Colonel Roosevelt (7 page)

They listen frustrated as he tells story after safari story, his face silhouetted against a papyrus fire in the swamp of Ar Rank. Eventually he gives them a statement—of sorts—for publication: “We [
sic
] have nothing to say and will have nothing to say on American or foreign policy questions.… I will give no
interviews and anything purporting to be an interview with me can be accepted as false as soon as it appears.”

Courteously, the next morning, he orders the newsmen back downriver, and spends the next two days writing in his stateroom. Every time he goes on deck for a breather, he recognizes more and more of
the Nile birds he pursued and stuffed as a boy, thirty-seven years before on his father’s rented dahabeah: cow herons, hoopoos, bee-eaters, black-and-white chats, plover, kingfishers, desert larks, and trumpet bullfinches. At night, he sits under the stars and listens to other, unseen species calling to one another in strange voices. He watches crocodiles and hippos slide through the black water and thinks up a phrase to describe the luminosity they shed from their backs: “
whirls and wakes of feeble light.” His narrative has caught up with him: he is writing now almost in real time.

All that remains is to list the game he has shot on safari: 9 lions, 8 elephants, 6 buffalo, 13 rhino, 7 giraffes, 7 hippos, 2 ostriches, 3 pythons, 1 crocodile, 5 wildebeest, 20 zebras, 177 antelope of various species, from eland to dik-dik, 6 monkeys, and 32 other animals and birds: 296 “items” in all. Kermit has bagged 216—a total almost as impressive as the young man’s ability to match Heller and Mearns drink for drink.

“
Kermit and I kept about a dozen trophies for ourselves,” Roosevelt writes in a final defensive paragraph. “We were in hunting-grounds practically as good as any that ever existed; but we did not kill a tenth, nor a hundredth, part of what we might have killed had we been willing.”

Shortly before noon on 14 March, Khartoum’s palms and minarets emerge from a red dust haze downriver. The
Dal
swings into the mouth of the Blue Nile and bears down on the private dock of the governor-general’s palace, where at last he sees, in his own half-regretful image, “
the twentieth century superimposed upon the seventh.”

PART ONE
1910–1913

 

The epigraphs at the head of every
chapter are taken from the poems of
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
,
whom Theodore Roosevelt rescued from
poverty and obscurity in 1905. He went on
to win three Pulitzer Prizes
.

THE KISS THAT THEODORE ROOSEVELT
longed for did not materialize when he stepped ashore in Khartoum on 14 March 1910. Instead, he had to return the salute of Sir Rudolf Anton Karl von Slatin Pasha, G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G., C.B., inspector-general of the Sudan, and pass an honor guard of
askaris
into the palace garden, where the elite of Anglo-Sudanese society awaited him amid the silver paraphernalia of afternoon tea.
He was informed that Edith’s train from Cairo was delayed, and that she and Ethel would not arrive for another couple of hours. In the meantime, Slatin would not hear of the Colonel checking in to a hotel. A suite for his party had been readied in the palace, and a private yacht was standing by for sightseeing during his stay.

What Roosevelt wanted to see, more than anything but Edith’s face, was Omdurman. The battlefield, where General Kitchener’s Twenty-first Lancers had staged the last great cavalry charge of the nineteenth century, lay only ten miles away. Kitchener had been on his mind in recent days, if only because HMS
Dal
, the boat that had brought him north from Gondokoro, had been the triumphant commander’s flagship.
On its boards, twelve years before, Kitchener had proclaimed British control over the entire Nile Valley, from Uganda to the Mediterranean.

The success of that dominion—or condominium, as the Foreign Office called it, as a sop to Sudanese, Egyptian, and Turkish sensibilities—was palpable in Khartoum’s tranquil, orange-blossom-scented air.
Rebuilt by Kitchener from the ruins of a thirteen-year Muslim interregnum, the city was laid out like the Union Jack, its crossbars lined with stone villas and its triangles filled with
seven thousand trees. Once the most violent flashpoint on the African continent, it now lazily breathed
pax Britannica
. In the sunburned, aristocratic faces of his hosts, in their perfect manners and air of unstudied authority, Roosevelt recognized the attributes he had always admired in the English ruling class, along with “intelligence, ability, and a very lofty sense of duty.”

