Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [309]
A few days later he read in an upstate newspaper the prediction of an AEF official in France that Quentin was a young officer worth watching, “as game as they make ’em in aviation.” Roosevelt did not hesitate to rebroadcast this quote, along with reports that Ted had nearly been killed in the same battle that wounded Archie, and that Kermit, having acquitted himself bravely in Mesopotamia (learning Persian as he did so), now wished to fight under General Pershing.
Roosevelt’s paternal pride swelled steadily. So did his stomach, as every day of improved health turned him back into the trencherman of yore. He argued that the government’s food restrictions did not apply to comestibles produced by the Sagamore Hill farm. Ethel was amazed at the amount of lunch he could put away. After one feast she wrote Dick Derby, “Father had 2 plates (cereal plates) of tomatoes, 2 plates of applesauce, 1 plate of potato, grouped around the pièce de résistance which was spare ribs of pork. I counted 18 which he ate, & then he refused to let me count further!! He certainly ‘eat hearty.’ ”
Although Roosevelt still chafed over his inability to fight in France, he had become resigned to it enough to accept whatever political or journalistic assignments gave him a feeling of being useful. One of these was a request from Will H. Hays, the new chairman of the RNC, to deliver a formal statement of Party war policy at Portland, Maine, on 28 March. It was intended to be the keynote of the fall Congressional campaign, for which Hays had high hopes.
The Colonel’s consultations and correspondence on the speech—he sent a draft to William Howard Taft for suggestions—helped distract him from headlines confirming that the German offensive in northeastern France had begun promptly, on the first day of spring. A bombardment of unbelievable intensity battered Allied artillery emplacements around Arras, while poisonous phosgene fumes spilled like fog into every bunker. The phosgene was mixed with lacrimators, which so stung the eyes of gunners that they pulled off their gas masks, weeping, only to inhale the fog and die. Then concentrated units of storm troopers moved in and drove the British Fifth Army westward, effectively wiping it out.
Under the circumstances, Roosevelt’s prediction, in Maine, of three more years of war, necessitating a five-million-man American army, did not sound alarmist. He returned home to hear that the Germans had recaptured all the territory they had lost in the Battle of the Somme. A terrified Jules Jusserand told President Wilson that the Arras salient was now no farther from Paris than Baltimore was from Washington. Clemenceau’s government was considering a retreat to Bordeaux.
Wilson remained outwardly impassive, but the emergency was so acute that Jusserand and Lord Reading begged him to allow units of the AEF to be “brigaded” among the French and British armies. General Pershing was adamant against such dissipation of American strength. The President’s growing number of critics in Washington suggested that he look to Oyster Bay for guidance. “Wilson always follows T.R., eventually,” one of them sneered at a dinner party attended by the secretary of the treasury, William G. McAdoo. “I suppose soon we will hear that he’s deaf in one ear.”
“Many think he’s already deaf in both,” McAdoo replied.
Wilson reluctantly agreed to a temporary transfer of ninety thousand U.S. troops. The Allied line held from Reims in the south to Amiens in the north, and the war of attrition resumed. Pershing went back