FDR - Jean Edward Smith [100]
I knew at once I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France. He did not wait for me to advance to meet him at his desk, and there was no formality such as one generally meets.… He is only 77 years old and people say he is getting younger everyday. He seemed delighted at the present rate of progress. [T]he wonderful old man leaves his office almost every Saturday in a high-powered car, dashes to the front, visits a Corps Commander, travels perhaps all night, goes up a good deal closer to the actual battle line than the officers like, keeps it up all day Sunday and motors back in time to be at his desk on Monday morning.91
Roosevelt was especially impressed by French sangfroid. Despite four years of war, with the Germans literally outside the gates of Paris, they continued “the planting of the flower beds in the Tuileries and the repairing and cleaning of streets. They seem to lose their heads even less than the Anglo-Saxons—very different from what we thought four years ago.”92
From Paris, FDR went to the front. After relieving an American naval attaché who sought to keep him out of the trenches, he pushed his party from one battlefield to the next. He saw Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and Verdun, was briefly under enemy fire (“the long whining whistle of a shell was followed by the dull boom of the explosion”), and came within a mile of the German lines. “Such tireless energy as Roosevelt’s I have never known,” said Captain Edward McCauley, Franklin’s naval aide, “except perhaps for his kinsman, Theodore Roosevelt. I thought I was fairly husky, but I couldn’t keep up with him.”93
If Franklin did not see combat, he surely experienced its immediate aftermath: the shell holes filled with water, the roofless houses and splintered trees, the stench of dead horses, “rusty bayonets, broken guns, discarded overcoats and ration tins, rain-stained love letters, men buried in shallow graves, some unmarked, some with rifles stuck in the earth bayonet down, and some, too, with a whittled little cross and a tag of wood or wrapping paper hung on it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.” That is the way Franklin described Belleau Wood, a memory he would cite again and again.94
From France, FDR went briefly to Italy, hoping to resolve the complicated command structure in the Mediterranean. In Rome he met with his naval counterparts and urged that the Italian fleet take action against the Austrians as soon as possible. At one point he questioned the wisdom of keeping the main Italian battle fleet riding at anchor in Taranto harbor for more than a year, with no drill or target practice.
“Ah,” said the Italian chief of staff, “but my dear Mr. Minister, you must not forget that the Austrian Fleet have not had any either.”
“This is a naval classic which is hard to beat,” FDR wrote afterward, “but which perhaps should not be publicly repeated for a generation or two.”95
From Italy back to France, then briefly to England before boarding the troopship USS Leviathan in Brest on September 8 for the return home. “Somehow I don’t believe I shall be long in Washington,” he wrote Eleanor before sailing. “The more I think of it the more I feel that being only 36 my place is not at a Washington desk, even a Navy desk. I know you will understand.”96
Whatever Franklin’s wish for active service, the Atlantic crossing of the Leviathan in September 1918 was certainly one he preferred to forget. Another Spanish influenza epidemic swept Europe and the United States that year,