“T
HE ELITE OF
A
NGLO
-S
UDANESE SOCIETY AWAITED HIM
.”
Roosevelt arrives in Khartoum, 14 March 1910
.
(photo credit i1.1)

Yet he was aware of the constant menace of Arab nationalism, obscure yet encircling, like the mirages wavering on the desert horizon. The haze that hung over the city seemed, to his vivid historical imagination, to be red with
the blood of General Gordon, murdered in this very palace by Mahdist dervishes.

KHARTOUM’S NORTH STATION
was cordoned off when he met the Cairo express at 5:30
P.M
. He climbed into his wife’s private car the moment it came to a halt, and remained inside for a long time. Finally the two of them emerged arm in arm, with Kermit and Ethel close behind. All four Roosevelts were laughing.

Edith’s smile transformed her normally stiff public face, exposing perfect teeth and lighting up the blue of her eyes. At forty-eight, she was no longer slender, but had just enough height to carry off the consequences of never having had to cook for herself, and her wrists and ankles and sharp profile were as elegant as ever. She had suffered during her year-long separation from
Theodore, more from worry about him on safari than distress about herself: books and music and children had always been her solace.

That evening, Roosevelt changed into a tuxedo and replaced the wire spectacles he had worn on safari with beribboned pince-nez. Transformed thus, he looked dapper for the first time in nearly a year, and worthy of the place card that confronted him at Slatin Pasha’s table:
THE HONORABLE COLONEL ROOSEVELT
.

So far he had managed to keep at bay the reporters that Henry Cabot Lodge had warned him about. They were clamoring for statements on a hot local news item—the murder, by a Nationalist student, of Egypt’s Coptic prime minister, Boutros Ghali Pasha. Roosevelt had heard about this incident before arriving in Khartoum.

He was not unwilling to speak about it, but preferred to wait until he made a scheduled address on the issue of condominium at Cairo University in two weeks’ time. As for commenting on American issues, he needed first to go through a fat sack of telegrams and letters from home. John Callan O’Laughlin of the
Chicago Tribune
had collared the sack and was offering to serve as his traveling stenographer, as F. Warrington Dawson had in British East Africa. Roosevelt was fond of O’Laughlin, an experienced foreign policy man, and admired his sass. (It had been “Cal” who, scattering piastres like couscous, chartered the steamboat that met the
Dal
at Ar Rank.)
However, another contender for secretarial honors was at hand: Lawrence F. Abbott, president of
The Outlook
. Roosevelt felt that, as an employee of that magazine himself (he was listed in its masthead as “Contributing Editor”), he could not turn Abbott down. His work for
Scribner’s Magazine
was done, and he must look to
The Outlook
for income—and, not incidentally, space to promulgate his political views.

So O’Laughlin was consoled with a promise of special access, the press corps invited to accompany the Omdurman excursion, and Abbott granted a close-up position from which to observe, and record, the Colonel’s return to public life.

EDITH KERMIT ROOSEVELT
was a woman of impeccable
sang-froid
—a phrase that came naturally to her, as did other Gallicisms deriving from her Huguenot ancestry. About the only scrutiny that shook her public composure was that of the camera lens. As mistress of the White House, she had managed to avoid it almost entirely. But now, to her consternation, she found a battery of photographers waiting at Omdurman. Worse still, they continued clicking as camels kneeled to carry the Roosevelt party to the battlefield.

In the event, she withstood the swaying journey better than her husband, enjoying herself as Slatin Pasha pointed out the plain on which Arab bodies
had piled up in masses under the fire of Kitchener’s artillery. Roosevelt chafed, not having been in a saddle of any kind for more than a year. But Slatin was impressed by his knowledge of every detail of the battle.

They dismounted by the dry watercourse where four hundred cavalrymen, trailed by vultures, had collided with Arab troops in a charge as suicidal as that of Pickett at Gettysburg. It had occurred only two months after Roosevelt’s own charge up the Heights of San Juan in 1898. “All men who have any power of joy in battle,” he had written then, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.”