Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [227]
If you have any influence with the President. Phrases like that, dictated through his teeth, betrayed his political impotence now that Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches of government. All he could do about it was to help as many Progressives and moderate Republicans as possible get elected in November. Bracing himself for more of the speaking tours he had sworn to renounce, he tried to see as much as possible of his children and grandchildren.
An unexpected feature of the summer had been postponement of Kermit’s departure for South America. Belle had fallen ill with a mild case of typhoid, and took her time recuperating. In the resultant flutter of home care and doctoral visits, deeply satisfying to the female Roosevelts, she and Edith had at last bonded. Ethel and Dick and little Richard also clustered around. Roosevelt wrote Emily Carow to say how much he liked having the old house full of young people. “Ted and Eleanor frequently motor over with their two babies. Gracie is the dearest small soul you ever saw and my heart is like water before her.”
IN A CRESCENDO of carnage, Germany and France took out on each other the accumulated antipathy of four decades. By early September, clashing mainly in Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes, they had together lost more than a quarter-million men. The almost unbelievable death toll came from two new forms of firepower—the horizontal “hail” of machine guns and the vertical destruction inflicted by cannons capable of lobbing twenty shells a minute—that mocked the pretensions of cavalry regiments still prancing around with swords and lances. Airplanes patrolling the unsettled front (not yet realizing that they might effectively exchange pistol shots) looked down on skirmishes reduced, by altitude, to the comings and goings of insect colonies.
Roosevelt, working at Sagamore Hill on the preface to his new book, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, had seen it all before. “The fire-ants [of Mato Grosso do Sul] bend the whole body as they bite.… These fighting ants, including the soldiers even among the termites, are frantically eager for a success which generally means their annihilation.”
Elsewhere in Brazil, and throughout his own life, he had noted the compulsion of predators to exterminate both “types and individuals.” This war was too enormous for individuals to matter, or even be registered before they were blown to bits. But it was clear that certain types were marked for extinction: not just the prancing cavalry officers but generals who could not adapt to mechanized slaughter (Joseph Joffre, the French chief of staff, had already replaced more than fifty), and the emperors in whose name the individuals fought.
Perhaps the type most feared by the emperors, for as long as they clung to their crowns, was the socialist with his red flag and ominously universal hymn:
Masses, slaves, arise, arise,
The world must shift its base,
We are not nothing in men’s eyes.
This is the fraught finale—
Together and forever
The Internationale
Shall be the human race!
The government of every nation currently at war—even Serbia, even republican France—feared socialism and its derivative doctrines, communism and anarchism, as more perilous to the stability of the state than alien armies. In Germany, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg deluded himself if he thought that the war would ingratiate Prussians with the proletariat. France’s first martyr of the war had been the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, assassinated by a paranoid right-winger. Britain had postponed, rather than averted class war by joining in; Russia was ripe for revolution;