Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [297]
In the midst of her anguish, Flora could tell that Edith was also pining for Quentin—the most vulnerable of the Roosevelt children, with his bad back and unmilitary nature. If that aloof woman had more particular reasons for loving him, Flora was too shy to ask. The Colonel was more approachable, yet again, there was a uniformity about the way he talked about his sons, except in occasional references to Kermit. They were equally brave and fine and determined to do their duty. Dick Derby was also brave and fine, in arranging to be sent back to France as a military doctor—and Nick Longworth would be brave and fine too, except that members of Congress were barred from enlisting. In his all-embracing pride, Roosevelt was actually harder than Edith for Flora to reach. She begged Ethel to tell her what she could do to help the family. “I am so sorry for your Mother that when I am with her … I almost forget my own troubles.”
The secrecy and slowness of troopship movements was such that the Roosevelts had to wait for weeks to hear if their last son had crossed over safely. On 9 August, a letter came from Major Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. He had not yet seen anything of Quentin in Paris, or of Kermit, who was due to pass through en route to Mesopotamia. But Ted had tremendous news of his own: he was appointed commander of the First Battalion, Twenty-sixth Infantry, AEF First Division—so far, the only war-ready unit Pershing had been able to establish in France. Archie expected to be assigned a place in the same division soon.
Roosevelt was overjoyed. “I had no idea,” he wrote back, “that you could make a regular regiment in a line position.” Evidently Pershing had felt Ted’s bulldog drive and decided to make use of it as soon as the AEF started fighting. Nobody knew when that might be.
“I am busy writing and occasionally speaking,” Roosevelt reported. “I have had various offers which are good from the financial side; but my interest of course now lies entirely in the work of you four boys, for my work is of no real consequence—what I did was in the Spanish War and in the decade following.…”
His habit of referring back to his days as Rough Rider and commander in chief had become compulsive as he adjusted to the fact that he was not wanted by the War Department. In a snub the Colonel’s friends could not see as anything but cruel, Secretary Baker announced that William Howard Taft had been appointed a major general. On close inspection of the official order, it became clear that Taft’s title was only a “certificate of identity,” awarded to him as a high officer of the American Red Cross. But the thought of the peace-loving former president lumbering around in khaki was grotesque. Roosevelt tried to make a joke of it. “Major General Taft! How the Kaiser must have trembled when he heard the news!”
As August dragged on with no further word from France, he showed symptoms of extreme stress. For the first time in his life, he had difficulty sleeping. He agonized about possibly having to tell Edith that one of her sons had been killed. An attack of Cuban fever laid him low in mid-month. It did not lapse as quickly as usual, and