The Illusion of Victory (41 page)

In London, Roosevelt stayed in “a magnificent suite” as a guest of the British admiralty. He and the first lord, Sir Eric Geddes, hit it off beautifully, and Geddes invited Roosevelt to accompany him on an inspection tour of several bases in Ireland and Wales. En route, he persuaded Roosevelt to act as a British surrogate in an ongoing dispute with the Italian navy in the Mediterranean. U-boats were sinking ships at a furious rate in that the
ater, and the Italians declined to let their ships out of port to do any serious patrolling, much less fighting. FDR leaped at the chance to play diplomat and promised to head for Rome as soon as possible.

On July 30, Roosevelt and two aides were driven to Buckingham Palace, where he spent forty minutes with King George V. FDR liked his nice smile and “quick and cordial” greeting. He was surprised to find His Majesty’s way of speaking so “incisive.” In fact, when they began talking about German atrocities in Belgium, Roosevelt’s “jaw almost snapped.” the king said many German deeds were “too horrible” to be included in Lord Bryce’s report—a mind-boggling comment considering what was included in this Wellington House propaganda triumph. The king seemed to think Americans did not believe the Bryce Report, because they had not declared war on Germany the day after it was published. Roosevelt diplomatically agreed that there had been “a singular unwillingness” in the United States to accept it.

His Majesty remarked that he had a number of relatives in Germany (including Kaiser Wilhelm), but that he had “never seen a German gentleman.” Here, indeed, was awesome evidence of the power of Wellington House—as well as the tiny dimensions of the royal brainpower.
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That evening, FDR attended a sumptuous official dinner for the War Cabinet. He met Winston Churchill, who was munitions minister, and had a very unpleasant time. Having been first lord of the admiralty, Churchill was apparently underwhelmed by an assistant secretary and treated Roosevelt and his entourage with scarcely concealed indifference. Twenty years later, when FDR dispatched Joseph Kennedy to London as his ambassador, the president spoke with still vibrating anger about the way Churchill “had acted like a stinker” at this dinner.
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In France, Roosevelt toured the British front on his way to Paris and got the distinct impression that the German offensives had shaken His Majesty’s Army “to its roots.” Many of the towns the Germans had hoped to seize, such as Amiens and Abbeville, were still under attack from German Gothas, which were dropping bombs that weighed 1,750 pounds. The British were revising their war plans from top to bottom to cope with future storm-trooper assaults. But the closest Roosevelt came to danger was on the highway, where his French driver insisted on hitting eighty-five kilometers per hour, no matter how often he was told to slow down.

In Paris, the assistant secretary hurried to a reception at the Élysée Palace, home of France’s president, Raymond Poincaré, and was somewhat discomfited to discover that the French leader and his wife did not even know who he was. The guest of honor was Herbert Hoover, a hero in France, thanks to his work as head of Belgian Relief before the United States entered the war. Later in the day, Roosevelt and his party had a more satisfactory visit with Georges Clemenceau, who shook hands with Roosevelt “as if he meant it.” Sitting him beside his desk, the Tiger began denouncing the atrocities the Germans were committing in their retreat from the Marne salient—“slashing paintings, burning homes.”

