• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3134 0

felt free to board the SS Vandyck, southbound on 4 October. Lyman and Lawrence Abbott were distressed to be losing their star columnist, so he sold The Outlook the rights to his four South American lectures, and a like number of travel articles, for $5,000. He assuaged Charles Scribner’s chagrin over his defection to Macmillan by signing a $15,000 contract for a book about his coming expedition. As with African Game Trails, it would be prepublished serially in Scribner’s Magazine, then put out in hardback with a 20 percent royalty. Roosevelt kept quiet about the speaking fees he would earn in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, but Edith privately informed Ethel that they would total “about $10,000.” Even after deducting all his travel and equipment costs, he expected to clear $20,000 over the next six months.

Quentin and Archie bade their parents goodbye with adolescent equanimity, and went their separate ways to school and college. Alice was more clinging. Still childless, she had been emotionally fragile since the announcement of Ethel’s pregnancy, and had to be persuaded not to sue her depressed, philandering husband for divorce. The only salvation for the Longworths, as Edith saw it, was for Nick to win back his cherished seat in Congress.

In his last literary task before leaving, the Colonel composed an introduction to the book version of his memoirs. “Naturally,” he wrote, “there are chapters of my autobiography which cannot now be written.”

Then for the second time in his life, he dropped below the equator.

Interlude

Germany, October–December, 1913

NEWLY COMPLETED AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS of construction, at a cost of six million marks, the pyramidal structure outside Leipzig was the largest war memorial in the world, comprising three hundred thousand tons of concrete and stone. Twelve colossal sentinels balanced their granite shields in a ring around the crown of the monument, as if to repel would-be invaders from any point in the compass.

Inevitably, they dwarfed Wilhelm II, more than 250 feet below. He bobbed in Prussian uniform down the steps from the dedication platform, his shrunken left arm clutching his sword. A crowd of sixty thousand cheered while a choir accompanied by six brass bands broke into “Nun danket alle Gott.” The date was 19 October 1913, the centenary of the birth of the modern German state. Here, Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, or Volkerschlacht, as the Kaiser preferred to call it—“the People’s Battle,” greatest of all European clashes of arms.

Today’s ceremony also marked the twenty-fifth year of Wilhelmine rule. The significance of the occasion to all German-speakers was signaled by the attendance of a special guest, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Lumpen, colorless, and stiff, the heir to the Dual Monarchy was everything that the Kaiser was not. Their helmets bespoke their characters—Wilhelm’s a froth of white plumes, respondent to the slightest breeze, the archduke’s a stolid cylinder. The two men were, however, close friends, vacationing frequently in each other’s hunting lodges, and discussing questions of offense and defense against the Slav. It was a question which of them was the more obsessive on that subject.

Their shared neurosis was nothing compared to that of Franz Ferdinand’s protégé, marching a few steps behind them: General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, the Austro-Hungarian chief of staff. Conrad’s anti-Slavism focused on Serbia, the most restive of the Balkan states crowding the Austrian border. That landlocked nation had already triggered two wars, each nominally against Turkey but strategically threatening its northern neighbor. Its aim was a southern Slav federation, a Yugoslavia strong enough to resist pan-Germanism.

Now, even as Leipzig celebrated the superiority of all things Teutonic, the archduke and general had disturbing news for Wilhelm. A third Balkan war was imminent. Serbia had sent troops into Albania in an attempt to gain access to the Adriatic Sea. The Austrian government was alarmed at this development, which