To provide an adequate number of officers for the volunteer army was more difficult. Even though a considerable number were transferred from the regular to the volunteer army, they constituted only a small proportion of the whole number necessary. Some few of those appointed were graduates of West Point, and more had been in the militia. The great majority, however, had purely amateur experience, and many not even so much. Those who did know something, moreover, did not have the same knowledge or experience. This raw material was given no officer training whatsoever but was turned directly to the task of training the rank and file. Nor were the appointments of new officers confined to the lower ranks. The country, still mindful of its earlier wars, was charmed with the sentimental elevation of confederate generals to the rank of major general in the new army, though a public better informed would hardly have welcomed for service in the tropics the selection of men old enough to be generals in 1865 and then for thirty-three years without military experience in an age of great development in the methods of warfare. The other commanding officers were as old and were mostly chosen by seniority in a service retiring at sixty-four. The unwonted strain of active service naturally proved too great. At the most critical moment of the campaign in Cuba, the commanding general, William R. Shafter, had eaten nothing for four days, and his plucky second in command, the wiry Georgian cavalry leader of 1864 and 1865, General "Joe" Wheeler, was not physically fit to succeed him. There is not the least doubt that the fighting spirit of the men was strong and did not fail, but the defect in those branches of knowledge which are required to keep an army fit to fight is equally certain. The primary cause for the melting of the American army by disease must be acknowledged to be the insufficient training of the officers. This hit or miss method, however, had its compensations, for it brought about some appointments of unusual merit. Conspicuous were those of Colonel Leonard Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. The latter had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position in which he had contributed a great deal to the efficiency of that Department, in order to take a more tangible part in the war. After raising among his friends and the cowboys of the West a regiment of "Rough Riders," he declined its command on plea of military inexperience. Roosevelt made one of those happy choices which are a mark of his administrative ability in selecting as colonel Leonard Wood, an army surgeon whose quality he knew through common experiences in the West.