Colonel Roosevelt (120 page)

THEY WERE ALL BRACING
for the delivery of a trunk of personal effects that Ham Coolidge had promised Quentin he would send to Sagamore Hill, in the event of it becoming surplus equipment.

It arrived, packed by Ham but also reflecting, in the orderliness of its contents (such as a sheaf of Flora’s letters, neatly numbered and tied) Quentin’s integrated personality. The mechanic in him had enjoyed fitting things together, in sequences that made for power or taut structure.
Even his poems were balanced, their meter meticulous, their rhyme schemes sometimes complex—
abcccb, adcccd
—but logical.

As Edith and Flora undertook the task of going through these leavings of a life, Roosevelt and Miss Stricker tried to extract, from an inpouring of condolence letters and newspaper tributes, some sense of the man Quentin had become during the year he had spent in France. The most informative testimony came from fellow aviators, who wrote that he was a reincarnation of his father—specifically, the young “Teedie” who had so enlivened the Harvard class of 1880. Emerging from their reminiscences was a jovial, toothy, myopic, often wildly exuberant youth, garrulous and gregarious, courtly toward women, with a habit of bursting into rooms and attracting instant attention.

There was little evidence, however, of the personal momentum that had always characterized the Colonel. Quentin’s energy had been
explosive rather than propulsive. And often he had suffered the drag of depression—a “
black gloom” that he could not hide from Ham Coolidge, and freely confessed to Flora. It was more chronic than the rare attacks of melancholy that Roosevelt had no trouble surmounting.
As Edith had long ago remarked, Quentin was “a complex sort of person,” with a tendency to “smoulder.”

Only in two respects had he ever approached fulfillment: as a boy born to fly, and as Flora’s lover.
Test-piloting a French Spad, he wrote that he had felt “part of the machine,” as if it were an extension of his own body. “It asks you for what it wants.… If it gets a puff under a wing and wants an aileron to take care of it, you can feel it in the pressure of the stick.… Same with the flippers.” His last 120 h.p. Nieuport had been just as responsive: “You can climb at the most astonishing rate,—& do perfectly wicked
chandelles.
”
^*

So Quentin had written Flora, confident she would share his delight, even
if she wondered what candles had to do with it. As he was part of his plane, she was part of him. “
The months that have gone, instead of blurring, have etched you deeper and deeper into my heart.”

The most consolation she could give herself was to say, numbly, “
His back will never hurt him now.”

IN HIS OXFORD LECTURE
on biological analogies in history, Roosevelt had spoken of the tertiary period, wherein “
form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of development and death.” He was now in his own such transition, moving into a precipitous decline that was as much disillusionment as grief. Only twice before had he suffered as much—at nineteen, when his father died, and at twenty-four, when the loss of his first wife and mother, in the same house on the same night, had almost unhinged him. But then he had been young and full of growth. Neither catastrophe had taught him anything about himself except that he was strong enough to survive.

The death of Quentin, in contrast, hit him after a spring in which he had himself nearly died, and toward the end of a decade that he had always said would be his last. Archie’s narrow escape and Ted’s gassing had prepared him for worse news from the Front, but the tension inherent in such anticipation had, paradoxically, weakened him, the longer he braced himself. Roosevelt had little physical resilience any more. Cuban and Amazonian pathogens were rampant in his system, which had been further battered by erysipelas and a recent attack of
ptomaine poisoning.

But what made this loss so devastating to him was the truth it conveyed: that death in battle was no more glamorous than death in an abattoir. Under some much-trodden turf in France, Quentin lay as cold as a steer fallen off a hook.
Look now, in your ignorance, on the face of death
, the boy had written in one of his attempts at fiction. The words seemed to admonish a father who had always romanticized war.

“
There is no use writing about Quentin,” Roosevelt told Edith Wharton, “for I should break down if I tried.” But by the end of August he had steeled himself enough to write a generalized eulogy for all the Quentins fallen and still falling in Europe:

After this magnificent beginning,
his tribute degenerated into an embarrassing argument that the bed and battleground were equal fields of honor. Prowess on each was necessary to militate against race suicide. Straining for eloquence, Roosevelt sank to a level of bathos more suited to the death of Little Nell. He went on at length about dark drinks proffered by the Death Angel, and girls whose boy-lovers were struck down in their golden mornings. But the hackneyed images did not work. Theodore Roosevelt was just another bereaved father unable to say what he felt.
Much more expressive were the words he was heard sobbing in the stable at Sagamore Hill, with his face buried in the mane of his son’s pony: “Poor Quentyquee!”

