a Motte reports that the
pace is too fast for the men, and that over fifty have
fallen out from exhaustion." Wood replied sharply: "I have
no time to bother with sick men now." You replied, more in
answer, I suppose, to his tone than to his words: "I merely
repeated what the Surgeon reported to me." Wood then turned
and said in explanation: "I have no time for them now; I
mean that we are in sight of the enemy."

This was the only information we received that the men of L
Troop had been ambushed by the Spaniards, and, if they were,
they were very calm about it, and I certainly was taking
photographs of them at the time, and the rest of the
regiment, instead of being half an hour's march away, was
seated comfortably along the trail not twenty feet distant
from the men of L Troop. You deployed G Troop under Captain
Llewellen into the jungle at the right and sent K Troop
after it, and Wood ordered Troops E and F into the field on
our left. It must have been from ten to fifteen minutes
after Capron and Wood had located the Spaniards before
either side fired a shot. When the firing did come I went
over to you and joined G Troop and a detachment of K Troop
under Woodbury Kane, and we located more of the enemy on a
ridge.

If it is to be ambushed when you find the enemy exactly
where you went to find him, and your scouts see him soon
enough to give you sufficient time to spread five troops
in skirmish order to attack him, and you then drive him
back out of three positions for a mile and a half, then
most certainly, as Bonsal says, "L Troop of the Rough
Riders was ambushed by the Spaniards on the morning of
June 24th."

General Wood also writes me at length about Mr. Bonsal's book,
stating that his account of the Guasimas fight is without foundation
in fact. He says: "We had five troops completely deployed before the
first shot was fired. Captain Capron was not wounded until the fight
had been going on fully thirty-five minutes. The statement that
Captain Capron's troop was ambushed is absolutely untrue. We had been
informed, as you know, by Castillo's people that we should find the
dead guerilla a few hundred yards on the Siboney side of the Spanish
lines."

He then alludes to the waving of the guidon by K Troop as "the only
means of communication with the regulars." He