Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [460]
61 Ethel wrote Dick, 17 May 1918 (ERDP).
62 Two days later Edith Normant scrapbook (ERDP).
63 Roosevelt had the Leary, notebook 8 (JJL).
64 Roosevelt took his Ibid.
65 “Theodore!” Ibid.; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 435 (eyewitness account).
66 “He feels” Leary, notebook 8 (JJL). See also TR’s follow-up letter to WHT: “What a dreadful creature he [WW] is!… In this really very evil crisis, we need a leader and not a weathercock.” (TR, Letters, 8.1336–37.) WHT, evidently no longer a pacifist, believed that WW was more interested in talking than fighting, and was a Bolshevik sympathizer to boot.
67 If present trends Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 496.
68 like summer lightning The image is Eleanor’s, in Day Before Yesterday, 97.
69 Just as disturbing EBR to mother, 4 June 1918 (TRJP); Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 97; official citation for “conspicuous gallantry” published in Harvard Club Bulletin, Aug. 1918 (KRP).
70 With this and TR, Letters, 8.1338; QR to Flora Whitney, 2 June 1918 (FWM). QR to Flora Whitney, 2 June 1918 (FWM).
71 “La guerre est finie” Cowley, The Great War, 424.
72 General Pershing tried Strachan, The First World War, 298; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 499.
73 On 7 June EKR to KR, 9 June 1918 (KRP); Leary, notebook 9 (JJL); EKR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 16 June 1918 (CRR).
74 When they got back EKR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 16 June 1918 (CRR).
75 “My joy for you” TR to QR, 19 June 1918.
76 “He evidently felt” QR to Flora Whitney, 17 June 1918 (FWM).
77 “It is really” QR to ERD, 17 June 1918 (FWM); QR to Flora Whitney, 17 June 1918 (FWM).
78 “Colonel, one of” TR to KR, 25 June 1918 (KRP).
79 a pile of books One item on TR’s reading pile reflected his understandable new interest in combat flying. It was Henry Bordeaux’s Le Chevalier de l’air: Vie héroïque de Guynemer (Paris, 1918). TR appears to have read it in French, but he wrote an introduction to the American edition, translated by Louise M. Sill and published as Georges Guynemer, Knight of the Air (New Haven, Conn., 1918). With palpable concern for Quentin, he wrote that “the air service in particular is one of such peril that membership in it is of itself a high distinction.”
80 “I have finished” TR to QR, 19 June 1918 (TRC).
81 a macabre souvenir QR to Flora Whitney, 20 June 1918 (FWM).
82 “There’s no better” QR to Flora Whitney, 23 Feb. 1918 (FWM).
83 “The real thing” QR to EKR, 25 June 1918 (TRC); QR to Flora Whitney, 29 June 1918 (FWM). This posting was to Touquin, a patrol center for the area between Château-Thierry and Reims. QR was billeted in the adjacent village of Mauperthuis.
84 On the Fourth Parsons, Perchance to Dream, 274.
85 Little tricolors Ibid.
86 Six days later QR to Flora Whitney, 11 July 1918 (FWM). A later letter from Hamilton Coolidge to Flora revealed that inexperience had something to do with this encounter: at first QR had “joined [the] Boche formation by mistake,” thinking it was his own. 16 July 1918 (FWM).
87 He and Eleanor Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 100. During this visit, QR told EBR that if any of his family were to die in the war, he hoped it would be himself, because his other brothers and Dick all had children. “I think he had a very distinct feeling that he might never get home again,” EBR wrote her mother. 28 July 1918 (TRJP).
88 a little French town Mauperthuis, adjacent to Saints and Touquin.
89 “O ruin!” QR to Flora Whitney, 11 July 1918 (FWM).
90 “Whatever now befalls” TR, Letters, 8.1351.
91 On the afternoon TR to KR, 21 July 1918 (KRP); The New York Times, 18 July 1918; Philip Thompson, “Roosevelt and His Boys,” McClure’s Magazine, Nov. 1918; Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 412.
92 “It seems dreadful” TR to KR, 16 July 1918 (KRP).
93 Then a cable John J. Pershing to TR, 17 July 1918 (ERDP). The chronology of events affecting TR and EKR over the next few days is somewhat confused, due to conflicting newspaper reports. It is reconstructed