Clemenceau told the assistant secretary the war was far from over.“Do not think the Germans have stopped fighting or that they are not fighting well.” roosevelt went away convinced the Tiger was “the greatest civilian in France.”
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The next day, Franklin visited Eleanor Roosevelt for tea and found her husband, Ted, lying on the sofa with a badly wounded leg, suffered in the First Division’s attack on Soissons. Also in the tea party was Archie Roosevelt, who looked “horribly badly.” Everyone was trying to get poor crippled depressed Archie to go home, but he refused to take the advice. FDR pitched in with a suggestion that a sea voyage would do wonders for him. Archie still said no. “They both have really splendid records,” Roosevelt wrote somewhat ruefully.
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Neither of his cousins told him what they really thought about the war, after seeing it close up in the trenches. When Ted’s leg was operated on, the nurse came out of surgery to report he would soon be as good as new and ready to return to the front.“Gee that’s tough,” archie said. Ted’s brother-in-law, Dr. Richard Derby, who had participated in the surgery, thought, “Poor Eleanor.” A surgeon in the Second Division, Derby had operated nonstop during the struggle for Belleau Wood.
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Franklin badly wanted a splendid war record. He went back to the Hôtel Crillon and planned a tour of the battlefront that took him as close as possible to flying shells and bullets. A navy captain from the American mission in France, who had orders to give him a safe VIP tour, tried to object. FDR told him off in grandiloquent tones, declaring he did not want “late rising, easy trips and plenty of bombed houses thirty miles or so behind the front.”
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Heading toward the trenches in a three-car caravan, Roosevelt’s party roared past French troops moving up and some captured Germans plodding in the opposite direction. Franklin was struck by the “awful contrast between the amount of intelligence in their faces compared with the French poilus.” In spite of this unfavorable comparison, Roosevelt saw in the faces of the French civilians along the road “just as much quiet determination . . . to see this thing through to victory as there was in the beginning.” He was blissfully unaware of the French army’s mutiny, Caillaux’s conspiracy, the poisonous mix of despair and hatred of
la gloire
that Shirley Millard had seen in her French hospital.
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Roosevelt’s party soon reached Château-Thierry, where they were cordially greeted by General DeGoutte, the French commander in Champagne. He arranged for them to visit Belleau Wood. Roosevelt was awed by the debris of battle:“rusty bayonets, broken guns, emergency ration tins, hand grenades, discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters . . . and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth, some with a helmet, and some, too with a whittled cross with a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.”
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Immensely proud of “his” (the navy’s) marines, Roosevelt plunged into a petty quarrel that had broken out between the army and the marines about who deserved credit for Belleau Wood. The marines had gotten immense publicity in U.S. newspapers when an army censor permitted them to be identified by name. No other American unit had been granted this privilege, because it was considered information that could help the enemy. When General Degoutte renamed Belleau the
Bois de la Brigade Marine
, someone on Pershing’s staff had changed it to the
Bois des Américains.
Roosevelt considered this a “mean piece of hocus pocus” and let everyone know it.
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Obviously, the assistant secretary did not have very much on his mind. This grew more apparent as he hustled Livingston Davis and the rest of his entourage toward the front, which was now ten miles east of Belleau Wood. The Germans were retreating slowly through Champagne, exacting a heavy toll on the advancing French and Americans. Roosevelt was more interested in collecting evidence of German brutality. In one house, he noted “a wreck of three chairs, one leg of a table gone, and smashed china on the dresser,” all evidence of damage done “deliberately and maliciously by the Huns.”
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North of Fère-en-Tardenois, the assistant secretary got a touch of the thrills he was seeking in a “small straggling village” named Mareuil-en-Dôle.
Roosevelt and his party got out of their cars and proceeded past numerous dead horses and some dead Germans. The group stopped now and then to study the landscape ahead of them through their field glasses in the hope of seeing some combat. They had been told they were out of range of German artillery, although Ludendorff ’s divisions had abandoned the town only the night before. Suddenly a tremendous explosion sent everyone’s pulses into overdrive. What else could it be but a German shell?

