Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [234]
Roosevelt persuaded himself that he looked forward to private life, although Wilson’s cool refusal to speak out about Belgium tormented him. For the moment, he did not have a big book to write, nor was any publisher asking for one. An Autobiography had been a disappointment for Macmillan, and Life-Histories of African Game Animals was so technical that Scribners had printed it almost as an act of charity. Through the Brazilian Wilderness, just out, was earning excellent reviews, and in narrative quality was probably the best thing he had ever done. But its early sales did not compare to those of African Game Trails.
For as long as the European war lasted, Roosevelt felt inclined to focus on journalism. Next February he would have a new editorial platform, as guest columnist for Metropolitan magazine. Pacifism, preparedness, and moral cowardice were to be his themes; he was bored with partisan argument. Let those intellectuals who were more policy-minded than he was—brilliant young men such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann—adapt what survived of Progressivism to suit a magazine they had just founded, The New Republic.
“It is perfectly obvious that the bulk of our people are heartily tired of me,” Roosevelt wrote William Allen White, in a posterity letter tinged with regret.
I shall fight in the ranks as long as I live for the cause and the platform for which we fought in 1912. But at present any attempt at action on my part which could be construed … into the belief that I was still aspiring to some leadership in the movement would, I am convinced, do real harm. It has been wisely said that while martyrdom is often right for the individual, what society needs is victory. It was eminently proper that Leonidas should die at Thermopylae, but the usefulness of Thermopylae depended upon its being followed by the victory of Themistocles at Salamis.… When it is evident that a leader’s day is past, the one service he can render is to step aside and leave the ground clear for the development of a successor. It seems to me that such is now the case as regards myself. “Heartily know that the half-gods go when the Gods arise.”
* Now Tsingtao.
CHAPTER 20
Two Melancholy Men
The coming on of his old monster Time
Has made him a still man; and he has dreams
Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow.
THE WINTER OF 1914–1915 found the Allies and Central Powers entrenched opposite each other in two freezing fissures that divided Western Europe like a fault line, all the way north from Switzerland to Ypres and the Belgian ports. Another fissure ran alongside the Bzura-Ravka riverline west of Warsaw and cracked down the map into Galicia, holding eight ill-supplied Russian armies at bay. Gone was the mobility that had characterized the early months of the war: the Schlieffen Plan’s rotation, the cavalry sweeps, the cuts and thrusts of maneuvers at Tannenberg and in the Marne. Abandoned, too, was the delusion of the soldiers dug in that a trench was a temporary thing that would last only as long as it took for politicians to settle the misunderstandings of last summer. The war was going to be long, and mortal beyond calculation: a continuum of attrition, to be won by whichever power had the largest reserves of blood, bread, industrial plant, and patience. Germany had by now lost well over a million men, France almost that number. On the Eastern Front, 750,000 Russian, German, and Austrian soldiers had fallen in just six weeks.
Across the Atlantic, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt hunkered down in their own psychological ditches. They were two melancholy men counterposed on either side of a foreign issue that most Americans chose to ignore—in Wilson’s words, “a war with which we have nothing to do.” White House aides were alarmed at the President’s inability to recover from the death of Ellen Wilson, five months before. He was not the type to share deep emotion with anybody except Colonel House and the