56 
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, indigo 
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 which 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. 
