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criticized in civic life and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness and calm judgment and towering heroism which made him perhaps the most admired and best loved of all Americans in Cuba.
    Edmund Morris is perhaps a bit hard on TR in assessing his reaction to the casualties at Las Guasimas, but as there is considerable evidence of a hard side in Roosevelt’s nature I insert the following quotation to serve as a perhaps needed balance to the extreme praise in Marshall’s opinion:
    Compassion, never one of Theodore Roosevelt’s outstanding characteristics, was notably absent from his written accounts of Las Guasimas and its aftermath—unless the perfunctory phrase “poor Capron and Ham Fish” can be counted to mean anything. His only recorded emotion as the Rough Riders buried seven of the dead the next morning, in a common grave darkened with the shadows of circling buzzards, was pride in its all-American variety: “Indian and cowboy, miner, packer and college athlete, the man of unknown ancestry from the lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the crest of the Stuyvesants and Fishes.” When Bucky O’Neill turned to him and asked: “Colonel, isn’t it Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes of princes and tear the flesh of kings’?” Roosevelt answered coldly that he could not place the quotation.
    The next objective of the invading Americans was San Juan Hill, crowned with a blockhouse that dominated the Camino Real leading to Santiago. Capture of the hill would mean possession of this main road over which the infantry and artillery could then proceed to the siege of Santiago. It was believed that the fall of Santiago would end the war, and so it proved.
    Fever in the high command led to some last-minute promotions, and the elevation of Wood raised TR, to his great satisfaction—for now he deemed himself fully qualified—to the command of the Rough Riders. But the Rough Riders were not the only troops now waiting impatiently at the bottom of the hill for the order to charge and suffering from the withering and well-aimed fire of the defenders above them. There were also officers superior to TR, and he was frantic with the notion that the glory of leading the charge might be denied him. At last a message was received: “Move forward and support the Regulars in the assault on the hills in front.” This was not a total license, but it was all TR needed: “The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse, and then my ‘crowded hour’ began.”
    His men followed him up the hill, and victory was achieved. “All men who feel any power in battle,” he wrote, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in his heart.” And Richard Harding Davis, who watched the great charge, said of it: “No man who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected he would finish it alive.”
    And America had a new hero, as John Morton Blum has put it: “Between the war with Spain and the war in Europe, the average American boy, discarding the log cabin and the split rail, adopted a new model of successful conduct—a model that his father, however he voted, cheered throatily, and his mother, however she worshipped, endorsed.”
    Of course, there was another side, the other side of war. Roosevelt shot a Spaniard only ten yards away; he bowled over “like a jack rabbit.” And after the heights were taken he exulted to an old friend and fellow trooper, Robert Ferguson, “Look at all those damned Spanish dead!” Ferguson wrote to Edith Roosevelt: “No hunting trip so far has ever equalled it in Theodore’s eyes. It makes up for the omissions of many past years … T was just reveling in victory and gore.”
    Now came the big job of getting the boys home before half of them died of malaria. General Shafter called a conference of all brigade and