“
L
OOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH
.
”
Quentin photographed by the Germans in front of his crashed plane
.
(photo credit i28.1)

WHEN THE ARMY
offered to exhume and repatriate Quentin’s body,
the Roosevelts declined. “We greatly prefer that Quentin shall continue to lie on the spot where he fell in battle, and where the foemen buried him,” the Colonel wrote. He had heard from Pershing that the crash site had become a shrine for
passing troops. “After the war is over, Mrs. Roosevelt and I intend to visit the grave, and then to have a small stone put up … not disturbing what has already been erected in his memory by his French and American comrades in arms.”

In another gesture of sympathy, a Congressional commission released the Nobel Peace Prize money—$45,483 in cash and liquidated securities—that Roosevelt had been trying to get back for years. He was perversely pleased that the fund’s trustees had never been able to agree how to spend it, because he now had his own ideas for its disbursal.
Every cent would go to war-related charities, or individuals and organizations planning to improve social conditions in the postwar world. His list of major recipients included the American, Japanese, and Italian Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., now working in the Y.M.C.A. in France,” Herbert Hoover, for use in Belgian war relief, a hospitality council for “colored troops [and] colored women and girls in and about the camps and cantonments,” and Maria Bochkareva of the Women’s Death Battalion, “as a token of my respect for those Russians who have refused to follow the Bolshevists in their betrayal to Germany of Russia, of the Allies, and of the cause of liberty through the world.” He allocated small, but attention-getting amounts to ethnic groups persecuted or fighting for freedom against autocracies—Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and Assyrian Christians. In something of a first for a former president, he promised to allocate “further sums of money from my royalties on certain scenarios of motion pictures.”

One of the movies he had in mind was to be a McClure Productions six-reeler entitled
The Fighting Roosevelts
, starring three different actors as himself in boyhood, youth, and maturity. The draft script called for a dramatic final climax, with one of his sons dying on the Western Front—an ending that could obviously be reshot, should any more of them fall.

On 4 September, Archie, transferred back to the United States for advanced therapy on his paralyzed left arm, returned limping to Sagamore Hill. The splendor of his blue and gold sleeve stripes, denoting a year’s service at the Front, in no way impressed Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., whom Grace had rushed down from Boston to show to him. Little Archie was only five months old, so both father and son were strangers. They eyed each other with a mutual lack of interest, while the rest of the family party tried to adjust to “Big” Archie’s worryingly limp arm. Two operations in Paris had failed to reconnect the severed main nerve well enough to restore full mobility.

Archie had become skeletal during his long convalescence. His hollow cheeks drew back from protruding teeth, and he wore a new, habitual frown. He admitted to be suffering from a “bad case of nerves.” Even if doctors at the Columbia Base Hospital in the Bronx—who had granted him only temporary
home leave—were successful in fixing his arm and digging the shrapnel out of his leg, they had warned him he might not be able to rejoin Ted’s regiment for another eight months. Which was all Archie wanted to do. Like many soldiers who had seen the worst of the war,
he had become addicted to it.

“
FALL HAS COME,”
Roosevelt wrote Kermit on 13 September. “The dogwood berries are reddening, the maple leaves blush, the goldenrod and asters flaunt their beauty; and log fires burn and crumble in the north room in the evenings.”

Very slowly, he was recovering his joy in the natural world, after a summer of finding himself unable to think of much but mortality. Hearing that Ted had been nearly blinded and killed, Dick Derby thrown into the air by a shell, and seeing how “crippled” Archie was had compounded his grief over Quentin’s fate. However, all were safe for the moment, as well as Kermit, detached to an artillery school in Saumur. General Pershing had written to say that Ted was about to be promoted to a colonelcy. Two Colonel Roosevelts in one family, plus two decorated captains and one dead hero, added up to
plenty of honor.