Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [298]
His tendency to rant returned. Once more Woodrow Wilson was “an absolutely selfish, cold-blooded, and unpatriotic rhetorician.” Seven months after the start of Germany’s submarine offensive, Wilson and the “well-meaning little humanitarian” in the War Department were still struggling to create and supply a fighting force. “With our enormous wealth and resources,” Roosevelt wrote Arthur Lee, “I still believe that we shall become a ponderable element in the war next spring; but until that time I doubt if we will count for as much as Belgium or Romania.”
He was diverted by the arrival of some more army-stamped letters, although Quentin had yet to be heard from. Kermit and Belle were at last in Paris, and stopping at the Ritz. Ted and Archie had been transferred near the Front—where, the censor would not let them say. Archie had been put in Ted’s regiment. Roosevelt did not like the sound of that. Having one brother under the other was prejudicial to discipline. He would not have allowed it, back when he was in command of a regiment!
Another thing that disturbed him was the way Belle and Kermit were sticking together. They had eighteen-month-old “Kim” with them, and Belle was pregnant again. Eleanor at least had gone over with the independent purpose of working for the American YMCA in Paris. She had the use of a large house on Rue de Villejust, in the sixteenth arrondissement. Belle talked of joining her parents in Madrid after Kermit moved on to Mesopotamia. But she was a clingy woman, and Kermit was capable of yielding to pressure from her to seek a staff assignment with the British army in France. He had never had a sense of career direction. “This is war,” his father cajoled him. “It needs the sternest, most exclusive, and most business-like attention; and no officer (especially an officer of a foreign nationality who has been approved by favor) must try to get his wife near him on the campaign.… He must devote himself solely to his grim work.”
As ever, Roosevelt sought comfort in books. He was not always successful. “One of the most ominously instructive things in history,” he wrote a correspondent, “is the difference between Hannibal’s career when, although in an incredibly difficult position, he had behind him the war party of Carthage and an army … and the last unhappy decade of his life when he was in Asia Minor, continually asked by Asiatic kings to help them do something against Rome, and yet absolutely powerless to accomplish anything in positions in which they had put him.”
SAGAMORE HILL
SEPT 1ST 1917
Dearest Quentin,
We were immensely pleased to get a note from Miss Emily Tuckerman saying that you, and the blessed Harrahs, were all in Paris together. I hope you saw Eleanor.
Miss Given Wilson* is just leaving for six months in France with the Red Cross; she is immensely pleased. The other evening she and darling Flora came over to dinner. Really, we are inexpressibly touched by Flora’s attitude towards [us]; she is the dearest girl; and the way that pretty, charming pleasure-loving young girl has risen to the heights as soon as the need came is one of the finest things I have ever seen. By George, you are fortunate.
I suppose you are now hard at work learning the new type of air-game. My disappointment at not going myself was down at bottom chiefly reluctance to see you four, in whom my heart was wrapped, exposed to danger while I stayed at home in do-nothing ease and safety. But the feeling has now been completely swallowed in my immense pride in all of you. I feel that Mother, and all of you children, have by your deed justified my words!!
I hope to continue earning a good salary until all of you are home, so that I can start Archie and you all right. Then I intend to retire. An elderly male Cassandra has-been can do a little, a very little, toward waking the people now and then; but undue persistence in issuing Jeremiads does no real good and makes