Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [311]
Two days later, at Romorantin, Edith Normant took photographs of Quentin and Ham swimming in the Sauldre, then posing in the cockpits of their freshly painted Nieuports, ready to take off for the Front.
ROOSEVELT HAD THE NOVEL experience of being pelted with peonies at his first speaking stop in Springfield, Ohio, on 25 May. He was the guest of Wittenberg College, a Lutheran school so saturated with Teuton Kultur it could well have been an adjunct of its namesake university in Saxony. There to hear him was an audience crammed with German-speaking farmers. They carried great bouquets of the fragrant flowers, which a local nursery had given away free as part of a war chest drive.
John Leary, reporting for the New York Tribune, was alarmed when Roosevelt walked onstage and the first soft bombs were tossed at him. Any one could have contained something dangerous. The Colonel’s appearance was not calculated to please these Volk, because they already knew that he disapproved of their preference for the German liturgy in church. (He felt it was sure to alienate younger worshippers, and turn them away from the faith, as had happened in his own Dutch Reformed Church.)
Roosevelt took his time walking to the podium, as if to emphasize his lack of hostility. The rain of petals continued, until he stood grinning on a perfumed carpet of pink and white.
Moving on to Chicago, he checked in to the Blackstone Hotel. The first person he saw on entering its restaurant was William Howard Taft. Fellow diners applauded as Taft stood up and called, “Theodore!” The two former presidents shook hands with obvious pleasure, straining to hear each other over cheers around the room. They took a small window table and plunged into conversation.
Afterward, a happy Roosevelt told Leary, “He feels exactly as I do about those creatures in Washington and the way they’re carrying on.”
QUENTIN AND HAM may have wanted to give Edith Normant the impression that they were headed straight into action, but their orders were to fly first to Orly. It was a ferry-pilot field just east of Paris, at any rate closer to glory than the mudflats of Issoudun. If present trends continued, the Front might well come to them: the Germans had launched another offensive, driving the Allies back from the Aisne to the Marne. Wilhelm II, delighted to pretend that he, and not General Erich Ludendorff, was the strategist of this new Kaiserschlacht, posed for photographs on the lookout at Craonne, where Napoleon had faced the powers that eventually overwhelmed him.
Quentin went to see Eleanor in her house on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. From its east-facing windows, the flashing of guns could be seen like summer lightning. Just as disturbing was the sight of Ted, crimson-eyed and racked with such spasms of coughing that he had to sleep sitting up. He had been gassed and temporarily blinded at Cantigny, in the first American group action of the war. Two hundred of his comrades had been killed around him. But he had refused to give up command of his battalion, or to be evacuated until the three-day assault was over. His superiors were saying they had never seen such heroism.
With this and Archie’s example to ponder, not to mention the news that Kermit had been awarded the British Military Cross for bravery in Mesopotamia, Quentin felt compelled to prove himself as the last whelp of “the old Lion.” But his only assignment was to test the airworthiness of new planes shipped through Orly. He fell into another of his depressions, worsened by a report from Oyster Bay that Flora had almost no chance of getting a passport to France. Given that, it was small consolation that her parents had agreed to let them marry. “It seems to me now,” he wrote her, “as tho’ nothing could ever fill that void that the last year has left in my heart.”
It was a year that had taken him from Newport to Nieuport, and Quentin could not see how the experience had bettered him. If