50 NAVAL SECRETARY AND ROUGH RIDER 



Let us go on to another incident a month or more later. The war 

 was ended. That charge up San Juan Hill had practically ended it. 

 During this month the victorious army had been kept in Cuba, doing 

 nothing and suffering from a malarial attack that had put more than 

 4,000 of the men on the sick list. If an attack of yellow fever, indig- 

 enous to that climate, had broken out among the weakened troops, it 

 would have proved ten times more fatal than the Spanish bullets. 



Colonel Roosevelt — he was a colonel then — chafed and fretted. 

 Doing nothing did not agree with his constitution. He broke out at 

 length in the famous ''round robin," which he wrote and his fellow 

 officers signed, protesting against keeping the army longer in Cuba, 

 exposed to the perils of that pestilential climate. People shook their 

 heads when they heard of this and talked of precedents. They did not 

 recognize that he was a man to break and make precedents. 



Whatever their opinion, the "round robin," and letter w^hich he 

 wrote to General Shafter, making a powerful presentation of the perils 

 of the army, had the intended effect. The men were recalled and 

 shook the malarial dust of Cuba from their feet. With that event 

 closed the war experience of Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Rider 

 regiment. 



