Colonel Roosevelt (86 page)

Davis was conscious mainly of sound: the rumble of howitzers and siege cannons, the jingling of machine guns, chains clanking on cobbles, sharp bugle calls, the squeal of ungreased axles and grinding of steel wheels on stone. To another American reporter, Will Irwin, what was more of an
onslaught on the senses was “the smell of a half-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the
n
th power. That smell lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed.”

Neither reporter could quite express the sense each had that something entirely new and wholly frightening had been revealed to them, implicit in the gray colorlessness, the engineered sameness, the loud, crushing force of human aggression turned to science. There was not a noun for it yet, but if the young tribune of “Red Week” in Emilia-Romagna had his way, it would be coined from
the Italian word
fasci
.

COMPARISON OF THE
developing war to a tornado, or cyclone, was so common among public figures that month that few of them noticed its precise applicability to Germany’s opening military maneuver. By curving up through Flanders and then around to encircle Paris, the plan—named after its designer, Count Alfred von Schlieffen—envisaged hitting the main French defense line from behind, in a whirl timed to last just forty-two days. Russia’s inadequate railroad system should delay any major offensive from beyond the Vistula for at least six weeks. France would have capitulated by then, so Germany could concentrate all its firepower in an eastern
Hunnenschlacht
that would settle the Slav problem forever.

Roosevelt had been confidentially aware of the essentials of the Schlieffen Plan since 1911. The best that could be said of the tornado in action was that it was weaker than it might have been. General Moltke, the Kaiser’s chief of staff, had deflected the curve through Flanders and Luxembourg only, sparing Holland. At the same time, he was so nervous of a French reprisal in the Marne that he transferred a considerable amount of strength there. This slowed his advance in the north, where fierce resistance by the Belgians—buttressed by an expeditionary influx of seventy-five thousand British troops—cost him precious days.

“
If the Franco-British armies hold their own against the Germans,” Roosevelt wrote Arthur Lee, “whether they win a victory or whether the result is a draw, it is in my judgment all up with Germany.” Even if Moltke succeeded in conquering France, his forces, the Colonel thought, would be too “enfeebled” afterward to mount an effective defense against Russia. Nor could they expect much help from Austria, which had its own problems in the Balkans. Germany was faced, in short, with the prospect of being reduced to “international impotence” after forty-three years of unrestricted growth.

The same prospect, mixed with panic, seemed to strike General Alexander von Kluck’s commanders on the road west of Liège. Their march was hampered by sabotage and the sniping of
francs-tireurs
, freelance sharpshooters with a maddening ability to remain invisible in flat terrain. The result, on 26 August, was a German bombardment of the ancient university town of Louvain that added new dimensions to Goethe’s warning, “
The Prussian was born a brute and civilization will make him ferocious.” Flamethrowers set fire to street after street of private houses, and people who ran from them were rounded up—the men to be bayoneted, then shot, the women and children for imprisonment in concentration camps. “Big Bertha,” a cannon so huge it had to be dragged by thirty-four horses, reduced churches and dormitories to flints. One of the world’s richest medieval libraries was burned to the stone. By dark, the seat of six hundred years of learning had become a huge hearth. Richard Harding Davis was there to record a modern
Gotterdämmerung:

DISPATCHES CONFIRMING THE
destruction and evacuation of Louvain reached the United States on 28 August and caused the first wave of anti-German revulsion to spread across the country.
The imperial embassy in Washington stated without apology that the Belgian city had been “punished” for “a perfidious attack” by civilians upon the soldiers of the Reich.

Woodrow Wilson remained silent.

No American soul was more tried than Theodore Roosevelt’s. “
I am an ex-President,” he apologized to Arthur Lee, “and my public attitude must be one of entire impartiality.” Criticism by him of Wilson’s foreign policy would be seized on by Democrats as a campaign issue in the fall congressional elections. What had happened in Belgium enraged him, but for as long as the war did not threaten the United States in its own hemisphere, patriotism required that he address himself only to domestic issues.

