Colonel Roosevelt (116 page)

The hospital denied this, but conceded that his surgeons were on emergency call. Another operation, however, was as likely to kill the Colonel as blood poisoning. His left ear was still suppurating, and now the mastoid process appeared to be involved, threatening the base of the brain. Probing that deep might have terrible consequences. Ethel found her father so mummified in bandages that she could see little of his face, and his voice—whispering something about her fighting brothers—was almost inaudible. The infection advanced to the limit of his tolerance, then stopped and began to subside. By the end of the day he was asking for food.

“
He’s a peach,” one of the nurses said.

ROOSEVELT REMAINED HOSPITALIZED
for a month. His recovery from sepsis was rapid, but extreme vertigo afflicted him through the middle weeks of February. The slightest movement of his head brought on waves of nausea. That made it doubly difficult for him to reorient himself to his surroundings, because of his blind left eye.
He was told that the deafness in his left ear would probably be permanent.

Edith and Ethel alternated in sitting with him. They read him newspaper articles soothing to his blood pressure, and get-well letters from the sackfuls delivered daily by Miss Stricker.
The first he answered came from William Howard Taft, who mentioned that he had been through a similar rectal experience. Roosevelt dictated a sympathetic reply, and said of himself, “Am rather rocky, but worth several men.”

The President wrote. Cables came from King George V and Clemenceau.
Edwin Arlington Robinson penned a few touching words. There was no message from Cecil Spring Rice: Edith suppressed the news that he had just died of a heart attack, en route home to England.

A letter arrived from Quentin. It had been mailed before he had heard of
his father’s illness, and did not explain his mysterious silence earlier that winter. But visits from Flora, looking pretty and more in love than ever, reassured Roosevelt that all was now well. Quentin’s only complaint was that he was still being held back from the Front. His commanding major had “called him down” for demanding to be transferred to the lines, saying that he was needed at Issoudun as an instructor for draftees. Roosevelt advised him to keep trying nevertheless. He should remember for the moment that he had been one of the first volunteers of the war. “
You stand as no other men of your generation can stand. You have won the great prize.”

When, at last, Quentin confessed what had been wrong with him for so long, he wrote not to his parents but Ethel. Horrified, she shared the truth with them on 27 February. He had succumbed to pneumonia a few weeks before Christmas, as a result of high-altitude training, and had been sent to the Riviera to recuperate. Archie, in a sharp letter endorsed by Ted, had accused him of “slacking” behind the lines. Quentin had consequently sunk into a depression, compounded by his longing for Flora and guilt over the fact that he had a taste for what doughboys in the trenches called
la guerre de luxe
—shopping and theatergoing with Eleanor on visits to Paris, and hopping his Nieuport over to Romorantin for weekends with the hospitable Normants. His Plattsburg buddy Hamilton Coolidge often accompanied him in convoy. They had their own rooms on the château’s second floor, overlooking the river Sauldre, and liked to laze up there on Sunday mornings, wearing white robes and breakfasting on croissants and
café au lait
.

Edith Roosevelt was furious at Archie’s insensitivity, and more than a little protective. Of all of her children, Quentin was the one most like her
in Gallic tastes and temperament. The others spoke French, but Quentin did so with instinctive rapidity, gesturing as he talked. He identified with the
gaîté
, the elegance and subtle snobbery of French culture, as opposed to the Nordic, Slavic, and even Mongol militarism his father admired. Archie and Ted were warriors, cut from coarser cloth. In her own hand, Edith wrote a cable of support, and signed it simply, “Roosevelt.”

The Colonel was released from hospital on 4 March, the same day that news came from Brest-Litovsk that Russia had capitulated to Germany in a peace treaty of alarming import. Whether out of desperation or long-term design, the Bolsheviks had sacrificed vast areas of formerly Tsarist territory to the Central Powers, including the Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Finland, and the
Baltic provinces. Germany could henceforth count on nearly all of Russia’s oil production, most of its iron ore, and a cornucopia of its food products. Instead of retreating behind its own borders, as Wilson had demanded in the sixth of his Fourteen Points, the Reich had effectively occupied a large swath of Russia west of Moscow. With relief forces daily amplifying those entrenched along the Hindenburg Line, a major offensive against Paris looked inevitable—most likely in the early spring, before Pershing’s army achieved its full fighting mass.

Enraged, Woodrow Wilson began to sound like Clemenceau. The Prussians, he publicly declared, had shown what they thought of his formula for world peace. “
There is therefore but one answer open to us. Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit.”

THE APPROACH OF SPRING
had cracked most of Oyster Bay’s ice by the time Roosevelt,
still unsteady on his feet, returned to Sagamore Hill.
Cove Neck exuded its ancient reek of salt marsh, clam flats, tangled rigging, and seawater. The first crocuses were out. It would be a long time before the enfeebled squire could walk around his property, much less ride a horse. “The destruction of my left inner ear,” he wrote Quentin, “has made me lose my equilibrium … but in two or three months I should be all right.”

