Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [292]
The secretary’s pleasure was sincere. He had not enjoyed hurting a great man who was, palpably, aging but still full of ardor. Nor did he discount the power of the Roosevelt lobby on Capitol Hill. The passions unleashed in the Senate over the Harding amendment indicated that a vengeful Lodge could hinder the administration in its attempt to get the draft bill passed. Balfour’s British mission had arrived in Washington on 22 April, and a French one dominated by Marshal Joseph Joffre was due any day. Both statesmen were known to admire Roosevelt profoundly. It would be an embarrassment for Baker if a quarrel with him slowed the pace of American mobilization.
Quentin was summoned to Washington for examination as a candidate for flight training in the signal corps. Doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital poured hot and cold water into his ears, dropped belladonna into his eyes, made him hop along blindfolded, and then, conveniently ignoring his shortsightedness, declared him fit for service. He was billeted, not to Fort Monroe, but to Hazelhurst Field, Mineola, Long Island, an easy motorcycle spin from Sagamore Hill.
BY THE FIRST WEEK of May, Roosevelt was receiving two thousand volunteer applications a day. Meanwhile, the administration’s draft bill passed both houses of Congress, but the Harding amendment was still so hot an issue it had to be settled by a House-Senate conference. The principal argument against letting Roosevelt have his division was that crackpot militiamen across the country might organize and demand that Wilson send them abroad too.
The leaders of the Allied missions were not encouraged by this discordance, judging from their looks and demeanor. Ellen Maury Slayden, the wife of an antiwar congressman from Texas, wrote a description of Arthur Balfour in her journal: “All the lines of him were drooping except his mouth, where there lingered a shadow of the usual British sneer at all things American, although somewhat chastened by their present desperate need for our help. His trousers drooped because they didn’t fit, each corner of his long-tailed coat seemed to have a weight in it, his arrow string tie was limp, and his turned-down collar so low that he might have worn a locket.”
The foreign secretary certainly was desperate, more so than Mrs. Slayden knew. His government was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would soon have to beg Washington for relief. Over the last six months its American debt, swollen by borrowing on Wall Street to keep the sterling-dollar exchange rate stable, had become an overdraft of $358 million. So much of what the Allies had bought in the way of food was being sent to the bottom by U-boats that a famine in Great Britain was no more than six weeks away. What London needed, even more than extra men, was extra credit. Touched as Balfour was to see Roosevelt rounding up volunteers willing to fight and die alongside Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s troops in Flanders, he had to accept the verdict of his chief military adviser, Lieutenant General George Bridges, that conditions there were “too serious … for untrained men or amateurs of any sort.” They agreed, in other words, with Baker, and Bridges telegraphed London to warn of the inadvisability of “any form of volunteer group from America.” Britain would have to wait—and bleed—until the U.S. Army was ready to send over an expeditionary force of regular soldiers.
“THE FOREIGN SECRETARY CERTAINLY WAS DESPERATE.”
Arthur Balfour (right) with René Viviani in Washington, April 1917. (photo credit i25.1)
Baker accordingly resisted Marshal Joffre’s pleadings for a Roosevelt division to be attached to his troops further south. Last month’s disastrous French offensive in the Soissons-Reims sector had cost 120,000 casualties and caused dozens of divisions to mutiny. Although this shameful news was being kept secret, Joffre had replaced his commander in chief, General Robert Nivelle, with General Henri-Philippe Pétain.
Roosevelt and Joffre