Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [181]
By the end of 1913, l’affaire Zabern was yesterday’s news. But the oracular Georges Clemenceau remained under no illusion as to what tomorrow’s would be. In an editorial addressed to his peace-minded younger countrymen, he bade them hear (if they would not see) “the cannons on the other side of the Vosges,” and warned that the noise would soon be too loud to ignore.
One day, at the fairest moment of blossoming hope, you will quit your parents, your wife, your children, everything you cherish, everything that holds your heart and fortifies it, and you will go forth, singing as you always have, yet a different song this time, with brothers (true brothers, they will be) to confront the ugly killer that mows down human lives in a veritable hurricane of steel.
* Corpse-head! You prematurely whitened rabbit!
* Bed-shitter.
PART TWO
1914–1919
CHAPTER 15
Expediçào Cíentifica Roosevelt-Rondon
’Twere better late than soon
To go away and let the sun and moon
And all the silly stars illuminate
A place for creeping things,
And all those that root and trumpet and have wings,
And herd and ruminate,
Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,
Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees
Hang screeching lewd victorious derision
Of man’s immortal vision.
ON THE FIRST DAY of 1914, Roosevelt got up before dawn to hunt tapir in the marsh country east of Corumbá, Brazil.
For a week he had been cruising the headwaters of the upper Paraguay in a chartered side-wheeler, the Nioac. It was less grand than the presidential gunboat that had brought him up the big river, courtesy of the Paraguayan navy. But it was flat-bottomed enough to steam inland along such shallow tributaries as the Rio São Lourenço, where it now lay at anchor, a few kilometers above the inflow of the Cuyabá. Neither stream was easily distinguishable at present: Brazil’s rainy season had set in, and an annual flood was coursing down from the central divide, filling the vast sump of the flats to capacity.
Knowing that he had a long wet day ahead of him, Roosevelt stoked himself with hardtack, ham, sardines, and coffee. Breakfast was his favorite meal, preferably including beefsteak or buttered hominy grits, and fruit with cream. When he got the chance, he could eat twelve fried eggs in a row. Over the last couple of years, he had become portly. His paunch did not compare with the world-class embonpoint of William Howard Taft, but he lacked Taft’s compensatory height. Edith was concerned enough to have persuaded him to do without lunch whenever possible. He joked to Ethel that the only result was to make him greedier at either end of the day.
This morning he ate with more purpose than pleasure. He had come north from Patagonia intent on natural history and exploration. The trouble was, wealthy Brazilians ranching along the Paraguay still thought of him as a mighty hunter. They were slowing his ascent to Mato Grosso, the central wilderness, with elaborate shooting parties in his honor. (He had managed to beg off a “Roosevelt rodeo.”) The great fazendas of Las Palmeiras and São João, with hundreds of peons and well-stocked stables, had been placed at his disposal. He did not want to appear ungracious toward his hosts. They and their governmental colleagues in Rio de Janeiro—not to mention the similar elites of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—had treated him so royally, and paid him such large lecture fees, that he had to conceal his impatience to be done with “state-traveling.” In any case, he felt obliged to collect, in behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, some of the large, water-loving mammals of southern Brazil, before proceeding north on his expedition proper.
He had already shot a large female jaguar, fulfilling a dream he had confessed to Father Zahm five years before. Kermit (a bridge builder no longer, having signed on as his companion and interpreter) had bagged an even larger one, male, the next day. But that was the luck of youth. The earlier cat was at any