Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [314]
Then a cable from Pershing arrived:
REGRET VERY MUCH THAT YOUR SON LT. QUENTIN ROOSEVELT REPORTED AS MISSING. ON JULY 14 WITH A PATROL OF TWELVE PLANES HE LEFT ON A MISSION OF PROTECTING PHOTOGRAPHIC SECTION. SEVEN ENEMY PLANES WERE SIGHTED & ATTACKED, AFTER WHICH ENEMY PLANES RETURNED AND OUR PLANES BROKE OFF COMBAT RETURNING TO THEIR BASE. LT. ROOSEVELT DID NOT RETURN. A MEMBER OF THE SQUADRON REPORTS SEEING ONE OF OUR PLANES FALL OUT OF THE COMBAT AND INTO THE CLOUDS AND THE FRENCH REPORT AN AMERICAN PLANE WAS SEEN DESCENDING. I HOPE HE MAY HAVE LANDED SAFELY. WILL ADVISE YOU IMMEDIATELY ON RECEIPT OF FURTHER INFORMATION.
At sunset Roosevelt changed out of his knickerbocker suit, bathed, and dressed for dinner as usual. With Ethel and the grandchildren away, the house was as quiet as it had ever been. For whatever reason, Edith left her daily diary blank when they went to bed.
Before breakfast the next day, Thompson returned to say that further dispatches from Europe indicated that Quentin had been killed. The reports, already printed in the morning papers, were unconfirmed but ominously definite. The Colonel paced up and down the piazza. “But—Mrs. Roosevelt? How am I going to break it to her?”
He disappeared into the house. Thompson was left alone as early morning breezes swept up the hillside from the bay.
Thirty minutes later Roosevelt emerged with a one-line statement. “Quentin’s mother and I are very glad that he got to the Front and had a chance to render some service to his country, and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him.”
He was due in town around noon, preparatory to leaving early Thursday for Saratoga Springs, where he had promised to address the New York State Republican convention. An organizer of the event called to ask, sympathetically, if he wanted to cancel. Roosevelt replied that on the contrary, he would honor his engagement. Taft was going to be there. Together, they had to set the Party on a course that would humiliate Woodrow Wilson in the fall Congressional elections. “I must go; it is my duty.”
Telegrams of condolence began to arrive by the hundreds. Roosevelt spent a couple of hours dictating acknowledgments to them. At times he choked and cried, but would not stop until his chauffeur came to take him and Miss Stricker into Manhattan. Edith emerged from the house to see them off, then turned red-eyed to Philip Thompson.
“We must do everything we can to help him,” she said, as if her own feelings did not matter.
Roosevelt had no sooner reached his office than Hermann Hagedorn, a thirtyish writer at work on a biography of him, came to pick him up for lunch. They walked through streets emblazoned with press posters announcing Quentin’s death. Albert Shaw, editor of American Review of Reviews, awaited them at the Harvard Club.
“Now, Colonel, you know it may not be true,” Shaw said. “I would not make up my mind until I hear from General Pershing direct.”
“No, it is true,” Roosevelt said. “Quentin is dead.”
With that he changed the subject, and talked lucidly throughout the meal, giving Hagedorn his take on the events of 1912. But there was a dim look behind his spectacles. Afterward Hagedorn noted, “The old side of him is gone, the old exuberance, the boy in him has died.”
Edith came later by train to stay with her husband overnight. Alice telegrammed to remind them that the newspaper reports were still unconfirmed. She was coming up from Washington anyway.
Roosevelt went upstate the following morning, Thursday, 18 July, not knowing that during the night, the Allies had launched the Second Battle of the Marne. It was a devastatingly powerful counterattack, driving German forces back from Château-Thierry toward the country west of Reims where Quentin had disappeared.
At 3:20 that afternoon the chairman of the convention in Saratoga Town Hall announced that the next speaker would be