a result no Cuban had any conception of what honest government, honest administration, honest taxation, honest dealings were. He not only had no conception of such things but he believed that what his family for generations and he during his life had known was the actual situation everywhere throughout the world. He knew of nothing else.

The city had no drainage system except the {104} open gutter of the streets--never had had. The water system consisted of an elemental sort of dam six miles up in the hills outside the city, old, out of repair, constantly breaking down, and a single 11-inch pipe which had a capacity of 200,000 gallons a day for the city--something like four gallons to a person. This was not sufficient for more than one-quarter of each day. In other words the city at the best was receiving for years only one-quarter of the water it absolutely needed for cleanliness.

Plagues and epidemics, smallpox, yellow fever, bubonic plague, typhus and tetanus followed one another in regular succession. The streets for years had contained dead animals and many times in epidemics dead human beings--sights to which the citizens had been so accustomed throughout their lives that they paid no attention to them. The authorities being accustomed to keeping the public moneys for their own use spent little or nothing upon public works, cleaning the streets or making improvements. They did not build; they did not replace; they only patched and repaired when it was absolutely necessary. It was {105} a situation difficult to conceive, impossible to realize. Yet one must constantly bear in mind that there not only appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary in this, but in reality there was nothing out of the ordinary. It was the accustomed, usual thing and had been so for centuries.

The sense of personal responsibility to the community was not dormant; it did not exist. The sense of duty of those who governed to those whom they governed was not repressed by modern corruption only; it had ceased to exist altogether. No city official was expected to do anything but get what he could out of those under him. No citizen knew anything but the necessity--to him the right--of concealing anything he had, of deceiving everybody whom he could deceive and of evading any law that might be promulgated.

The integrity of the family and its right to live as it chose within restrictions required by gregarious existence had disappeared--never had existed at all so far as those living knew. The responsibility of the individual to his government was unconceivable and inconceivable.

Had all this not been so there would have been {106} no war on our part with Spain, for the whole origin of the trouble which eventually led to war grew out of the final despair of men and women in Cuba who gradually came to realize in a dim way that something was wrong and unfair. Out of this grew internal dissension which constantly spilled over to interfere with international relations.

It was the inevitable breaking down of a civilization because of the years during which civilization's laws had been disregarded, and because all this took place in close proximity to a country where the reverse was the evident fact. There are such rotten spots still upon this earth--one just across our doorstep on the Rio Grande, and somebody some day must clean that house, too.

Added to all this, and much more, was the fact that the city of Santiago had been besieged by land and by sea. Thus naturally even the conditions in this cesspool were intensely exaggerated.

Into such a plague-stricken, starving city on the 20th of July, 1898, Wood, then Brigadier General of United States Volunteers, thirty-seven {107} years of age, fresh from the job of army surgeon to the President in the White House, some Indian fighting in the Southwest and the task of getting the Rough Riders organized into fighting shape--fresh from the fighting that had taken place on and since July 1st--into this situation on July 20th General Wood was summoned by General Shafter, commanding the American forces, with the information that he had been detailed to take command of the city, secure and maintain order, feed the starving and reorganize generally.

Why he was selected may be easily guessed. He was a military man who had made good recently, who had made good in the Southwest, whom the President knew and trusted--and he was a doctor who had just shown great organizing ability. The job itself was as new to him as would have been the task in those days of flying. But with his inherited and acquired sense of values, of the essentials of life, with his education and his characteristic passion for getting ready he started at once to pull off the wall paper, hammer away the plaster and examine the condition of the beams which supported this leaning, tottering, {108} out-of-repair wing of the world's house of civilization.

What he found was rotten beams; no integrity of family; no respect for or responsibility to the state; no sense on the part of the citizens of what they owed to themselves, or their families, or their city--not the slightest idea of what government of the people for the people by the people meant. The government was robbing the family. The family was robbing the government. That was the fundamental place to begin, if this wing of the house was not to fall.

