Colonel Roosevelt (112 page)

FLORA WROTE QUENTIN
a farewell letter to take with him.

On Monday morning, Theodore and Edith went into Manhattan to see their youngest son off on the SS
Olympia
. Alice joined them at the Cunard dock. The Whitney family was there en masse. None of them knew Flora was
engaged, but they were showing rare support for her and her soldier boyfriend.

The liner, war-painted troopship gray, was in no hurry to leave. Humid heat built up along the waterfront. Quentin seemed to want to do nothing but sit on a bale of hides holding hands with Flora. By lunchtime, his parents and sister could stand it no longer and said goodbye. They left the young couple in care of the Whitneys and drove home to Sagamore Hill. Alice sensed Roosevelt’s utter desolation.

She murmured to herself,
The old Lion perisheth for lack of prey and the stout Lion’s whelps are scattered abroad
.

HAVING LITTLE RELIGION
, Roosevelt was confessedly fatalistic. “
I have always believed in the truth of the statement that ‘He who seeks his life shall lose it.’ ” Perhaps the same applied to seeking a soldier’s death.
He was being punished for the fatal insolence of wanting to go gloriously.

Sagamore Hill had been a lonely place before, after his various political defeats and the marriages and resettlements of his children. But he had always been able to count on the politicians returning, and even when Ted and Kermit had tried to seek
their
lives, on the West Coast and in South America, somehow or other the same flame kept bringing them back. Alice, too. Although she was now a fixture of the Washington establishment, she was never happier than when she could leave Nick to his violin and his mistresses and revisit the home of her childhood.

But the diaspora of four sons to the war—not to mention Eleanor and Belle, hurrying to beat an imminent law against the wives of servicemen going overseas—plus an almost total transferal of press attention to what was happening “over there,” filled the old house with an emptiness that only extreme youth could assuage. Ethel brought her little boy and baby girl often, but not often enough for a wistful grandfather. And there was Flora Whitney, with a gulf of her own inside her. She visited the Roosevelts again and again, as if she were already their daughter-in-law.

Quentin had done what he could to create interdependence between her and them, leaving a farewell note to Flora in his father’s hands: “
I love you, dearest, and always shall, far, far, more than you will ever know or believe.… Ah, sweetheart, war is a cruel master to us all.”

“
FLORA CAME OVER
for dinner with Mother and me,” Roosevelt wrote Quentin on 28 July. “So darling and so pretty.… I cannot overstate how fond I have grown of her, and how much I respect and admire her—so pretty and young and yet so good and really wise.”

His praise might have signified more, were he not in the habit of applying the same adjectives to all the women in his family.
It was too early for him to adjust to Flora as a species different from those others, so avant-garde in her affectations (“I am perfectly mad about amber”), mercurial, hungry for new experiences that she could not quite specify, except to be certain that Quentin would provide them. She found a sympathetic friend in Ethel, to whom she poured out emotions the Roosevelts would have recoiled from: “If the fates can be as cruel as to take him from me, I need all the courage I can get from him and his influence now, while he is concretely mine, so that my life has to be lived
for
him and not
with
him.… It was hard during that last day but toward evening I got to a point where I couldn’t cry. I felt as if the tears of the centuries had amassed themselves somewhere between my throat and my stomach and intended to remain there.”

In the midst of her anguish, Flora could tell that Edith was also pining for Quentin—the most vulnerable of the Roosevelt children, with his bad back and unmilitary nature. If that aloof woman had more particular reasons for loving him, Flora was too shy to ask. The Colonel was more approachable, yet again, there was a uniformity about the way he talked about his sons, except in occasional references to Kermit. They were equally brave and fine and determined to do their duty. Dick Derby was also brave and fine, in arranging to be sent back to France as a military doctor—and Nick Longworth would be brave and fine too, except that members of Congress were barred from enlisting. In his all-embracing pride, Roosevelt was actually harder than Edith for Flora to reach. She begged Ethel to tell her what she could do to help the family. “
I am so sorry for your Mother that when I am with her … I almost forget my own troubles.”

