BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT LIEUTENANT-COLONEL, U. S. A. ILLUSTRATED G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON The Knickerbocker Press 1919 Copyright, 1919 by THEODORE ROOSEVELT To THE OFFICERS AND MEN OF THE 26th INFANTRY...

ALL our lives my father treated his sons and daughters as companions. When we were not with him he wrote to us constantly. Everything that we did we discussed with him whenever it was possible. All his children tried to live up to his principles. In the paragraphs from his letters below, he speaks often of the citizens of this country as "our people." It is for all these, equally with us, that the messages are intended. "New Year's greetings to you! This may or may not be, on the whole, a happy

BOYHOOD RECOLLECTIONS "'Tis education forms the common mind,— Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined." Alexander Pope FROM the time when we were very little boys we were always interested in military preparedness. My father believed very strongly in the necessity of each boy being able and willing not only to look out for himself but to look out for those near and dear to him. This gospel was preached to us all from the time we were very, very small. A story, told in the family of an inci

SINS OF THE FATHERS "Sons of the sheltered city— Unmade, unhandled, unmeet— Ye pushed them raw to the battle As ye picked them raw from the street. And what did ye look, they should compass? Warcraft learned in a breath, Knowledge unto occasion At the first far view of death?" Kipling. WHILE we were personally working at Plattsburg the national administration, after a meandering course, in which much of the motion was retrograde, had finally decided that to fight a war in France it was necessary

OVERSEAS "Behind him lay the gray Azores, Behind the gates of Hercules, Before him not the ghosts of shores Before him only shoreless seas." Joaquin Miller. MY brother and I sailed from New York for Bordeaux on June 18, 1917. One little incident of the voyage always stands out in my mind. As we were leaving the harbor, the decks crowded with passengers, everyone keyed up to a high state of excitement, our flag was lowered for some reason. While being lowered it blew from the halyards and fell in

TRAINING IN FRANCE "I wish myself could talk to myself as I left 'im a year ago; I could tell 'im a lot that would save 'im a lot in the things that 'e ought to know. When I think o' that ignorant barrack bird it almost makes me cry." Kipling. A day or two after the Fourteenth of July review the rest of the troops arrived and my personal fortune hung in the balance, as I was still unattached. Colonel Duncan, afterward Major General Duncan, commander of the Seventy-seventh and Eighty-second divis

LIFE IN AN ARMY AREA THE billeting of the men was a problem. As I mentioned before, the constitution of the United States forbids billeting, taking as ground for this action that when soldiers are placed under a private roof constant friction is bound to arise. In Europe the masses of troops were so great and the country so thickly settled that this method of caring for the soldiers was of necessity the only one that could be adopted. In the average French farm the houses have big barns attached

EARLY DAYS IN THE TRENCHES "How strange a spectacle of human passions Is yours all day beside the Arras road, What mournful men concerned about their rations When here at eve the limbers leave their load, What twilight blasphemy, what horses' feet Entangled with the meat, What sudden hush when that machine gun sweeps And flat as possible for men so round The quartermasters may be seen in heaps, While you sit by and chuckle, I'll be bound." A. P. H. ( Punch ). EARLY in October mysterious orders r

MONTDIDIER "And horror is not from terrible things—men torn to rags by a shell, And the whole trench swimming in blood and slush, like a Butcher's shop in Hell; It's silence and night and the smell of the dead that shake a man to the soul, From Misery Farm to Dead Man's Death on a nil report patrol." Knight-Adkin. BY the end of March we were veteran troops. All during the latter part of the month rumor had been rife about the proposed German drive. After nearly four years of war, Germany had cru

SOISSONS "And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." Tennyson. EARLY in July rumors reached us that we were going to be relieved. At first we did not attach any importance to this, as we had heard many rumors of a like nature during the months we had been in the sector. At last, however, the French officers came up to reconnoiter, and we knew it was true. We were relieved and marched back to some little village near the old French town of Beauvais. Every

ST. MIHIEL AND THE ARGONNE "'Millions of ages have come and gone,' The sergeant said as we held his hand; 'They have passed like the mist of the early dawn Since I left my home in that far-off land.'" Ironquill. DURING the next couple of months, while I was laid up with my wound, the regiment first went to a rest sector near Pont-à-Mousson. There replacements reached them, wounded men returned, and they gradually worked up to their full strength again. They enjoyed themselves fully. It was one o

THE LAST BATTLE "The giant grows blind in his fury and spite, One blow on the forehead will finish the fight." Holmes. HARDLY had the new replacements, some 1800 in all, learned to what company they belonged, when our definite orders reached us. The trucks arrived and we rattled off toward the front. We detrucked and bivouacked for a couple of days in a big wood while our supply trains came up. The weather, fortunately, was crisp and cool and bivouacking was really pleasant. What our mission was

UP THE MOSELLE AND INTO CONQUERED GERMANY "Judex ergo cum sedebit Quidquid latet, apparebit Nil, inultum remanebit." Celano. THE Third Army, which was to march into Germany as the army of occupation, was all in place on the 15th of November. My regiment was bivouacked in what had once been a wood, northeast of shell-shattered Verdun. The bleakest of bleak north winds whistled over the hilltops, whirling the gray dust in clouds. The men huddled around fires or burrowed into cracks in the hillside