1 66 The Rough Riders 



dierly obedience to make up for any deficiencies in 

 the technique of the trade which they had tempo- 

 rarily adopted. It must be remembered that they 

 were already good individual fighters, skilled in the 

 use of the horse and the rifle, so that there was no 

 need of putting them through the kind of training 

 in which the ordinary raw recruit must spend his 

 first year or two. 



On July 2d, as the day wore on, the fight, though 

 raging fitfully at intervals, gradually died away. 

 The Spanish guerillas were causing us much trouble. 

 They showed great courage, exactly as did their 

 soldiers who were defending the trenches. In fact, 

 the Spaniards throughout showed precisely the 

 qualities they did early in the century, when, as 

 every student will remember, their fleets were a 

 helpless prey to the English warships, and their 

 armies utterly unable to stand in the open against 

 those of Napoleon's marshals, while on the other 

 hand their guerillas performed marvelous feats, and 

 their defence of intrenchments and walled towns, as 

 at Saragossa and Gerona, were the wonder of the 

 civilized world. 



In our front their sharp-shooters crept up before 

 dawn and either lay in the thick jungle or climbed 

 into some tree with dense foliage. In these places 

 it proved almost impossible to place them, as they 

 kept cover very carefully, and their smokeless pow- 



