Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [312]
General Pershing tried to persuade a despairing Clemenceau that the war was not over. The United States was ready to announce that it had a million troops in France, and a million—or more—on the way. The Allies simply needed to hold the Germans off, at this moment of the Reich’s maximum advancement west and east. Overextension always preceded collapse, in Pershing’s view. The strategic situation was poised. “It may not look encouraging just now,” he said, “but we are certain to win in the end.”
On 7 June, the day Quentin hoped he might be sent into action, Roosevelt was hit by an attack of erysipelas, a streptococcal inflammation of the leg that had bothered him so often since his traffic accident in 1902. He was in Chicago en route to Omaha, still traveling as a spokesman for the National Security League. “Jack, I’m pretty sick,” he confided to John Leary. It was his way of saying that he was running a temperature of 104°F. Fortunately Edith was at hand to nurse him on the train, along with a doctor to control his fever. Roosevelt insisted on keeping every engagement the League had mapped out for him, distracting himself from pain by reading Polybius and what his wife described as “hundreds of thousands” of ten-cent magazines.
When they got back home in the middle of the month, a cable from Quentin was waiting. He and Ham Coolidge had been ordered forward at last.
“My joy for you and pride in you drown my anxiety,” Roosevelt wrote. “Of course I don’t know whether you are to go in the pursuit planes—or battle planes or whatever you call them.”
In fact, as Quentin reported to Flora, he had already ridden to the Front on his motorcycle, after detaching himself from an emotional, one-armed embrace by Archie. “He evidently felt that he was saying a last fond farewell to me.”
That lugubrious soul was convinced that no Roosevelt in uniform would return to America alive. Quentin thought this funny, as well as the fact that the anti-aircraft shells he would be dodging in the future were known among pilots as “Archies.” He had already, he boasted, experienced flak on his maiden patrol along the lines as a member of the First (U.S.) Pursuit Group. “It is really exciting when you see the stuff bursting in great black puffs around you, but you get used to it in about fifteen minutes.”
WITH KERMIT NOW attached to the Seventh Field Artillery Regiment of the First Division in France, Roosevelt could congratulate himself on the “first-ness” of all his sons. News that Ted had been cited for both a Croix de Guerre and American Silver Star turned him into something of a paterfamilial bore. Finley Peter Dunne heard him out and said, “Colonel, one of these days those boys of yours are going to put the name of Roosevelt on the map.”
As his erysipelas ebbed, he spent the latter part of June at Sagamore Hill, lazing on the piazza with a pile of books and listening to birds. “I have finished my last tour of speechmaking,” he wrote Quentin, in words that his family had long learned to ignore. Immediately came the disclaimer: “From now on I shall speak … only just enough to put whatever power I have back of the war, and to insist that we carry it through until we win such a peace as will ensure against danger from Germany for at least a generation to come.”
For at least a generation to come. Before Quentin left Romorantin, a son had been born to one of the Normants, and he had found a macabre souvenir on his pillow. It was a baby doll and box of chocolates labeled, “From the poilu of 1938.”
In the place he was now—the censor would not allow him to say where—men had no interest in times beyond the present. The average life of a chase pilot on the Front in the summer of 1918 was eleven days. Quentin was clear-eyed about his own vulnerability, having lost a Mineola comrade earlier in the year. In an attempt to