Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [266]
Roaring cheers and cannon fire shook the air as the distinguished visitors rode through town in an open automobile. House façades displayed the tricolors of France and the United States. At every stop, Roosevelt received full honors, as he had six years before in Paris. He asked to see something of the island, and was taken to the ridge of Vert-Pré, with its double view of the Atlantic and the Mer des Antilles. Northward, the ocean stretched blue and white-capped all the way to Brittany. To the west, the calm shallows of the New World lolled.
At 5 P.M. the Roosevelts returned to Fort-de-France for a military review. Bugles sounded in the city square, and a double file of troops presented arms. Roosevelt inspected both ranks with the governor at his side. Then he joined Edith on the reviewing stand while the whole company saluted them en défilé.
Most of the marchers were youths of Quentin’s age, conscripted for service in Europe and only a month or two in uniform. But the effect of France’s preparedness program—even more intense, apparently, than that administered by General Wood at Plattsburg—was evident in their machine-like drill. A cavalry charge ensued. Then the entire island company, officers and youths, stamped to a halt in front of the Roosevelts and inclined the French flag at their feet.
Edith, who had always considered herself partly French, began to weep. So did another woman on the stand. Roosevelt turned to the governor and, courteously abandoning his own language, said, “Je vois que Madame Guy pleure. Madame Roosevelt pleure aussi, et moi, je sens les larmes me monter aux yeux: c’est impressionnant.”*
Later he was asked to present the Croix de Guerre to a wounded corporal, and said companionably, “Moi aussi j’ai une balle allemande au dos. L’assassin qui me l’a tiré était un Allemand.”*
Edith excused herself from a grand banquet in the Chamber of Commerce garden that night. She thus missed a unique opportunity to hear her husband compared to Cyrano de Bergerac. Speaking with considerable emotion, the governor recalled being present at the Sorbonne in April 1910, when Roosevelt had delivered his famous address exhorting Frenchmen to gird themselves for moral battle. Now the hour of blood and dust had come, and the students he had inspired were fighting for their country.
In youth, “l’ardent colonel des Rough-Riders” had fought likewise. More recently, as everybody in Martinique knew, he had been a lonely American oracle, shouting that democracy must be protected against barbarism—unlike certain of his countrymen who took refuge in “une neutralité prudente.” Turning to Roosevelt, the governor accorded him one of the most moving tributes he had ever heard:
Vous nous donnez l’exemple rare, presque unique, d’un homme politique qui n’est pas un politicien, d’un homme d’action qui est en même temps un homme de pensée; d’un parlementaire qui ne parle que s’il a quelque chose à dire; d’un écrivain qui sait se battre et d’un soldat qui sait écrire. Et tout cela avec une gaîté franche, une absence de morgue qui séduit les plus humbles et qui en impose aux plus puissants. Il y a en vous quelque chose de notre Cyrano de Bergerac qui risque sa vie pour une idée; qui lutte sans souci des dangers pour son idéal, mais qui entre deux combats dépose sa cuirasse et son épée pour lire Lucrèce et commenter Platon.*
AFTER VISITING THE New York Zoological Society’s tropical research station in British Guiana, maintained by Charles William Beebe, Roosevelt proceeded to Trinidad. He arrived there on 3 March, and received a disquieting batch of cablegrams from New York. They informed him that prospective delegates to the Republican and Progressive conventions (scheduled to run simultaneously in Chicago, in early June) were already pledging themselves to him, as an expected bipartisan candidate for president. John McGrath had announced