Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [36]
FRIDAY, 20 MAY 1910, was a day so beautiful that all London seemed to want to be outdoors and see the procession scheduled to depart from Buckingham Palace at 9:30 A.M. Hours before the first drumbeat sounded, a mass of humanity blocked every approach to the parade route along the Mall to Westminster Hall. There was little noise and less movement as the crowd waited under a cloudless sky. Green Park was at its greenest. The air, washed clean by rain overnight, was sweet and warm, alive with birdsong.
Roosevelt arrived early in the palace yard, where horses and coaches were lining up, and was again accosted by a furious Stéphen Pichon. The Duke of Norfolk had decreed that because of their lack of royal uniforms, they could not ride with the mounted mourners. Instead, they were to share a dress landau. Pichon noted, in a voice shaking with rage, that it would be eighth in a sequence of twelve, behind a carriage packed with Chinese imperials of uncertain gender. Not only that, it was a closed conveyance, whereas some royal ladies up front had been assigned “glass coaches.”
The landau struck Roosevelt as luxurious all the same, and he admitted afterward, in describing the funeral, that he had never heard of glass coaches “excepting in connection with Cinderella.” But Pichon could not be calmed down:
He continued that “ces Chinois” were put ahead of us. To this I answered that any people dressed as gorgeously as “ces Chinois” ought to go ahead of us; but he responded that it was not a laughing matter. Then he added that “ce Perse” had been put in with us, pointing out a Persian prince of the blood royal, a deprecatory, inoffensive-looking Levantine of Parisian education, who was obviously ill at ease, but whom Pichon insisted upon regarding as somebody who wanted to be offensive. At this moment our coach drove up, and Pichon bounced into it. I suppose he had gotten in to take the right-hand rear seat, to which I was totally indifferent.… But Pichon was scrupulous in giving me precedence, although I have no idea whether I was entitled to it or not. He sat on the left rear seat himself, stretched his arm across the right seat and motioned me to get in so that “ce Perse” should not himself take the place of honor! Accordingly I got in, and the unfortunate Persian followed, looking about as unaggressive as a rabbit in a cage with two boa constrictors.
Band music blared as the gates of the palace opened and the Duke of Connaught rode out onto the Mall, escorting the two chief mourners, George V and Wilhelm II. Behind them came file upon file of mounted monarchs, princes, dukes, pashas, and sultans. The pace of the procession was so slow that people in the crowd were able, with the help of printed lists, to identify every strange or famous face. Eyes lingered longer on the Kaiser than on King George. He sat erect on a gray charger, helmet and jeweled orders flashing in the sun, his little left arm curving into the horse’s reins in a practiced trompe l’oeil.
When the last royal rider, Prince Bovaradej of Siam, had meekly trailed a posse of minor-state European dukes out the gates, the coaches and carriages started to roll. Edith Roosevelt stood with Kermit and Ethel on a private balcony overlooking the park, searching for her husband’s landau. They were among the few spectators to pay any attention to it when it passed. Roosevelt sat well back, with the strange reticence that sometimes overcame him on ceremonial occasions, avoiding eye contact with the crowd. There was no indicating that he was being subjected to a further Gallic tirade:
Pichon’s feelings overcame him.… He pointed out the fact that we were following “toutes ces petites royautés,” even “le roi du Portugal.” I then spoke to him seriously, and said that in my judgment France and the United States were so important that it was of no earthly consequence whether their representatives went before or behind the representatives of utterly insignificant little nations like Portugal, and that I thought