Naturally the immediate and crying needs had to be corrected at once. But Wood began all on the same day on the beams as well as on the plaster and wall paper--this 20th day of July, 1898. Another man might well have forgotten or never have thought of the fundamentals in the terrible condition within his immediate vision. That seems to be the characteristic of Wood--that while he started to cure the illness, he at the same time started to get ready to prevent its recurrence. And there we may perhaps discover something of the reason for his success, something of the reason why people lean on him and {109} look to him for advice and support in time of trouble.

These immediate needs were inconceivable to those who lived in orderly places and orderly times. Of the 50,000 inhabitants, 16,000 were sick. There were in addition 2,000 sick Spanish soldiers and 5,000 sick American troops. Over all in the hot haze of that tropical city hung the terror of yellow fever, showing its sinister face here and there. At the same time a religious pilgrimage to a nearby shrine taken at this moment by 18,000 people led to an immense increase in disease because of the bad food and the polluted water which the pilgrims ate and drank. In the streets piles of filth and open drains were mixed with the dead bodies of animals. Houses, deserted because of deaths, held their dead--men, women and children--whom no one removed and no one buried. All along the routes approaching the city bodies lay by the roadside, the living members of the family leaving their dead unburied because they were too weak and could only drag themselves along under the tropic sun in the hope that they {110} might reach their homes before they, too, should die.

This was enhanced by the fact of the siege and the consequent lack of food. The sick could not go for food; and if they could have done so there was little or none to be had. Horrible odors filled the air. Terror walked abroad. It was a prodigious task for anybody to undertake, but it was undertaken, and in the following manner:

Simultaneously certain main lines of work were mapped out by Wood and officers put in charge of each subject, the commanding officer reserving for himself the planning, the general supervision, the watching, as well as the instituting of new laws based upon the existing system of the Code Napoleon.

It was first necessary to feed the people and to bury the dead. There were so many of the latter that they had to be collected in lots of ninety or a hundred, placed between railway irons, soaked in petroleum and burned outside the city. It was such dreadful work, this going into deserted homes and collecting dead bodies for the flames, that men had to be forced to it. All were {111} paid regularly, however, and the job was done. General Wood's own account of this task is better than any second-hand description can even hope to be.

"Horrible deadly work it was, but at last it was finished. At the same time numbers of men were working night and day in the streets removing the dead animals and other disease-producing materials. Others were engaged in distributing food to the hospitals, prisons, asylums and convents--in fact to everybody, for all were starving. What food there was, and it was considerable, had been kept under the protection of the Spanish army to be used as rations. Some of the far-seeing and prudent had stored up food and prepared for the situation in advance, but these were few.

"All of our army transportation was engaged in getting to our own men the tents, medicines and the thousand and one other things required by our camps, and as this had to be done through seas of mud it was slow work. We could expect no help from this source in our distribution of rations to the destitute population, so we seized {112} all the carts and wagons we could find in the streets, rounded up drivers and laborers with the aid of the police, and worked them under guard, willing or unwilling, but paying well for what they did. At first we had to work them far into the night.

"Everything on wheels in the city was at work. Men who refused and held back soon learned that there were things far more unpleasant than cheerful obedience, and turned to work with as much grace as they could command. All were paid a fair amount for their services, partly in money, partly in rations, but all worked; some in removing the waste refuse from the city, others in distributing food. Much of the refuse in the streets was burned outside at points designated as crematories. Everything was put through the flames.

"In the Spanish military hospital the number of sick rapidly increased. From 2,000 when we came in, the number soon ran up to 3,100 in hospital, besides many more in their camps. Many of the sick were suffering from malaria, but among them were some cases of yellow fever. Poor devils, they all looked as though hope had {113} fled, and, as they stood in groups along the waterfront, eagerly watching the entrance to the harbor, it required very little imagination to see that their thoughts were of another country across the sea, and that the days of waiting for the transports were long days for them." [Footnote: Scribner's Magazine.]

