Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [301]
“Well, I feel myself slipping a bit both mentally and physically. I’m an abnormal eater and I can’t see how you’re going to do much good … but I’m told you can.”
Cooper said that he could continue to eat as much as he liked, providing he consented to a daily routine of long hikes, gym exercise, massage, and sessions on something called “the Reducycle.” Roosevelt was agreeable. For the next ten days, until he could stand the monotony no longer, he obeyed every house rule—even breaking his lifetime habit of dressing for dinner.
The Reducycle, a machine of Cooper’s own invention, was designed to cause prodigious sweating. Roosevelt had to pump its pedals for twenty-five minutes every morning, while steam nozzles enveloped him in a miasma of humid heat. He lost up to two pounds per session. Cooper monitored his heart and lungs, which performed satisfactorily.
On 22 October, the Colonel returned to Sagamore Hill, looking much thinner but exhausted. “Cooper’s not a success,” Edith wrote in her diary.
FLORA RECEIVED A chilling rejection from Quentin. He wrote that he dreaded “temporarily” marrying her, only to be killed a month later, or becoming one of the war’s many paraplegics, “a useless chain to which you were tied.” In a follow-up letter, he changed his mind and asked what she thought of a wedding in Paris next summer, when he should have completed his term of duty at the Front and would be eligible, with luck, for some leave.
He wrote that he was back to flying practice and enjoying it, although cramped hours in the cockpit of a little French Nieuport, at freezing high altitudes, badly bothered his back. “I don’t see how the angels stand it.” He also liked the male comradeship of camp, but referred often to a dull longing for Flora that would not go away.
She felt the same. “Oh, Quentin … I want you so desperately & the hollow, blank feeling that is a living nightmare almost kills me at times.” His letters came irregularly, sometimes one a day, sometimes none for a week. Their datelines indicated that the fault was not always due to shipping delays. Like Flora, Quentin was easily cast down. He confessed to her that all he saw ahead was “endless gray vistas of war.” His engineer’s nature, loving coordination, was outraged by the reshufflings and reversals that kept the Aviation Service in a perpetual state of organizational flux. At any given moment he was truck officer, groundskeeper, pilot, purchasing agent in Paris, or recalled to Issoudun to fly again. About his only certainty was that he would, eventually, be put into service as a “fighter up in the ceiling,” not as “a bomb dropper.” His commander had promised him that, but warned that he would not be sent forward to the line for at least three months.
Ted and Archie were already there, but they were not seeing any action. The Allies, concerned at the AEF’s greenness, had persuaded Pershing to dig his First Division into a relatively quiet sector of the Front, near Nancy. Ironically, it was Kermit, the last brother to be commissioned, who looked likely to taste battle first. Belle had allowed him to proceed to Mesopotamia, where he was now on duty with the British army, and ranked as an “honorary” captain.
For Theodore Roosevelt, as his fifty-ninth birthday approached, the mere fact that all his sons were trained and ready for war was thrilling. He hung a huge service flag, with four stars on it, from the upper story of Sagamore Hill. In a letter to Ted, who had just turned thirty, he wrote, “You and your brothers are playing your parts in the greatest of the world’s great days, and what man of spirit does not envy you? You are having your crowded hours of glorious life; you have seized the great chance, as was seized by those who fought at Gettysburg, and Waterloo, and Agincourt, and Arbela and Marathon.”
AT THE BEGINNING OF November, Russian troops defending imperial outposts in the Baltic yielded to Bolshevik calls that they lay down their arms and fraternize with the enemy. Kerensky’s provisional government, weakened by transport and railroad