Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [310]
QUENTIN HAPPENED TO have been in Paris just after the first German shells landed. He calculated his chance of being hit at one hundred thousand to one, and with a boy’s bravado found the slight danger thrilling. It was enough, however, to remind him of the tenuousness of life, and his father’s obsession about getting Flora over to marry him. Letters to that effect kept arriving, written in the Colonel’s forceful hand, and not mincing words:
Quentin foresaw trouble with Flora’s parents, and with the passport authorities who were making it difficult for American civilians to cross the Atlantic unless they had war duties in Europe. Perhaps, he wrote her, she could work with Eleanor in the Parisian YWCA, or as a military secretary. She was fluent in French. He was sure he would be flying at the Front by the time she arrived, but wedding leave was permitted. After that he would be able to join her “every six months for a couple of days.”
When Quentin next heard from his father, in a letter dated 8 April, Sagamore Hill’s maple buds were red and its willow tips green. Robins and sparrows and redwing blackbirds had begun to sing, and frogs were noisy in the lawn ponds. “The Hon. Pa,” as Quentin affectionately called him, was still capable of an ecstatic response to the sights and sounds of nature—all the more, this season, because he had come so close to death.
A second German offensive in the Lys sector, recapturing Passchendaele and driving another twelve miles toward Paris, hampered communications between the Roosevelts and their sons for the rest of the month. What information reached them was mostly disturbing. A medical report indicated that Archie’s wounds were more serious than they had thought. His left arm had been so severely fractured that the main nerve was cut, and his left kneecap smashed by a shrapnel fragment deeply embedded in lower bone. Medics wanted to amputate the leg, but Eleanor and Ted had managed to dissuade them. There was a photograph of him lying in traction, with his medal pinned to his pillow.
“ARCHIE’S WOUNDS WERE MORE SERIOUS THAN THEY HAD THOUGHT.”
Captain Archibald Roosevelt, Croix de Guerre, in traction. (photo credit i27.1)
Quentin was lucky not to be in the same hospital. Flying to Paris to see Archie, he had snapped a connecting rod in low clouds, and crash-landed in a pine grove. He had broken his right arm and hurt his always-vulnerable back. The accident had led to a “ghastly” week of depression when “everything looked black.” He shared this information with Flora but not his father, who thought soldiers should be positive. (Archie, scarcely able to move, was already swearing to report back for duty.)
Roosevelt chafed at Quentin’s renewed silence. “I simply have no idea what you are doing—whether you are fighting, or raging because you can’t get into the fighting line.” Nor could he guess that Ted was in Flanders, helping to hold back the Lys offensive at Saint-Mihiel. All he knew was that the imbalance there between German and Allied forces, and the passing of the first anniversary of America’s entry into the war, had revived his contempt for un-preparedness. He wrote two articles for the Kansas City Star so savagely critical of the administration that his editor, Ralph Stout, rejected them.
For some time now the Colonel and his youngest son had been unconsciously moving in tandem, with alternate or parallel fluctuations of mood, and physical ups and downs. Through the middle of May, they both showed signs of rising tension—Quentin over intimations from his commanding officer that he and Ham Coolidge would soon be in action, and Roosevelt over two arduous tours he had agreed to undertake on behalf of the National Security League’s “Committee on Patriotism.”
Ethel wrote Dick on the seventeenth that she was sitting on the piazza at Sagamore Hill with her parents. “Just across from me is Father, rocking violently to & fro—and ever so busy talking to himself. Poor lamb