Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [313]
To his mother, he was determinedly upbeat. “The real thing is that I’m on the Front—cheers, oh cheers—and I’m very happy.” Then he learned that he was being transferred to a “hot” sector on one of the salients threatening Paris.
On the Fourth of July, Roosevelt dined with Fanny Parsons in Manhattan. She too had a son in uniform abroad. They both felt, and shared, a lift in the national morale. After the terror of March and April and the good news in June of U.S. troops repelling Ludenorff’s last offensive at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood, the war finally looked winnable. For however many more months it continued, American power, burgeoning with the force of lava long suppressed, was evidently going to shape the outcome.
Little tricolors decorated the Colonel’s table. He was in the same high spirits that had enchanted Fanny forty years before. Then the headwaiter brought over an evening paper, pointing to a cable report that Quentin had just made his first sortie over the German line. Roosevelt read it without comment and set the paper aside, but Fanny noticed that his face had darkened. For the rest of the meal they talked with less animation.
SIX DAYS LATER, Quentin shot down his first “Boche.” He was in command of a small squadron of Nieuports, and was flying as top man on a high patrol when he got blown off course at 5,200 meters. Descending out of the sun, he came upon a trio of Pfalz monoplanes. “Great excitement!” he wrote Flora. “They had white tails with black crosses.… I was scared perfectly green, but then I thought to myself that I was so near I might as well take a crack at one of them.” He fired, then hustled for home, fifteen kilometers away beyond Château-Thierry. In his rearview mirror was the pleasing sight of his victim tumbling into lower clouds, and two outraged pursuers unable to catch up with him. There was no confirmation yet that he had scored a kill, but he had tasted what passed for blood in the air, and that evening tooled in to Paris to celebrate. He and Eleanor had dined at Ciro’s and gone on to Grand Guignol.
Now (Quentin was writing on 11 July) his squadron had relocated yet again. He was billeted in a little French town not far from Reims, where he had first seen airplanes flying, nine summers before. Flora would want to know about his quarters: a ground-floor room in a white plaster house with a weathercock on the roof and a blooming garden behind. “O ruin! There goes an alerte & I must run, or rather fly, so I’ll just finish this off. Goodbye, dear sweetheart, & a kiss from your QR.”
ROOSEVELT HEARD ABOUT Quentin’s score that same day, in a cable dispatch that thrilled him. He wrote to tell Ethel, who had taken her children to Islesboro, Maine, for the hot months. “Whatever now befalls Quentin, he has had his crowded hour, and his day of honor and triumph.”
On the afternoon of Tuesday, 16 July, a cryptic advisory from Paris alerted reporters: WATCH SAGAMORE HILL IN EVENT OF [DELETED BY CENSOR]. The Colonel was dictating to Miss Stricker when Philip Thompson, a reporter from the Associated Press, showed the cable to him. “Something has happened to one of the boys,” Roosevelt said, closing the door in case Edith was within earshot.
Rapid deduction (Archie and Ted incapacitated, Kermit not yet at the Front) made it plain that the news concerned Quentin. But what news? He had no choice but to ask Thompson not to alarm Edith, and continue to dictate as if nothing had happened. One of his letters of the day was to Kermit. He made no mention of the AP advisory, but could not resist saying, “It seems dreadful that I, sitting at home in ease and safety, should try to get the men I love dearest into the zone of fearful danger and hardship.… Mother, who has the