74 The Rough Riders 



we talked of the war, which all of us present be- 

 lieved to be impending, and Wood and I told him 

 we were going to make every effort to get in, some- 

 how ; and he answered that we must be sure to get 

 into his brigade, if he had one, and he would guaran- 

 tee to show us fighting. None of us forgot the con- 

 versation. As soon as our regiment was raised Gen- 

 eral Young applied for it to be put in his brigade. 

 We were put in ; and he made his word good ; for he 

 fought and won the first fight on Cuban soil. 



Yet, even though under him, we should not have 

 been in this fight at all if we had not taken advan- 

 tage of the chance to disembark among the first 

 troops, and if it had not been for Wood's energy in 

 pushing our regiment to the front. 

 , On landing we spent some active hours in march- 

 ing our men a quarter of a mile or so inland, as boat- 

 load by boat-load they disembarked. Meanwhile 

 one of the men, Knoblauch, a New Yorker, who was 

 a great athlete and a champion swimmer, by diving 

 in the surf off the dock, recovered most of the rifles 

 which had been lost when the boat-load of colored 

 cavalry capsized. The country would have offered 

 very great difficulties to an attacking force had 

 there been resistance. It was little but a mass of 

 rugged and precipitous hills, covered for the most 

 part by dense jungle. Five hundred resolute men 

 could have prevented the disembarkation at very lit- 