A yellow fever hospital was established on an island in the harbor. The city was divided into districts and numbers of medical men put in charge, their duty being to examine each house and report sanitary conditions, sickness and food situations. As a result of these reports Wood issued orders for action in each district so that the food, the available medical force and the supplies of all kinds should be used and distributed to produce the greatest results in the shortest possible time. In one district alone just outside the city there were thousands of cases of smallpox in November. The streets were filled with filth and dead and wrecked furniture. The wells were full of refuse. The task seemed almost hopeless. Yet, under Wood's system of detailing squads to undertake the work in certain sections {114} with the system of centralized reporting, the epidemic was checked in a month, the district cleaned and scrubbed from end to end with disinfectants and the small pox cut down to a few scattering cases. In this district of Holguin the plan was adopted of vaccinating two battalions of the Second Immune Regiment. These men were then sent into the district to establish good sanitary conditions and clean up the yellow fever. The work was done successfully without the occurrence of a single case of smallpox amongst the American troops. No better demonstration of the efficacy of vaccination was ever given.

Thus the first task of feeding the starving population and cleaning the city was simultaneously undertaken by districts under the direction of officers having authority to proceed along certain established lines. Episodes illustrating these "established lines" are many, but there is space here, for only one or two of them.

It developed at the outset that there was food and meat in the city which the people could use, but which was beyond their reach on account of the high prices. General Wood no sooner heard {115} of this than he "established a line of procedure" to correct it. He sent for the principal butchers of the city and asked:

"How much do you charge for your meat?"

"Ninety cents a pound, Señor."

"What does it cost you?"

There was hesitation and a shuffling of feet; then one of the men said in a whining voice:

"Meat is very, very dear, your Excellency."

"How much a pound?"

"It costs us very much, and ..."

"How much a pound?"

"Fifteen cents, your Excellency; but we have lost much money during the war and..."

"So have your customers. Now meat will be sold at 25 cents a pound, and not one cent more. Do you understand?"

Then, turning to the alderman, he charged him to see that his order was carried out to the letter, unless he wanted to be expelled from office.

Thenceforward meat was sold in the markets at 25 cents. The same simple plan was evolved for all other kinds of supplies. Naturally such high-handed methods caused a great hue and cry {116} amongst certain of the citizens and no such method could have been carried out by any one but a military commander with absolute authority. Some of the newspapers, all of which had been given a free hand by Wood and were allowed for the first time to say what they liked, started a campaign against the new administration and its busy head. But hand in hand with this autocratic procedure went the organization of native courts, the appointment of native officials for carrying on the government, native police to catch Cuban bandits and native judges to give decisions and impose sentences. Furthermore, in these same days of autocratic action, the people gradually discovered that although everybody was forced to work all those who did got paid--something new to the Santiago-Cuban consciousness--that the invading American army was not arresting natives in the streets and thrusting them into jail, but that their own native police were doing this work. Gradually, as the city became clean, as prices fell, as payment for work came in, as illness decreased, as law became fairly administered by the Cuban officials themselves, a certain awe {117} and veneration grew for the invaders and their big, hardworking head. It was a revelation, unbelievable yet true, unknown yet a fact, which opened up to the minds of these long-suffering, incompetent people the first vision of an existence which has since through the same agency of General Wood become a fact throughout the whole island, so that Cuba is to-day a busy, healthy, self-governing state.

Parallel with the feeding and sanitation work General Wood put into effect a certain system of road building where it was necessary in order to keep the people at work and allow them to make money and at the same time to produce necessary transportation facilities. Five miles of asphalt pavement, fifteen miles of country pike, six miles of macadam were built and 200 miles of country road made usable out of funds collected from the regular taxes which had heretofore gone into the pockets of the Spanish government officials. The costs varied somewhat from the old days, as may well be guessed. A quarter of a mile of macadam pavement built by the Spaniards the year before along the water-front had cost $180,000. Wood's {118} engineers built five miles of asphalt pavement at a cost of $175,000.

