A primary source account of the consequences of Teddy Roosevelt’s participation with the Rough Riders during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

From the diary of Francisco Sagasta, staff doctor of the Santiago military hospital (translated)

July 5, 1898

Today the horrors of war, and the long-lasting scars it inscribes upon the hearts of the men involved, were impressed upon me in the gravest manner.  Another soldier was entrusted to my care today, and his most grievous wounds are mental rather than physical.  He was one of those tasked with defending the garrison at San Juan hill, according to the men who brought him here.  I cannot verify this from the soldier, nor anything else; his mind is gone, and he is unable to even share his name.

He spends his nights seemingly  wracked with pain.  His body twists itself into unnatural postures, ones that make my spine ache in sympathy.  It is only during the night that he speaks.  Most of his speech is guttural: moans and wails, as though in mourning for his brothers who fell at the hill.  Sometimes though, an intelligible word escapes.  It’s all nonsense of course, he talks about cavalry, but a grotesque sort of cavalry.  I fear he is slipping into madness, as he describes bears mounted on horseback which maul everyone around them.  His delirium rages, and the behaviors described grow ever more unthinkable.  Last night he described one of the bear cavalry dismounting mid-battle and devouring a soldier.  Strangely, the patient mentioned the bear adjusting its glasses before remounting the horse.

My best supposition is that this unfortunate soldier’s mind was far too sensitive for the inhumanity of war.  In an attempt to bridge that gap, his mind has constructed an alternate reality where man’s physical form matches his animalistic tendencies during war.  There certainly can be no other explanation for his descriptions of bear cavalry.  A world of half-bear/half-men abominations is one I do not care to contemplate.