Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [221]
Holy flame, burn and glow
Unextinguishable
For Fatherland!
To foreigners listening at a distance, the words and tune could have been “God Save the King” or “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Except that British and American crowds did not sing with this kind of bellicosity. It was not a bloodthirsty so much as an exultant sound, a roar of rapture that all Germans now had a cause worth dying for: the protection and enlargement of the Reich. Only a few patriots felt uneasy about joining in the celebration, which was duplicated in other cities. One of them, the industrialist Walter Rathenau, felt that he was witnessing a Totentanz, “a dance of death, the overture to a doom which I had foreseen would be dark and dreadful.”
* Charles F. Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall.
* Wilhelm II reversed the words of urbi et orbi, a Latin phrase commonly used by the Vatican to address “the city [i.e., Rome] and the world.”
CHAPTER 19
A Hurricane of Steel
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.
“THE SITUATION IN EUROPE is really dreadful,” Roosevelt wrote to his youngest son on 2 August 1914. “A great tragedy impends.”
Had Quentin not been in the canyonlands of Arizona, about as un-European an environment as could be imagined, he might have agreed with his father. Or more likely, yesterday’s triple mobilization of Germany, Belgium, and France would have thrilled him, fascinated as he was with any kind of synchronized movement involving wheels, weight, oil, and fire. At the moment he was beyond the reach of news bulletins, and distracted by a riding accident that had badly wrenched his back. A packhorse had slipped and rolled over on him, dislodging two ribs where they joined the spine. It was not the kind of trauma a youth needed just when he was testing the limits of his new adult body.
Of all Roosevelt’s children, Alice was the one most drawn to furor teutonicus, the German war rage that had been suppressed for so long. As a little girl, she had listened to recitations of the Nibelungenlied at her father’s knee, and reveled in the violent parts. There was a savage streak in Alice: she approved of the strong overriding the weak. Except that she did not require, as he did, that the strong should have a moral reason to do so. She was never entirely sure what he meant by “righteousness,” and why it meant so much to him. Righteousness had killed a goodly number of Filipinos during his presidency, and discharged a regiment of black soldiers without honor or due process, and separated Panama from the Colombian federation. But if he maintained these actions had been necessary, she took his word for it.
“SHE WAS NEVER ENTIRELY SURE WHAT HE MEANT BY ‘RIGHTEOUSNESS.’ ”
Father and daughter, thinking their separate thoughts, summer 1914. (photo credit i19.1)
His attitude to the developing war had so far been pessimistic yet detached. It was “a great black tornado” threatening Europe only, although Africa and Asia Minor might get sucked in. If Great Britain chose to fight, his emotions would be more engaged, insofar as he felt a solidarity with the English and their empire. (What would he be doing now, had Balfour’s dream of a Roosevelt-led Anglo-Saxon federation come true?) Yet he