Colonel Roosevelt (13 page)

He cabled back, “Accept,” and went to bed.

MORE VOCAL WEAR
and tear threatened in the morning, when a yellow imperial limousine came to transport him to Döberitz Field for the army exercises. The Kaiser awaited him, resplendent in blue and gold. Roosevelt’s slouch hat and khaki riding suit looked dingy in contrast. Henry White stood discreetly by, ready to mediate if needed.

“Roosevelt,
mein Freund
, I wish to welcome you in the presence of my guards,” Wilhelm said, as the three men climbed onto their horses. “I ask you to remember that you are the only private citizen who ever reviewed the troops of Germany.”

Roosevelt knew this was not true. General Leonard Wood, his old colleague from Cuba days, had been accorded the same courtesy in 1902, albeit as a senior officer of the U.S. Army. Perhaps Wilhelm was emphasizing the word
private
. But there was more to bother a foreign visitor, now, than semantics. The maneuvers he witnessed for the next five hours both amazed and depressed him. Five cavalry, six infantry, and four artillery regiments engaged in a clash of arms that made the charges at Vincennes look puny in comparison. Then the whole force split into two armies, each commanded by a Hohenzollern prince, and collided again. Battle conditions prevailed, with no hint of “game” playing, even when all three thousand troops marched past at the end, goose-stepping in salute to the Kaiser.

Lifting his hat every time Wilhelm touched his helmet, Roosevelt mantained a genial façade, but was aware only of the vast difference between himself and his host. It was not simply that the Kaiser held power, while he had none, nor the obvious fact that they were king and commoner. It was that he, self-made, had an integrated point of view, whereas Wilhelm personified the classic German neurosis of the
Doppelgänger
. Born to power, but also to disability, the Kaiser had “a sort of double-barreled perspective” on everything.
One self—the imperial—surveyed the passing troops, exulting in supreme command. The other self—Wilhelm’s “mental ghost”—had ridden some way off, and was observing the whole scene with a quizzical detachment. Of the two, man and ghost, the former was the more disturbing to Roosevelt. “He was actually, as far as I could discover, one of the last of those curious creatures who sincerely believed himself to be a demi-god.”

“
T
HE
C
OLONEL OF THE
R
OUGH
R
IDERS LECTURING THE
C
HIEF OF THE
G
ERMAN
A
RMY
.
”
Wilhelm II’s caption to this photograph of himself and Roosevelt at Döberitz
.
(photo credit i2.4)

When Edith saw her husband alone, late in the day, she got the feeling that he had undergone an epiphany. “I’m absolutely certain now, that we’re all in for it,” he told her. “Facts and figures … aren’t half so convincing as the direct scrutiny of a thing—especially such a monstrous thing as this!”

HE RECOVERED HIS CHEERFULNESS
overnight, along with much of his voice. This encouraged him to address the University of Berlin in person, dispensing with the offer of a substitute reader. The proceedings in the Aula auditorium amounted to a Germanic replay of those at the Sorbonne, only now, Roosevelt was made a
Doktor
of philosophy, and spoke with an emperor smiling and nodding at his feet.

Wilhelm had never visited the university before, so the atmosphere was
stiff. Five jackbooted commanders of the student army corps stood immobile on the platform, swords drawn, throughout Roosevelt’s eight-thousand-word speech. He gave it in English, but in view of its length it was untranslated, and received in a heavy silence. Defining his theme as “The World Movement,” he began with a hoarse preamble on the rise and fall of civilizations. Germans, he said, had developed early as “castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers.” They had turned back waves of barbaric invaders from the East, and helped Christianize Danes and Magyars and Slavs. He made much of the day when “
the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront of the nations of mankind.”

Roosevelt had learned as president that the Kaiser needed praise as much as oxygen, so he kept invoking imperial values as he went on. But when he remarked on the longevity of some cultures, as opposed to others that died, he used one of Wilhelm’s least favorite words, dropping it like acid into the balm of his previous flattery. “Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman.”

Nor was he finished:

The last statement, at least, was calculated to get the Kaiser’s head nodding again. Roosevelt swung into his main argument, which was that the spread of Greco-Roman culture across half the globe presaged the “world movement” now known as Western civilization.
He listed the main features of European history since the invention of printing, in such primer-like fashion that scholars in the audience—many of whom had spent their careers studying the complexities of each—listened with expressions ranging from surprise to bemusement. Those who could understand English did not know whether they were being patronized, or merely disregarded by this species of
genus Americanus egotisticus
. Roosevelt certainly seemed to care little for the Kaiser’s racial phobias:

So much for the Yellow Peril. Roosevelt went on to suggest that the best aspirations of all modern cultures were connected, as never before, by a web of global communications. “The bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.”

As at the Sorbonne, he spoke too long, and equivocated too often. So the most cautionary part of his address, a reminder that the world’s new inter-connectedness could just as easily bring about its destruction, lulled more than it alarmed:

But it was a warm afternoon, and the auditorium was stuffy. Here and there, grayheaded professors slept.

ROOSEVELT’S BERLIN UNIVERSITY ADDRESS
was even less of a success than his speech in Christiania. Local
newspapers gave it scant attention. Nevertheless, he enjoyed
substantive interviews over the next two days with many eminent Berliners, from Bethmann-Hollweg and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to the aeronaut Count Zeppelin and the wildlife photographer C. G. Schillings. The German he had learned as a teenager in Dresden came back to him, and he had no difficulty making himself understood.

Back at the embassy, he was tickled to receive
a set of photographs of himself
and the Kaiser conversing at Döberitz. Each print was annotated on the back by Wilhelm, with heavy Prussian humor:

The Colonel of the Rough Riders lecturing the Chief of the German Army

A piece of good advice: “Carnegie is an old Peace bore
”

The German and Anglo Saxon Races combined will keep the world in order!

Just before he left for London, an emissary came to ask if he would mind returning the pictures. Clearly, someone in the imperial suite dreaded that they might be published. But Roosevelt could already see them framed in glass, front and back, on display at his home in Oyster Bay.

“
Oh, no,” he said. “His Majesty the Kaiser gave the photographs to me and I propose to retain them.”