At the same time a reorganization of the Custom House service was instituted which increased receipts; jails and hospitals were reorganized under the system existing in the United States; and perhaps in the end the greatest work of all was the establishment of an entirely new school system based on an adaptation of the American form. Teachers had disappeared. There were none, since nobody paid them. School houses were empty, open to any tramp for a night's lodging. In a few months this was changed so that kindergartens and schools were opened and running.

In fact the work was the making of a new community, the building of a new life--the repairing of the tottering wing of the old, old house.

All this, as may be supposed, did not take place without friction, obstruction, and without at first a great deal of bad blood.

Wood's methods in dealing with disturbances were his own and can only be suggested here by isolated anecdotes and incidents. When an official who had the Spanish methods in his blood {119} did not appear after three invitations he was carried into the commanding officer's presence by a squad of soldiers in his pajamas. The next time he was invited he came at once.

"One night about eight o'clock, General Wood was writing in his office in the palace. At the outer door stood a solitary sentinel, armed with a rifle. Suddenly there burst across the plaza, from the San Carlos Club, a mob of Cubans--probably 600. Within a few minutes a shower of stones, bricks, bottles and other missiles struck the Spanish Club, smashing windows and doors. A man, hatless and out of breath, rushed up to the sentry at the palace entrance and shouted, 'Where's the General? Quick! The Cubans are trying to kill the officers and men in the Spanish Club!'

"General Wood was leisurely folding up his papers when the sentry reached him. 'I know it,' he said, before the man had time to speak. 'I have heard the row. We will go over and stop it.'

"He picked up his riding-whip, the only weapon he ever carries, and, accompanied by the one American soldier, strolled across to the scene of {120} the trouble. The people in the Spanish Club had got it pretty well closed up, but the excited Cubans were still before it, throwing things and shouting imprecations, and even trying to force a way in by the main entrance.

"'Just shove them back, sentry,' said General Wood, quietly.

"Around swung the rifle, and, in much less time than is taken in the telling, a way was cleared in front of the door.

"'Now shoot the first man who places his foot upon that step,' added the General, in his usual deliberate manner. Then he turned and strolled back to the palace and his writing. Within an hour the mob had dispersed, subdued by two men, one rifle and a riding-whip. And the lesson is still kept in good memory."

"One day about the middle of November the native calentura or fever, from which General Wood suffered greatly, sent him to his home, which is on the edge of the town, earlier than usual. He had no sooner reached the house than he was notified by telephone that a bloody riot had occurred at San Luis, a town 20 miles out on the {121} Santiago Railway. The fever was raging in the General, his temperature exceeding 105, and he was so sick and dizzy that he staggered as he walked. But with that indomitable will that had served him on many a night raid against hostile Apaches, he entered his carriage and was driven back to the city. He picked up his chief signal officer, Captain J. E. Brady, at the Palace and hastened to the building occupied by the telegraph department of the Signal Corps on Calle Enramadas. Captain Brady took the key at the instrument.

"'Tell the operator to summon members of the rural guard who were fired on, and the commanding officer of the Ninth Immunes,' ordered the General, tersely. Thenceforward, for three hours General Wood sat there, questioning, listening, issuing orders, all with a promptness and certainty of judgment that would have been extraordinary in a man quite at his ease; yet all the time, as he could not help showing in mien and features, the raging fever was distressing to the point of agony. Those about him could not but marvel at the man's resolution and endurance. The {122} following day, although still racked with fever, he went by special train to San Luis and investigated the affair in person.'" [Footnote: Fortnightly Review.]

The basis of the great work, however, as General Wood has himself repeatedly said in conversation and in print, was to effect all this regeneration without causing the Cubans to look upon the American Army and the American control as they had for years looked upon the Spanish Army and the Spanish control. That his success here in the most difficult phase of the whole prodigious enterprise was absolute has been testified to in innumerable ways and instances.

Only one or two of these can be given here, but they are illuminating in the extreme and they suggest the success of the methods of the man who had been put in charge of this difficult work.

Death amongst the Spanish soldiers had been very heavy from yellow fever and pernicious malaria and the course of the troop-ships which carried them back to Spain was marked by long lists of burials at sea. These ships carried with them most of the nurses and nursing sisters to {123} care for the sick and dying during the voyage. It was a great drain on the nursing force at Wood's disposal in Santiago. He, therefore, hit upon the idea of offering to pay for the return trips of these nurses if they would come back at once; with the result that most of them gladly accepted and rendered splendid service in Santiago to the sick as a token of their appreciation of the military governor's act. This did much to establish friendly relations between Americans, Spaniards and Cubans who had so short a time before been enemies.

Another vital point was the relations of the invaders with the Church. It had never been contemplated that a Catholic viceroy should be replaced by a Protestant. This viceroy had so many intimate relations with the Catholic Church in which he represented the Catholic king that it was absolutely necessary for whatever American happened to be governor to play the game regardless of what his own religious scruples might be. As an interesting example of how well this was handled by Wood the story of Bishop Bernaba is a charming instance.

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This bishop was elevated from priesthood while Wood was governor and because of his affection and respect for the American officer he asked him to walk with him daring the ceremonious procession from the priest's little parish church, where he had served, to the old cathedral where he was to officiate thereafter. It was a solemn religious function and has been described, because of the terrific surroundings of the hour, as not unlike the ceremony which took place in Milan after the Great Plague.

The entire population of the city with some forty or fifty thousand from the surrounding hills packed the streets along the route of the procession. None of them had had a blessing from his own Cuban clergy in many years. It was like a mediaeval scene. The old bishop bowed by years, weakened by his recent grief at the suffering of his people and by the excitement of the moment, and General Wood, the American Protestant, walked together under the bishop's canopy. The people in the streets, seeing this, cried: "Thank God, the General is a Catholic! We didn't know it!"

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From time to time the old bishop, tired with the exertion of swinging the censer with the holy water, would hand it to Wood and ask him to continue the function by his side until he could secure a slight respite. Occasionally as he leaned forward to bless the thousands who lined the way and who had come to feel his touch and kiss his hand his miter would slip to one side on his head and the unperturbed American general would lean forward and straighten it for him. Each time the old bishop turned to him and murmured, "Thank God, you are here! I am so old that I could not have made this journey, if you had not been here to help me."

Wood told him that he was not a Catholic, that indeed from Bishop Bernaba's point of view he was a heretic and bound for Hell.

"No," said the bishop, with a smile, "you are a good Catholic; only you do not know it."

Small wonder that when he left Santiago in the spring of 1899 to visit the United States Wood was presented by the people of the city with a magnificent hand-work scroll which said in Spanish:

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"The people of the City of Santiago de Cuba to General Leonard Wood ... the greatest of all your successes is to have won the confidence and esteem of a people in trouble."

Small wonder that in December, 1899, less than a year after the United States took over the island, he was appointed by President McKinley Governor General of Cuba and made a Major General of United States Volunteers!

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THE ADMINISTRATOR

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[VI]
THE ADMINISTRATOR

It has been said that General Wood's work in Havana as Governor-General of Cuba was the continuation of his work at Santiago on a larger scale. This would seem to be erroneous.

The Santiago problem was the cleaning and reorganizing of a city of 60,000 inhabitants. Many stringent measures could properly be put into operation in such a community which were quite impossible in a city of 350,000 inhabitants like Havana, or in a state of two and one-half million people such as the Island of Cuba. It was possible in an epidemic to close up houses temporarily, stop business and commercial intercourse for a period where only 60,000 people were concerned. But to stop the daily commerce of a large city, the capital of a state, was out of the question.

Furthermore the problem in the first instance was one of organizing a community in so {130} deplorable a condition that it was on the verge of anarchy. In the second instance much of the cleaning-up process had been at least begun by other American officers. It was here in Havana a case of administration and statecraft as against organization.

It was the taking of a crown colony of Spain--a kingdom--which had never been anything but a royal colony, and turning it in two years and a half into a republic, self-governed, self-judged, self-administered and self-supporting.

