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41 6 Las Guasimas General William Shafter’s Fifth Corps was small by usual military standards; it consisted of only about sixteen thousand officers and men, twenty–three hundred horses and mules, two hundred wagons, sixteen light guns, a dozen heavier guns, and other weapons.1 It was, however, the largest force that could be carried on the thirty–two transports available. Shafter’s biggest problem was not the size of his force, but uncertainty as to his destination. Lacking specific orders,he took matters into his own hands.Presuming that he would eventually be sent to the vicinity of Santiago Bay, he followed a course around the eastern tip of Cuba and thence westward along the south coast. Fortunately for his men, the seas were calm, somewhat alleviating the misery they were undergoing in the holds of the ships. The greatest source of distress was the heat. Many of the men, those coming from the sands of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, were somewhat inured to hot weather, but those from the Ivy League schools fared worse. Nevertheless, they made the best of the situation and spent their time as soldiers always do on transports: some gambled, some just gazed at the sea, and others passed the time writing letters. Wood and Roosevelt were of course responsible for seeing to the welfare of the troops, but their actual duties did not take up much of their time. Both occupied themselves writing letters, of which Roosevelt’s were the more remarkable because they hardly read like those normally expected from a lieutenant colonel far down the chain of command. On June 12, even before the Yucatan left Tampa, Roosevelt wrote to Senator Lodge, in which letter the lieutenant colonel gave the senator his instructions: 1. Frank Freidel, The Splendid Little War, 68–69, 72. 42 Teddy Roosevelt and Leonard Wood I wonder if it would be possible for you to tell the Administration, that is, the President, and if necessary the Secretary of War, just what is going on here and the damage that is being done. Of course, I cannot speak publicly in any way; I should be court–martialed if I did, but this letter I shall show to Wood, my Colonel, and it is written after consultation with Gen. Young,2 my brigade commander. I shall not show this first to Wood or to Young, for I want to say that it would be impossible to get a better man than Wood has shown himself to be, and so far as I am concerned I am entirely content with Young as Brigade General but otherwise the mismanagement here is frightful.3 He then continued on for several pages, not bothering with such conventions as paragraphs, outlining his observations of everything wrong described above and then some. Wood’s letters, on the other hand, were written almost exclusively to his wife and were more conventional. Sometimes he showed a touch of the poet, and sometimes he lapsed into gloomy reality. On June 15, the day of departure from Tampa, he wrote describing the experience of being on the ocean: “Painted ships on a painted ocean. Imagine three great lines of transports with a warship at the head of each line, steaming in long lines, 800 yards from each other over a sea of indigo blue, real deep blue, such as I have never seen before. Air warm and balmy, with a gentle breeze stirring up the water. No swell or disturbance. Simply a great peaceful marine picture.” But then, on June 20: “No one seems to know exactly what we are to do or where we are to land. You can hardly imagine the awful confusion and lack of system which meets one on every hand in this business. . . . Somehow everything seems to go on in a happy–go–lucky way. . . . If the Europeans want to intervene, nothing could give them more encouragement. . . . [We are lucky] having struck a broken–down power, for we would surely have had a deuced hard time with any other.”4 —————————————————— General Shafter and his staff made the trip on the Seguranca, along with a group of war correspondents, men who took themselves far more seriously than did the Army. Foremost among them was Richard Harding Davis, still reporting for Hearst’s New York Journal. But there were other men of note 2. Brigadier General Samuel B. M. Young. 3. Roosevelt to Lodge, June 12, 1898, quoted in Brands, Selected Letters of Roosevelt...

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