That did not stop Roosevelt from doing a little private lobbying on the subject of “preparedness,” a word that had begun to dominate his vocabulary. “
If you have any influence with the President,” he wrote a Harvard classmate close to Colonel House, “I wish you would get him to assemble the fleet and
put it in first-class fighting order, and to get the army up to the highest pitch at which it can now be put. No one can tell what this war will bring forth.”

If you have any influence with the President
. Phrases like that, dictated through his teeth, betrayed his political impotence now that Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches of government. All he could do about it was to help as many Progressives and moderate Republicans as possible get elected in November. Bracing himself for more of the speaking tours he had sworn to renounce, he tried to see as much as possible of his children and grandchildren.

An unexpected feature of the summer had been postponement of Kermit’s departure for South America.
Belle had fallen ill with a mild case of typhoid, and took her time recuperating. In the resultant flutter of home care and doctoral visits, deeply satisfying to the female Roosevelts, she and Edith had at last bonded. Ethel and Dick and little Richard also clustered around. Roosevelt wrote Emily Carow to say how much he liked having the old house full of young people. “
Ted and Eleanor frequently motor over with their two babies. Gracie is the dearest small soul you ever saw and my heart is like water before her.”

IN A CRESCENDO
of carnage, Germany and France took out on each other the accumulated antipathy of four decades. By early September, clashing mainly in Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes, they had together lost more than a quarter-million men. The almost unbelievable death toll came from two new forms of firepower—the horizontal “hail” of machine guns and the vertical destruction inflicted by cannons capable of lobbing twenty shells a minute—that mocked the pretensions of cavalry regiments still prancing around with swords and lances. Airplanes patrolling the unsettled front (not yet realizing that they might effectively exchange pistol shots) looked down on skirmishes reduced, by altitude, to the comings and goings of insect colonies.

Roosevelt, working at Sagamore Hill on the preface to his new book,
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
, had seen it all before. “
The fire-ants [of Mato Grosso do Sul] bend the whole body as they bite.… These fighting ants, including the soldiers even among the termites, are frantically eager for a success which generally means their annihilation.”

Elsewhere in Brazil, and throughout his own life, he had noted the compulsion of predators to exterminate both “types and individuals.” This war was too enormous for individuals to matter, or even be registered before they were blown to bits. But it was clear that certain types were marked for extinction: not just the prancing cavalry officers but generals who could not adapt to mechanized slaughter (Joseph Joffre, the French chief of staff, had already replaced more than fifty), and the emperors in whose name the individuals fought.

Perhaps the type most feared by the emperors, for as long as they clung to their crowns, was the socialist with his red flag and ominously universal hymn:

The government of every nation currently at war—even Serbia, even republican France—feared socialism and its derivative doctrines, communism and anarchism, as more perilous to the stability of the state than alien armies. In Germany, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg deluded himself if he thought that the war would ingratiate Prussians with the proletariat. France’s first martyr of the war had been the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, assassinated by a paranoid right-winger. Britain had postponed, rather than averted class war by joining in; Russia was ripe for revolution; Austria had a large Marxist minority; even “poor little Belgium,” as members of the Entente had taken to calling it, was a socialist hothouse, overpopulated and harshly governed by the ruling elite.

One Western power alone, in the late summer of 1914, stood secure, able by virtue of its enormous size, constitutional freedoms, and industrial capacity to determine the outcome of the war. But that potential was, for the time being, moot. Its president was so numb with personal grief that he could concentrate only on the driest details of domestic policy: tariff tinkerings, farm loan refinance, updated definitions of antitrust practices, a federal trade commission act.
When Wilson thought about foreign policy at all, he brooded over the still-unsettled situation in Mexico. He listened sympathetically to the plaints of European ambassadors, and proclaimed a national day of prayer for peace in October, when it would benefit his party in the fall elections. But he lacked the international stature—and more important, he could not summon up the moral energy—to do what Roosevelt had done in 1905, and coax the belligerents to the negotiating table. In any case, none except Belgium was ready to accept mediation. “
I gather,” Cecil Spring Rice wrote, “that when you intervened in the Russo-Japanese conflict you had conclusive evidence that your aid was wanted.”