The secrecy and slowness of troopship movements was such that the Roosevelts had to wait for weeks to hear if their last son had crossed over safely.
On 9 August, a letter came from Major Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He had not yet seen anything of Quentin in Paris, or of Kermit, who was due to pass through en route to Mesopotamia. But Ted had tremendous news of his own: he was appointed commander of the First Battalion, Twenty-sixth Infantry, AEF First Division—so far, the only war-ready unit Pershing had been able to establish in France. Archie expected to be assigned a place in the same division soon.

Roosevelt was overjoyed. “
I had no idea,” he wrote back, “that you could
make a
regular
regiment in a line position.” Evidently Pershing had felt Ted’s bulldog drive and decided to make use of it as soon as the AEF started fighting. Nobody knew when that might be.

“I am busy writing and occasionally speaking,” Roosevelt reported. “I have had various offers which are good from the financial side; but my interest of course now lies entirely in the work of you four boys, for my work is of no real consequence—what I did was in the Spanish War and in the decade following.…”

His habit of referring back to his days as Rough Rider and commander in chief had become compulsive as he adjusted to the fact that he was not wanted by the War Department.
In a snub the Colonel’s friends could not see as anything but cruel, Secretary Baker announced that William Howard Taft had been appointed a major general. On close inspection of the official order, it became clear that Taft’s title was only a “certificate of identity,” awarded to him as a high officer of the American Red Cross. But the thought of the peace-loving former president lumbering around in khaki was grotesque. Roosevelt tried to make a joke of it. “Major General Taft! How the Kaiser must have trembled when he heard the news!”

As August dragged on with no further word from France, he showed
symptoms of extreme stress. For the first time in his life, he had difficulty sleeping. He agonized about possibly having to tell Edith that one of her sons had been killed. An attack of Cuban fever laid him low in mid-month. It did not lapse as quickly as usual, and inflamed the leg he had hurt in Brazil. He sat around the house with his head and back throbbing and his thigh done up in a moistened clay poultice.

His tendency to rant returned. Once more Woodrow Wilson was “
an absolutely selfish, cold-blooded, and unpatriotic rhetorician.”
Seven months after the start of Germany’s submarine offensive, Wilson and the “well-meaning little humanitarian” in the War Department were still struggling to create and supply a fighting force. “With our enormous wealth and resources,” Roosevelt wrote Arthur Lee, “I still believe that we shall become a ponderable element in the war next spring; but until that time I doubt if we will count for as much as Belgium or Romania.”

He was diverted by the arrival of some more army-stamped letters, although Quentin had yet to be heard from. Kermit and Belle were at last in Paris, and stopping at the Ritz. Ted and Archie had been transferred near the Front—where, the censor would not let them say. Archie had been put in Ted’s regiment. Roosevelt did not like the sound of that. Having one brother under the other was prejudicial to discipline.
He
would not have allowed it, back when
he
was in command of a regiment!

Another thing that disturbed him was the way Belle and Kermit were sticking
together. They had eighteen-month-old “Kim” with them, and Belle was pregnant again. Eleanor at least had gone over with the independent purpose of working for the American YMCA in Paris. She had the use of a large house on Rue de Villejust, in the sixteenth arrondissement. Belle talked of joining her parents in Madrid after Kermit moved on to Mesopotamia. But she was a clingy woman, and Kermit was capable of yielding to pressure from her to seek a staff assignment with the British army in France. He had never had a sense of career direction. “This is war,” his father cajoled him. “It needs the sternest, most exclusive, and most business-like attention; and no officer (especially an officer of a foreign nationality who has been approved by favor) must try to get his wife near him on the campaign.… He must devote himself solely to his grim work.”

As ever, Roosevelt sought comfort in books. He was not always successful. “
One of the most ominously instructive things in history,” he wrote a correspondent, “is the difference between Hannibal’s career when, although in an incredibly difficult position, he had behind him the war party of Carthage and an army … and the last unhappy decade of his life when he was in Asia Minor, continually asked by Asiatic kings to help them do something against Rome, and yet absolutely powerless to accomplish anything in positions in which they had put him.”