Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [319]
But what made this loss so devastating to him was the truth it conveyed: that death in battle was no more glamorous than death in an abattoir. Under some much-trodden turf in France, Quentin lay as cold as a steer fallen off a hook. Look now, in your ignorance, on the face of death, the boy had written in one of his attempts at fiction. The words seemed to admonish a father who had always romanticized war.
“There is no use writing about Quentin,” Roosevelt told Edith Wharton, “for I should break down if I tried.” But by the end of August he had steeled himself enough to write a generalized eulogy for all the Quentins fallen and still falling in Europe:
Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure.… Never yet was a country worth dying for unless its sons and daughters thought of life as something concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual, but as a link in the great chain of creation and causation, so that each person is seen in his true relations as an essential part of the whole, whose life must be made to serve the larger and continuing life of the whole.
After this magnificent beginning, his tribute degenerated into an embarrassing argument that the bed and battleground were equal fields of honor. Prowess on each was necessary to militate against race suicide. Straining for eloquence, Roosevelt sank to a level of bathos more suited to the death of Little Nell. He went on at length about dark drinks proffered by the Death Angel, and girls whose boy-lovers were struck down in their golden mornings. But the hackneyed images did not work. Theodore Roosevelt was just another bereaved father unable to say what he felt. Much more expressive were the words he was heard sobbing in the stable at Sagamore Hill, with his face buried in the mane of his son’s pony: “Poor Quentyquee!”
“LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.”
Quentin photographed by the Germans in front of his crashed plane. (photo credit i28.1)
WHEN THE ARMY offered to exhume and repatriate Quentin’s body, the Roosevelts declined. “We greatly prefer that Quentin shall continue to lie on the spot where he fell in battle, and where the foemen buried him,” the Colonel wrote. He had heard from Pershing that the crash site had become a shrine for passing troops. “After the war is over, Mrs. Roosevelt and I intend to visit the grave, and then to have a small stone put up … not disturbing what has already been erected in his memory by his French and American comrades in arms.”
In another gesture of sympathy, a Congressional commission released the Nobel Peace Prize money—$45,483 in cash and liquidated securities—that Roosevelt had been trying to get back for years. He was perversely pleased that the fund’s trustees had never been able to agree how to spend it, because he now had his own ideas for its disbursal. Every cent would go to war-related charities, or individuals and organizations planning to improve social conditions in the postwar world. His list of major recipients included the American, Japanese, and Italian Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., now working in the Y.M.C.A. in France,” Herbert Hoover, for use in Belgian war relief, a hospitality council for “colored troops [and] colored women and girls in and about the camps and cantonments,” and Maria Bochkareva of the Women’s Death Battalion, “as a token of my respect for those Russians who have refused to follow the Bolshevists in their betrayal to Germany of Russia, of the Allies, and of the cause of liberty through the world.” He allocated small, but attention-getting amounts to ethnic groups persecuted or fighting for freedom against autocracies—Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and Assyrian Christians. In something of a first for a former president, he promised