Looking over the letter after Miss Stricker had typed it, he scrawled an impulsive postscript: “
I wish you could get darling Flora to cross the ocean and marry you! I would escort her over.”

On 13 March, Edith came down to breakfast and found her husband already up, pondering a telephone call from United Press. Captain Archibald Roosevelt of Company B, Twenty-sixth Infantry, AEF, had reportedly won France’s Croix de Guerre “under dramatic circumstances.” A War Department telegram later in the morning advised that Archie had been “slightly wounded.” Then a cable from Ted came to say that he had been hit in an arm and leg by shrapnel. Ted’s terseness implied there could be worse medical news to come. As soon as Archie was transferable, Eleanor would look after him in Paris.

The Roosevelts were especially moved because Grace, staying with her parents in Boston, had
just given birth to Archibald Roosevelt, Jr.—their eighth grandchild. That evening a proud Colonel wrote to tell Archie, Sr., how they had celebrated his blooding in battle: “
At lunch Mother ordered in some madeira; all four of us filled the glasses
^*
and drank them off to you; then Mother, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, as pretty as a picture, and as spirited as any heroine of romance, dashed her glass on the floor, shivering it
in pieces, saying ‘that glass shall never be drunk out of again’; and the rest of us followed suit and broke our glasses too.” He did not add that his own eyes had been wet at that moment.

A few days later he read in an upstate newspaper the prediction of an AEF official in France that Quentin was a young officer worth watching, “as game as they make ’em in aviation.” Roosevelt did not hesitate to rebroadcast this quote, along with reports that Ted had nearly been killed in the same battle that wounded Archie, and that Kermit, having acquitted himself bravely in Mesopotamia (learning Persian as he did so),
now wished to fight under General Pershing.

Roosevelt’s paternal pride swelled steadily. So did his stomach, as every day of improved health turned him back into the trencherman of yore. He argued that the government’s food restrictions did not apply to comestibles produced by the Sagamore Hill farm. Ethel was amazed at the amount of lunch he could put away. After one feast she wrote Dick Derby, “
Father had 2 plates (cereal plates) of tomatoes, 2 plates of applesauce, 1 plate of potato, grouped around the
pièce de résistance
which was spare ribs of pork. I counted 18 which he ate, & then he refused to let me count further!! He certainly ‘eat hearty.’ ”

Although Roosevelt still chafed over his inability to fight in France, he had become resigned to it enough to accept whatever political or journalistic assignments gave him a feeling of being useful. One of these was a request from Will H. Hays, the new chairman of the RNC, to deliver a formal statement of Party war policy at Portland, Maine, on 28 March.
It was intended to be the keynote of the fall Congressional campaign, for which Hays had high hopes.

The Colonel’s consultations and correspondence on the speech—he sent a draft to William Howard Taft for suggestions—helped distract him from headlines confirming that the German offensive in northeastern France had begun promptly, on the first day of spring. A bombardment of unbelievable intensity battered Allied artillery emplacements around Arras, while
poisonous phosgene fumes spilled like fog into every bunker. The phosgene was mixed with lacrimators, which so stung the eyes of gunners that they pulled off their gas masks, weeping, only to inhale the fog and die. Then concentrated units of storm troopers moved in and drove the British Fifth Army westward, effectively wiping it out.

Under the circumstances, Roosevelt’s prediction, in Maine, of three more years of war, necessitating a five-million-man American army, did not sound alarmist.
He returned home to hear that the Germans had recaptured all the territory they had lost in the Battle of the Somme.
A terrified Jules Jusserand told President Wilson that the Arras salient was now no farther from Paris than Baltimore was from Washington. Clemenceau’s government was considering a retreat to Bordeaux.

Wilson remained outwardly impassive, but the emergency was so acute that Jusserand and Lord Reading begged him to allow units of the AEF to be “brigaded” among the French and British armies. General Pershing was adamant against such dissipation of American strength. The President’s growing number of critics in Washington suggested that he look to Oyster Bay for guidance. “
Wilson always follows T.R., eventually,” one of them sneered at a dinner party attended by the secretary of the treasury, William G. McAdoo. “I suppose soon we will hear that he’s deaf in one ear.”

“Many think he’s already deaf in both,” McAdoo replied.

Wilson reluctantly agreed to a temporary transfer of ninety thousand U.S. troops. The Allied line held from Reims in the south to Amiens in the north, and the war of attrition resumed. Pershing went back to building up his army and found
a place for Kermit as a captain of artillery in the armored car service.

QUENTIN HAPPENED TO
have been in Paris just after the first German shells landed.
He calculated his chance of being hit at one hundred thousand to one, and with a boy’s bravado found the slight danger thrilling. It was enough, however, to remind him of the tenuousness of life, and his father’s obsession about getting Flora over to marry him. Letters to that effect kept arriving, written in the Colonel’s forceful hand, and not mincing words: