The Career of Leonard Wood Part 4

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 doc.u.ment 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.

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THE ORGANIZER

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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.

n.o.body 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 cla.s.ses 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 teta.n.u.s 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 pa.s.sion 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 inst.i.tuting 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 dest.i.tute 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.