Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [228]
One Western power alone, in the late summer of 1914, stood secure, able by virtue of its enormous size, constitutional freedoms, and industrial capacity to determine the outcome of the war. But that potential was, for the time being, moot. Its president was so numb with personal grief that he could concentrate only on the driest details of domestic policy: tariff tinkerings, farm loan refinance, updated definitions of antitrust practices, a federal trade commission act. When Wilson thought about foreign policy at all, he brooded over the still-unsettled situation in Mexico. He listened sympathetically to the plaints of European ambassadors, and proclaimed a national day of prayer for peace in October, when it would benefit his party in the fall elections. But he lacked the international stature—and more important, he could not summon up the moral energy—to do what Roosevelt had done in 1905, and coax the belligerents to the negotiating table. In any case, none except Belgium was ready to accept mediation. “I gather,” Cecil Spring Rice wrote, “that when you intervened in the Russo-Japanese conflict you had conclusive evidence that your aid was wanted.”
The war ministers, sea lords, and commanders who now largely governed Europe were persuaded by the war’s extreme violence that it would be short, or, if not, long enough for a desirable number of revolutionaries to be killed.
BEFORE ROOSEVELT LEFT New York on 5 September on a campaign trip to Louisiana, he assured nervous Progressives that he would not make an issue of Wilson’s pacifism. An enormous number of voters were of German ancestry and supported the Reich, while those sympathetic to Britain and her allies were not so passionate that they wanted to end American neutrality.
Returning to the hustings afflicted him with an ennui he could not conceal. “He is most pessimistic,” Cal O’Laughlin noted after meeting up with him in Baltimore. “He says his usefulness in public life is at an end and that any cause he supports is foredoomed.… He believes the country is reactionary.… I encouraged him as greatly as I could, but he has the blues.” Only when their conversation switched to the war did the Colonel show any animation. Neutrality, he argued, was no guarantee of security. The United States should at once train half a million men to defend itself. Germany could not be allowed to win, but neither should it be broken up in defeat. After the war, Roosevelt said, “there should be three great peoples—the Slavs, the Germans, and the English.” He was negative about France, which he felt was on the way to becoming “a second class nation,” due to “her failure to increase her birth rate.”
He had cause to rethink these words after returning home to the news that General Joffre’s troops in the Marne, aided by the tiny British Expeditionary Force, had held a line extending from the environs of Paris to Verdun. The Germans had been forced into retreat, and were now entrenching themselves beyond the Aisne. Joffre was a hero and Moltke disgraced. The slaughter had been terrible on all sides. France estimated its losses at 250,000 men, Britain at 12,733. Germany declined to release any figures at all, but the litter of gray-clad bodies on French soil gave full weight to Clemenceau’s phrase ouragan de fer, a hurricane of steel.
Dr. Richard Derby read about Louvain, and Liège, and the Battle of the Marne, and decided to go to France to help treat the wounded. He volunteered his services as a surgeon in the American Hospital in Paris. Ethel insisted on accompanying him as a nurse. Little Richard was only five months old, but her parents were glad to look after him while she was away. She promised to return, with or without Dick, in December.
Kermit and Belle took the opportunity to book their own departure, on the same ship but to a different final destination. During his wife’s illness,