Colonel Roosevelt (117 page)

Quentin foresaw trouble with Flora’s parents, and with the passport authorities who were making it difficult for American civilians to cross the Atlantic unless they had war duties in Europe. Perhaps, he wrote her, she could work with Eleanor in the Parisian YWCA, or as a military secretary. She was fluent in French. He was sure he would be flying at the Front by the time she arrived, but wedding leave was permitted. After that he would be able to join her “every six months for a couple of days.”

When Quentin next heard from his father, in a letter dated 8 April, Sagamore Hill’s maple buds were red and its willow tips green. Robins and sparrows
and redwing blackbirds had begun to sing, and frogs were noisy in the lawn ponds. “The Hon. Pa,” as Quentin affectionately called him, was still capable of an ecstatic response to the sights and sounds of nature—all the more, this season, because he had come so close to death.

A second German offensive in the Lys sector, recapturing Passchendaele and driving another twelve miles toward Paris, hampered communications between the Roosevelts and their sons for the rest of the month.
What information reached them was mostly disturbing. A medical report indicated that Archie’s wounds were more serious than they had thought. His left arm had been so severely fractured that the main nerve was cut, and his left kneecap smashed by a shrapnel fragment deeply embedded in lower bone. Medics wanted to amputate the leg, but Eleanor and Ted had managed to dissuade them. There was a photograph of him lying in traction, with his medal pinned to his pillow.

“A
RCHIE’S WOUNDS WERE MORE SERIOUS THAN THEY HAD THOUGHT
.”
Captain Archibald Roosevelt, Croix de Guerre, in traction
.
(photo credit i27.1)

Quentin was lucky not to be in the same hospital. Flying to Paris to see Archie, he had snapped a connecting rod in low clouds, and crash-landed in a
pine grove. He had broken his right arm and hurt his always-vulnerable back. The accident had led to a “ghastly” week of depression when “everything looked black.” He shared this information with Flora but not his father, who thought soldiers should be positive. (Archie, scarcely able to move, was already swearing to report back for duty.)

Roosevelt chafed at Quentin’s renewed silence. “I simply have no idea what you are doing—whether you are fighting, or raging because you can’t get into the fighting line.” Nor could he guess that Ted was in Flanders, helping to hold back the Lys offensive at Saint-Mihiel. All he knew was that the imbalance there between German and Allied forces, and the passing of the first anniversary of America’s entry into the war, had revived his contempt for un-preparedness. He wrote two articles for the
Kansas City Star
so savagely critical of the administration that his editor, Ralph Stout, rejected them.

For some time now the Colonel and his youngest son had been unconsciously moving in tandem, with alternate or parallel fluctuations of mood, and physical ups and downs. Through the middle of May, they both showed signs of rising tension—Quentin over intimations from his commanding officer that he and Ham Coolidge would soon be in action, and Roosevelt over two arduous tours he had agreed to undertake on behalf of the National Security League’s “Committee on Patriotism.”

Ethel wrote Dick on the seventeenth that she was sitting on the piazza at Sagamore Hill with her parents. “Just across from me is Father, rocking violently to & fro—and ever so busy talking to himself. Poor lamb—he is having a horrid time, for he has too much to do, and it frets him terribly, this looking ahead [and] feeling driven.”

Two days later, at Romorantin, Edith Normant took photographs of Quentin and Ham swimming in the Sauldre, then posing in the cockpits of their freshly painted Nieuports, ready to take off for the Front.

ROOSEVELT HAD THE NOVEL
experience of being pelted with peonies at his first speaking stop in Springfield, Ohio, on 25 May. He was the guest of Wittenberg College, a Lutheran school so saturated with Teuton
Kultur
it could well have been an adjunct of its namesake university in Saxony. There to hear him was an audience crammed with German-speaking farmers. They carried great bouquets of the fragrant flowers, which a local nursery had given away free as part of a war chest drive.

John Leary, reporting for the New York
Tribune
, was alarmed when Roosevelt walked onstage and the first soft bombs were tossed at him. Any one could have contained something dangerous. The Colonel’s appearance was not calculated to please these
Volk
, because they already knew that he disapproved
of their preference for the German liturgy in church. (He felt it was sure to alienate younger worshippers, and turn them away from the faith, as had happened in his own Dutch Reformed Church.)

Roosevelt took his time walking to the podium, as if to emphasize his lack of hostility. The rain of petals continued, until he stood grinning on a perfumed carpet of pink and white.

