Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [28]
This was not the kind of peace Carnegie, or the Committee, hoped he would salute. When he did raise the subject of the naval arms race, he said only that “something should be done as soon as possible” to check it. He gave conditional support to the idea of arbitration treaties between powers “civilized” enough to hate war, and was prepared to believe that a Third Hague Conference might improve on the First and the Second. Finally he said something unequivocal. “It would be a master stroke if those great Powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others.”
The idea was arresting, if hardly new. It went back to Hugo Grotius’s “Society of States” linked by one law. Even the phrase “League of Peace” had been used before, by the British statesman Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But Roosevelt gave it an original twist by warning that such a body would count for nothing if it did not have punitive, as well as judicial, authority. The impotence of the permanent court of arbitration at The Hague tribunal was a case in point. World peace, in his opinion, could be effected only by a concert of mature nations exercising “international police power.” He repeated the words police and power, as well as force and violence, three times each before sitting down.
Carnegie, disgusted, gave up all faith that the Colonel would serve as his personal peace envoy at Potsdam. “There’s a trace of the savage,” he wrote, “in that original compound.”
THE NEXT ROYAL PERSON to greet Roosevelt, at Stockholm’s Central Station early on the morning of 7 May, was Crown Prince William. He had news that threw into disarray all the future plans and protocol Lawrence Abbott had been working on. King Edward VII had died of pneumonia during the night.
Coughing and feverish himself, Roosevelt was relieved to have an excuse to shorten his stay in Sweden. Five weeks of being the most famous man in the world had been enough for him. He was happy to cede his title to a corpse, and did not care if he never stayed in another palace with European plumbing.
He sent a telegram to Berlin, asking if the Kaiser—King Edward’s nephew—might “in view of the circumstances” like to withdraw his gracious offer of accommodations in the Royal Castle. Word came back that the German court had gone into official mourning. His Majesty, however, looked forward to entertaining Colonel Roosevelt privately, and to riding with him at the military exercises in Döberitz Field. After that, Wilhelm would leave for Great Britain, to attend the royal funeral. So would almost every other head of state and government leader on the Continent. The exact date of the ceremony would not be announced for several days. Only then could Roosevelt decide what to do about his own British engagements.
Meanwhile, there hung in the sky over Europe, fading slightly in the light of dawn, the immense apparition of Halley’s Comet. It had shone with peculiar radiance in the small hours just after Edward died.
THE FIRST THING Roosevelt noticed, when his train reentered Germany on Monday, 9 May 1910, was the smallness of the crowds at every railway station. Some depots offered no welcome at all. Throughout every country he had traversed so far, he had been greeted “not as a king, but as something more than a king”—to quote one reporter in his entourage. Here, people who bothered to notice him at all were at best civil.
It was not dislike that showed on their faces, so much as lack of interest. They stolidly believed that Germany was the foremost nation in Europe, and would soon eclipse Britain as the world’s dominant power. To them,