Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [299]
I am just publishing a book, for which Mother gave me the title: “The Foes of our own Household;” I dedicate it on behalf of both of us to our sons and daughters—the latter to include daughters in law, and Flora shall have her copy with a special inscription to show that she is included among those of whom I am most proud.
I make a few speeches; I loathe making them; among other reasons because I always fear to back up the administration too strongly lest it turn another somersault. At the moment New York City, having seen the National Guard, fresh from gathering at the Armories, parade, believes that Germany is already conquered!
Your loving
Father
QUENTIN DID NOT remain in Paris more than forty-eight hours. He was dispatched to Issoudun, in central France, where a huge American aviation instruction center was being built in a quagmire of Auvergnois mud. To his chagrin, it was far from the zone des armées where Ted and Archie were girding for battle.
“I confess I’m sorry,” he wrote Flora, “for I wanted to get started flying and have it over with, I know my back wouldn’t last for very long.”
He doubted that he would get into the air for another two months, so preliminary and bureaucratic was all the organization of the base. It was possible he might not be assigned to the Front until next spring. Remote as Issoudun was, he had already seen enough of the war’s effects in Paris (streets and cafés strangely quiet and lacking in laughter, haunted-looking women in black, a gas-blinded boy his age being helped along) to understand its “appalling reality,” and how serious was the challenge of “driving the Boche back.” He could feel the wall of German expansionism pressing on France like a tectonic plate. Until the Allies were reinforced by America’s draft army, “no amount of talk, of airplane fleets that loom large only in the minds of newspapermen,” would relieve the pressure.
Quentin felt changed by his translocation from a life of promise to a life of threat. “The thing that it brings home the most is the greatness of the responsibility,” he told Flora, “—and the fact that it has got to be fought to a decision. For if there is no decision, we will go through it all again in fifteen years. That would be about the time we had settled down.”
In more cheerful letters he reported being absorbed in mechanical work, as supply officer in charge of a fleet of fifty-two trucks. Since he had an easy command of French, he was also constantly called on to interpret between American and local officials, and mediate when quarrels broke out—a task that suited his genial personality. He had taken to smoking a pipe, and made friends with a wealthy French family, the Normants, who had a riverside château nearby at Romorantin.
Flora registered the presence of a daughter about her own age chez Normant. But the tone of Quentin’s last August letter, written under a full moon, was reassuring: “Ah, dearest, if I have to pay the price of war, yet I am happy, in that earth has no higher blessing than the knowledge of a love that fills one’s heart and soul.”
AMONG THE LUCRATIVE speaking and writing opportunities that the Colonel had mentioned to Ted was an invitation to write war commentary for the Kansas City Star, one of the most admired newspapers in the country. It paid $25,000 a year. He accepted, liking both the quickness of newspaper publication and the chance to address himself, once again, to a Midwestern readership. War spirit was lacking in many areas of the breadbasket states. At the same time, Harry Whitney (aware, at last, of Flora’s engagement to Quentin) offered a new, nonexclusive contract at the Metropolitan. It would pay him $5,000 for a “short monthly editorial” in the magazine, on whatever subject caught his attention. Roosevelt accepted that too, and in the third week of September, set off with Edith to meet with the Star’s editorial team in Missouri.
It was therapeutic for them both to get away. Edith found herself constantly imagining the sound of Quentin’s step on the piazza at Sagamore