Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [308]
Edith Roosevelt was furious at Archie’s insensitivity, and more than a little protective. Of all of her children, Quentin was the one most like her in Gallic tastes and temperament. The others spoke French, but Quentin did so with instinctive rapidity, gesturing as he talked. He identified with the gaîté, the elegance and subtle snobbery of French culture, as opposed to the Nordic, Slavic, and even Mongol militarism his father admired. Archie and Ted were warriors, cut from coarser cloth. In her own hand, Edith wrote a cable of support, and signed it simply, “Roosevelt.”
YOUR LETTER TO ETHEL CAME. AM SHOCKED BY ATTITUDE OF TED AND ARCHIE. IF YOU HAVE ERRED AT ALL IT IS IN TRYING TOO HARD IN GETTING TO THE FRONT. YOU MUST TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH. WE ARE EXCEEDINGLY PROUD OF YOU.
The Colonel was released from hospital on 4 March, the same day that news came from Brest-Litovsk that Russia had capitulated to Germany in a peace treaty of alarming import. Whether out of desperation or long-term design, the Bolsheviks had sacrificed vast areas of formerly Tsarist territory to the Central Powers, including the Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic provinces. Germany could henceforth count on nearly all of Russia’s oil production, most of its iron ore, and a cornucopia of its food products. Instead of retreating behind its own borders, as Wilson had demanded in the sixth of his Fourteen Points, the Reich had effectively occupied a large swath of Russia west of Moscow. With relief forces daily amplifying those entrenched along the Hindenburg Line, a major offensive against Paris looked inevitable—most likely in the early spring, before Pershing’s army achieved its full fighting mass.
Enraged, Woodrow Wilson began to sound like Clemenceau. The Prussians, he publicly declared, had shown what they thought of his formula for world peace. “There is therefore but one answer open to us. Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit.”
THE APPROACH OF SPRING had cracked most of Oyster Bay’s ice by the time Roosevelt, still unsteady on his feet, returned to Sagamore Hill. Cove Neck exuded its ancient reek of salt marsh, clam flats, tangled rigging, and seawater. The first crocuses were out. It would be a long time before the enfeebled squire could walk around his property, much less ride a horse. “The destruction of my left inner ear,” he wrote Quentin, “has made me lose my equilibrium … but in two or three months I should be all right.”
Looking over the letter after Miss Stricker had typed it, he scrawled an impulsive postscript: “I wish you could get darling Flora to cross the ocean and marry you! I would escort her over.”
On 13 March, Edith came down to breakfast and found her husband already up, pondering a telephone call from United Press. Captain Archibald Roosevelt of Company B, Twenty-sixth Infantry, AEF, had reportedly won France’s Croix de Guerre “under dramatic circumstances.” A War Department telegram later in the morning advised that Archie had been “slightly wounded.” Then a cable from Ted came to say that he had been hit in an arm and leg by shrapnel. Ted’s terseness implied there could be worse medical news to come. As soon as Archie was transferable, Eleanor would look after him in Paris.
The Roosevelts were especially moved because Grace, staying with her parents in Boston, had just given birth to Archibald Roosevelt, Jr.—their eighth grandchild. That evening a proud