Through the subsiding blast they heard raucous laughter. A well-camouflaged American artillery battery was only a few dozen feet away in a thicket, and its crew had decided to give these battlefield tourists a scare. After a round of handshakes, the gunners let Roosevelt pull the lanyard of a 155 and fire a shell toward the retreating Germans. In years to come he would improve on the story, adding an extra round and an Allied plane that reported one shell had been on target. He supposedly went away wondering “how many, if any, Huns I killed.”
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Immensely pleased with himself, Roosevelt wrote home that “the members of my staff have begun to realize what campaigning . . . with the assistant secretary means.” The heroic leader got his doughty band back to General Degoutte’s headquarters by 9 P.M., where, after washing off “layers of dust,” they sat down to an “excellent dinner.” One wonders what the marines of the Second Division, who had gone without food for four days at Soissons, would have said about this sort of campaigning.
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Early in August, Roosevelt headed for Rome, where he plunged into conferences with Italian admirals and politicians, including the white-mustached premier, Vittorio Orlando, about the need for the Italian fleet to do some fighting in the Mediterranean. He got nowhere. When he pointed out that the fleet had not even had target practice for a year, one admiral complacently replied that the Austrian fleet had not had any either. To humor Roosevelt, the Italians agreed to form a unified command with a British admiral in charge.

Within days, the arrangement became a diplomatic tempest—something the Italians had probably foreseen. The French objected, and Secretary of State Lansing was soon sending irritated inquiries to Secretary of the Navy Daniels asking who had authorized Roosevelt to play diplomat. President Wilson, already suspicious that Franklin was too chummy with Theodore Roosevelt, curtly warned Daniels against letting people go to Europe “assuming to speak for the government.”
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After much sightseeing and diplomatic dining in Rome, the assistant secretary returned to France and embarked on a whirlwind tour of the inactive Belgian front, which included lunch with King Albert. Roosevelt rushed up and down the channel coast, visiting navy air bases, then dashed back to England to inspect the British Grand Fleet and America’s European squadron. By the time he boarded the SS
Leviathan
for the trip back to the United States, Franklin was a very tired young man, with an aching head and body. A fever of 102 confirmed the ship doctor’s suspicions: He had influenza.

By the time Roosevelt reached New York, he had pneumonia in both lungs and had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher. Four orderlies lugged him from a taxi to his mother’s townhouse on East Sixty-Fifth Street. His dutiful wife hurried from Washington to his side. As the sick man tossed and turned, she began unpacking his suitcases. Suddenly she was staring at a bundle of love letters from Lucy Mercer. Much later, Eleanor Roosevelt told a friend this was the moment when “the bottom dropped out of my particular world.”
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In Champagne, on the road outside her hospital, Shirley Millard saw Americans going into action.“They were all grinning like youngsters on the way to a picnic.” One of them shouted at her,“Hey listen, where is all this trouble, anyway?” the phrase stuck in her mind, interfering with her sleep.
They don’t know what they are in for, but I do
, she thought almost guiltily.

At the same time she was glad and proud to see the doughboys heading for the front.
How can I be glad?
she asked herself. It was all very puzzling. War turned everything upside down and inside out.

Among the items in upheaval was her own heart. She realized she was slowly falling in love with Dr. Le Brun, the handsome French surgeon who operated for seventy-two hours at a stretch. He began inviting her for walks in the fields and woods around the hospital. Le Brun had a “delightful” sense of humor, which Millard warned herself was a “dangerous thing to find out about someone you already like a lot.” the surgeon asked her if she had ever been in love. She replied no. She started wondering how her fiancé, Ted, would react if she changed her mind about their engagement. But everything with Le Brun remained on a “spiritual plane.”
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That was more than Millard could say about another French doctor, who invited her to Paris for the weekend and followed up the suggestion with a passionate kiss. He added all sorts of pet French names, to which Millard replied,
“Absolument jamais!”
(Absolutely never!) It was not very good French, but she hoped he got the message.
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Suddenly, in mid-July, the hospital filled with Americans. They lay outside on the ground,“a sea of stretchers, a human carpet.” Millard hated to see them pouring in. But she was overwhelmed by their gallantry and “pluck.” they never complained. It was “Thank you for every little thing” or “Help him first, he has waited longer than I have.”
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“I felt they were mine, every last one of them, and their downright grit makes me want to cry all over them,” she told her diary. Her “efficient detachment of mind”—something every good nurse needed—was demolished. She was no longer a compassionate sympathizer. She was an “active combatant.” From now on “the guns shook our blood; the shells exploded in our very hearts.”