Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [225]
These and maybe a thousand other aspects of wisdom were embodied in the retired statesman who found few journalists, that summer, interested in his views on any subject other than Progressive politics. Ray Stannard Baker visited him at Sagamore Hill and got the impression that Roosevelt was chafing in unaccustomed obscurity. “It must indeed be a cross for him not to keep on the front page!”
THE PRESIDENT’S TENDENCY to talk in the abstract was demonstrated in his salute to the Panama Canal as a waterway that would permit “a commerce of intelligence, of thought, and sympathy” around the world, as if such things were dry goods. On 19 August, he formally called upon Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as in name.”
But to the handful of his countrymen who were still in Brussels, the spectacle of the German army marching into town next day was so overwhelmingly physical as to negate philosophy. Richard Harding Davis of the New York Tribune had seen war before—in Cuba, where he had followed Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to Santiago—but he realized that the new technological century was going to make it infinitely more horrible.
Belgium’s defense strategy, modeled on that of Russia against Napoleon in 1812, had been to leave the capital unprotected. By ten in the morning, all non-official citizens were off the streets and hidden behind shuttered windows. The first German to appear on the Boulevard de Waterloo was a captain on a bicycle, no more fearsome than Woodrow Wilson en vacance. He was followed by a pair of privates, also pedaling, their rifles casually slung. But right behind came such a gray mass of men and matériel, advancing row on row, hour after hour till sunset and beyond, that Davis was at first amazed, then numbed, then stupefied.
Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman.…
All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army. And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken.… This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller. And for three days and three nights through Brussels it roared and rumbled, a cataract of molten lead. The infantry marched singing, with their iron-shod boots beating out the time. They sang “Fatherland, My Fatherland.” Between each line of song they took three steps. At times two thousand men were singing together in absolute rhythm and beat. It was like the blows from giant pile-drivers. When the melody gave way the silence was broken only by the stamp of iron-clad boots, and then again the song rose.
Davis was conscious mainly of sound: the rumble of howitzers and siege cannons, the jingling of machine guns, chains clanking on cobbles, sharp bugle calls, the squeal of ungreased axles and grinding of steel wheels on stone. To another American reporter, Will Irwin, what was more of an onslaught on the senses was “the smell of a half-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power. That smell lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed.”
Neither reporter could quite express the sense each had that something entirely new and wholly frightening had been revealed to them, implicit in the gray colorlessness, the engineered sameness, the loud, crushing force of human aggression turned to science. There was not a noun for it yet, but if the young tribune of “Red Week” in Emilia-Romagna had his way, it would be coined from the Italian word fasci.
COMPARISON OF THE developing war to a tornado, or cyclone, was so common among public figures that month that few of them noticed its precise applicability to Germany’s opening military maneuver. By curving up through Flanders and then around