Moving on to Chicago, he checked in to the Blackstone Hotel. The first person he saw on entering its restaurant was William Howard Taft. Fellow diners applauded as Taft stood up and called, “
Theodore!” The two former presidents shook hands with obvious pleasure, straining to hear each other over cheers around the room. They took a small window table and plunged into conversation.

Afterward, a happy Roosevelt told Leary, “
He feels exactly as I do about those creatures in Washington and the way they’re carrying on.”

QUENTIN AND HAM
may have wanted to give Edith Normant the impression that they were headed straight into action, but their orders were to fly first to Orly. It was a ferry-pilot field just east of Paris, at any rate closer to glory than the mudflats of Issoudun.
If present trends continued, the Front might well come to them: the Germans had launched another offensive, driving the Allies back from the Aisne to the Marne. Wilhelm II, delighted to pretend that he, and not General Erich Ludendorff, was the strategist of this new
Kaiserschlacht
, posed for photographs on the lookout at Craonne, where Napoleon had faced the powers that eventually overwhelmed him.

Quentin went to see Eleanor in her house on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. From its east-facing windows, the flashing of guns could be seen
like summer lightning.
Just as disturbing was the sight of Ted, crimson-eyed and racked with such spasms of coughing that he had to sleep sitting up. He had been gassed and temporarily blinded at Cantigny, in the first American group action of the war. Two hundred of his comrades had been killed around him. But he had refused to give up command of his battalion, or to be evacuated until the three-day assault was over. His superiors were saying they had never seen such heroism.

With this and Archie’s example to ponder, not to mention the news that Kermit had been awarded the British Military Cross for bravery in Mesopotamia, Quentin felt compelled to prove himself as the last whelp of “the old Lion.” But his only assignment was to test the airworthiness of new planes shipped through Orly. He fell into another of his depressions, worsened by a report from Oyster Bay that Flora had almost no chance of getting a passport to France. Given that, it was small consolation that her parents had agreed to
let them marry. “It seems to me now,” he wrote her, “as tho’ nothing could ever fill that void that the last year has left in my heart.”

It was a year that had taken him from Newport to Nieuport, and Quentin could not see how the experience had bettered him. If French soldiers retreating from the Fr
ont were right in shouting “
La guerre est finie” at Americans going the other way, he might at least survive, and unite with Flora after all; but what sort of world would they have to adjust to?

General Pershing tried to persuade a despairing Clemenceau that the war was not over. The United States was ready to announce that it had a million troops in France, and a million—or more—on the way. The Allies simply needed to hold the Germans off, at this moment of the Reich’s maximum advancement west and east. Overextension always preceded collapse, in Pershing’s view. The strategic situation was poised. “It may not look encouraging just now,” he said, “but we are certain to win in the end.”

On 7 June, the day Quentin hoped he might be sent into action, Roosevelt was hit by an attack of erysipelas, a streptococcal inflammation of the leg that had bothered him so often since his traffic accident in 1902. He was in Chicago en route to Omaha, still traveling as a spokesman for the National Security League. “Jack, I’m pretty sick,” he confided to John Leary. It was his way of saying that he was running a temperature of 104°F. Fortunately Edith was at hand to nurse him on the train, along with a doctor to control his fever. Roosevelt insisted on keeping every engagement the League had mapped out for him, distracting himself from pain by reading Polybius and what his wife described as “hundreds of thousands” of ten-cent magazines.

When they got back home in the middle of the month, a cable from Quentin was waiting. He and Ham Coolidge had been ordered forward at last.

“
My joy for you and pride in you drown my anxiety,” Roosevelt wrote. “Of course I don’t know whether you are to go in the pursuit planes—or battle planes or whatever you call them.”

In fact, as Quentin reported to Flora, he had already ridden to the Front on his motorcycle, after detaching himself from an emotional, one-armed embrace by Archie. “
He evidently felt that he was saying a last fond farewell to me.”

That lugubrious soul was convinced that no Roosevelt in uniform would return to America alive. Quentin thought this funny, as well as the fact that the anti-aircraft shells he would be dodging in the future were known among pilots as “Archies.” He had already, he boasted, experienced flak on his maiden patrol along the lines as a member of the First (U.S.) Pursuit Group. “
It is really exciting when you see the stuff bursting in great black puffs around you, but you get used to it in about fifteen minutes.”