Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [295]
“If you could really convince the President of that,” Elihu Root said, “I’m quite sure he would send you at once.”
QUENTIN ROOSEVELT’S POSTING to Long Island filled Flora Whitney with joy. She and Quentin were besotted with each other, to the extent that they had secretly become engaged. The Whitney estate at Old Westbury was near enough to Mineola for them to spoon whenever Quentin got an evening pass from Hazelhurst Field, and Sagamore Hill was available for weekend trysts. Edith Roosevelt had taken to Flora (as she had not to Grace). Knowing how little time the two nineteen-year-olds were likely to have together, she encouraged their closeness.
“Ah, Fouf,” Quentin wrote from camp, using Flora’s family nickname, “I don’t yet see how you can love me,—still I feel as tho’ it were all a dream from which some time I will wake … with nothing left to me but the memory of beauty and the wonder of it all.”
He was a year and a half younger than the youngest men who flocked to register on “Draft Day,” 5 June, and just as unready as she to face the horrifying fact that after six or seven more weeks of rapture, he might never see her again. It was difficult for Quentin to imagine himself flying solo before the end of the month. But that was the speed at which he was being flung into the air, in a lumbering, hard-to-control Curtiss Jenny that cruelly taxed his back. France was hopelessly calling for five thousand American pilots and fifty thousand aviation “mechanicians.” The U.S. Army (seventeenth in the world, packing only one and a half days’ worth of ammunition) had fewer than a hundred trained pilots. A story in The New York Times reported seventy-five British planes had been shot down in a single dogfight. Apparently, service aloft was more dangerous than life in the trenches.
The war had so long been regarded by Americans as something they were “kept out of” that its sudden, here-and-now reality was shocking, even to the Colonel’s children. On 17 June, just as Ethel was giving birth to a little girl, Ted and Archie came to Sagamore Hill to announce, in great secrecy, under the new Espionage Act, that they would be leaving for France in three days’ time. Quentin and Flora felt impelled to reveal their own secret at the family’s final gathering before the two regulars sailed. They were so barely grown up that Edith might have reacted in horror, except that all over the country, the accelerating pace of “mobilization” had made short order of maternal scruples. She gave them her blessing.
“HE WAS ASSIGNED TO THE NINETY-FIFTH AERO SQUADRON.”
Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt. (photo credit i25.2)
Flora was as sure as Quentin that their engagement was a commitment for life. Outside of that, and the flamboyant “freshness” with which she dressed, bobbed her hair, and rode horses, she was an insecure girl, tongue-tied when the Roosevelts quoted poetry to one another, and in awe of the public figures who constantly visited the Colonel. She adored her father, but Harry Whitney had the globetrotting restlessness of the wealthy, and she saw little of him. Her famous mother was interested only in art and artists. Roosevelt, in contrast, embraced Flora as he did anyone who passed Edith’s muster, radiating such affection that she understood Sagamore Hill would remain “home” to her, however long Quentin stayed away.
Ted and Archie sailed on the twentieth, with orders attaching them to General Pershing’s advance headquarters in Paris. Roosevelt was overjoyed to be able to boast that they were among the first in line for the Front. He pushed to have Kermit similarly placed in Mesopotamia, writing to Lloyd George, “I pledge my honor that he will serve you honorably and efficiently.” Early in July, an acceptance call came through from Balfour’s roving ambassador in New York, Lord Northcliffe. Kermit was tracked down in Boston, where he was sitting for a portrait by John Singer Sargent, and by mid-month he