Roughly speaking, there had never been such a case. Even now the proposal of the Philippine Islands would practically be the second case should independence be granted to them by the United States. In all history a colony, once a colony, either has remained so, or has revolted from the mother country and by force of arms established its own independence.

These two problems, then, were quite different in their essential elements and they required different qualities in the man who settled them.

President McKinley's instructions to the new Governor-General were "To prepare Cuba, as {131} rapidly as possible, for the establishment of an independent government, republican in form, and a good school system." And both the President and the Secretary of War left their representative entirely to his own resources to work this out. His work was laid out for him and he was given a free hand.

General Wood, therefore, in December, 1899, after having been received with a magnificent ovation on his return to the United States, made a Major-General and given an LL.D. degree by his own University of Harvard--after having returned to Santiago suddenly upon the outbreak of yellow fever, cleaned the town, covered it with chloride of lime, soaked it with corrosive sublimate, burned out its sewers and cesspools, and checked the epidemic,--finally took up his residence in Havana and began his work.

One can readily imagine the immediate problems all of which needed settlement at once, none of which could be settled without study of the most thorough and vital sort. Wood's method was that of an administrator and statesman of great vision. He immediately proceeded to {132} secure wherever he could find them the best men on each of the problems and set them to work with such assistance, expert and otherwise, as they required to make reports to him within a limited time as to what should be done in their particular branches of the government.

Again, it was so simple that it can be told in words of one syllable. But the great administrator appeared in the selection of the men for the jobs and in the final acceptance, rejection, or modification of the plans proposed. While he was an absolute monarch of the Island he never exerted that authority unless there was no other possible course. In all cases he left decisions in so far as that could be done to native bodies and native representatives and native courts with full authority.

Chief Justice White of the Supreme Court upon being consulted told him that in the main the laws were sound but that the procedure was faulty; that he must look closely to this and make many modifications. This hint from a great authority became his guide.

The most crying needs of the moment were the {133} courts and the prisons. Prisoners were held without cause; trials were a farce; the prisons themselves were filthy places where all ages were herded together; court houses were out of repair and out of use; records hardly existed, and the whole machinery of justice was that of a decayed colony of a decayed kingdom totally without the respect of the public and without self-respect.

General Wood began with characteristic promptness to get to the root of the matter. The principal officer charged with the prosecution of cases was removed and a mixed commission, selected and appointed by himself, substituted. As a result in a short time six hundred prisoners were freed, because there was not sufficient evidence against them to warrant their arrests. Court houses were put into repair. Judges with fixed and sufficient salaries were appointed; officials were set at work upon salaries that were fair and--what is far more to the point--were regularly paid. Prison commissions appointed by Wood examined conditions and the prisons were cleaned, moved to other buildings, or renovated and remodelled according to modern American methods. {134} The result in less than six months was that native officials were conducting this work in a self-respecting, honorable manner, convicting or releasing prisoners in short order and bringing the idea of justice into respect in the public mind. The establishment of order was a natural result. Outbreaks and riots became unknown. The people began to realize as no amount of exhibition of power on the part of the invaders could ever have made them realize that peace, order, fair play, and a chance to live had come upon the land in what seemed some miraculous fashion.

The respect of the individual for the State was born again in the Cuban mind--born, perhaps it is fairer to say, for the first time in the heart of this much abused and ignorant people. Once this really pierced their inner consciousness--the inner consciousness of the whole people, of everybody poor or rich--these people felt safe and secure and knew they could take up their enterprises with safety and with hope of adequate returns which should belong to themselves.

It was so sound to do this wherever possible through the medium of the Cubans themselves and {135} not through army officials! It was so sane and clear-visioned a method to begin with this great beam of the remodeled Cuban house--this building up by the process of individual observation of confidence in those who ruled them!--and the men whom General Wood selected to draw the plans were experts in just such work. He selected them. He passed on their schemes. They did the work. And to this day he gives them credit for the whole thing.