Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  An eruptive bigness, as of lava rising, seethed beneath the vineyards and farms and spotless towns of the Fatherland. Since the Franco-Prussian War, the population had burgeoned to sixty-eight million, twenty-nine million more than that of France. Its notable feature was a huge new middle class, thrown up by a fabulously successful program of industrialization. To Germans, all things seemed possible in the arts and sciences. What the monument was to architecture, the symphony was to Richard Strauss. In Vienna on the night of the Leipzig celebration, that master of the modern orchestra had premiered his most gargantuan score yet, a Festive Prelude for 150 instruments, including eight horns, six extra trumpets, and organ. It would seem that music could not get more earth-shaking. Yet Arnold Schönberg was simultaneously opening up a new system of harmony which, like the relativism of Albert Einstein, abolished all sense of stability.

  Macht alone, overwhelming political and armored might, could contain all these forces and perpetuate the Reich for who knew how many thousand years. Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son and heir, declared that it was the “holy duty” of his countrymen to hold themselves ready for a “conflagration” which would make the battle of 1813 seem but a first spark. “It is only by reliance on our brave sword that we shall be able to maintain that place in the sun which belongs to us, and which the world does not seem very willing to accord us.”

  If the prince’s language sounded unduly inflammatory, it was because he sensed a Prussian militarism developing in the very Volk that Germany’s oligarchy of princes and generals depended on to beat back, once and for all, the Eastern hordes. Although there was no denying the impressive depth and breadth of the Kultur that had made Germany the most powerful nation in the world, its society was paradoxically rife with socialism and “progressivism,” not to mention communism and anarchism. In last year’s general elections, the Social Democratic Party had won an astonishing third of the vote, and, with Catholic centrists and other anti-Prussian factions, now held the balance of power in the Reichstag.

  As a reaction to that victory, the Kaiser and his court of almost exclusively Prussian generals and landowners had forced upon the parliament the greatest troop buildup in German history. The army was now increased to well over three-quarters of a million men, with seventy-two-thousand called up this month alone. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Chancellor, argued that a record force was needed to prepare for the coming battle of “Slavdom against Germandom.” The Reichstag had reluctantly granted his wish, but was looking for an issue that would transform it at last into a parliament of public opinion, rather than a tame enacter of the imperial will.

  SERBIA YIELDED TO THE Austrian ultimatum. Its surly capitulation served only to accelerate Russia’s long-term program of rearmament and (what made the German Chancellor ever more apprehensive) raiload building, with most lines pointing west. Aross Europe, from Königsberg to Bordeaux and from Naples to Edinburgh and Christiania, fears of a multinational war sharpened into certainty. Georges Clemenceau, France’s former prime minister and its most eloquent Cassandra, had been railing since the spring against the pangermaniste monstrosity in Leipzig, and all it stood for. The German army bill, he wrote, made it “inevitable” that France must fight for her survival again—and soon. She was, after all, the ally of Russia. His warnings used so many words of common meaning on both sides of the Atlantic that they did not need translation. Germany was plotting a “fureur d’hégémonie dont l’explosion ébranlera tout le continent européen quelque jour.” Its ultimate aim was nothing less than “une politique d’extermination.”

  EARLY IN NOVEMBER there was a scuffle between two army recruits on a rifle range outside Zabern, in the Reichsland.

  In living French memory, Zabern had been Saverne, and the Reichsland known as Alsace-Lorraine. But the Ninety-ninth Prussian Infantry had been garrisoned in the town for twenty-five years. Restaurants served more beer than wine, and the Kaiser’s portrait hung in the offices of the civil authority.

  The fight on the range was broken up by Günter von Forstner, a twenty-year-old lieutenant. With members of his entire squad listening, he lectured the youths on the importance of proper behavior in a region where there was a racial difference between the conquerors and the conquered. It was especially important not to tangle with any “Wackes” downtown.

  Wacke, an almost untranslatable word connoting peasant or thickheaded inferiority, had as much force locally as nigger in the United States. Forstner went on to say that German soldiers had, nevertheless, the right to draw arms against this subspecies if shoved or insulted. “Should you kill one of them, so be it,” the lieutenant went on. “Behave right, and you’ll get ten marks from me, no one will blame you.”

  A sergeant standing at his elbow increased the offered bounty. “And me, I’ll give you three marks more.”

  They were indulging in what passed among Prussians as humor. But the citizens of Zabern were not amused when reports of Forstner’s words were published in two town newspapers. With repetition, the lieutenant’s language got stronger: “For every one of those dirty Wackes you cut down, I’ll pay you ten marks.” The story spread to Paris and Berlin.

  On 7 November, a public demonstration broke out in front of Forstner’s house on the main street in Zabern. Stones were thrown. Amid catcalls of “Dirty Prussian!” two toughs broke down the front door before being dispersed by police. Thereafter, Forstner was escorted everywhere by a security detail so preposterously armed that the curses thrown at him became death threats. Within twenty-four hours, officers of the entire regiment were rendered jittery by the gathering hostility. Colonel Adolf von Reuter, the garrison commander, was so provoked by shouts in the street, as he sat at dinner in the Carpe d’Or tavern, that he went out and ordered the crowd to disperse, in the tone of a man who expected to be obeyed. His pallor and flap ears succeeded only in stimulating a competition for creative insults: “Tête de macchabée!” “Espèce de lapin blanchi avant l’âge!”* The fury of the crowd grew till he and his fellow diners had to retreat to the barracks, pursued by hecklers screaming, “We are not Wackes!”

  Demonstrations followed almost daily, with cries of “Vive la France.” Colonel Reuter warned the municipal government that if it did not keep order, he would impose martial law. He then left for an undisclosed destination, pleading ill health. Lieutenant Forstner was overheard telling recruits, “As far as I am concerned, you can shit on the French flag.” This was too much for his superior officers, who disciplined him with six days’ house arrest. Police contained the situation until 17 November, when Reuter returned and announced that he did so “by order of his Majesty the Emperor and King.”

  By now, l’affaire Zabern had attracted the attention of international observers, who saw it as a showdown between German and French nationalism, more fraught with strategic implications than the scare over Serbia. Reporters and photographers from as far away as Bloomington, Indiana, poured into the little town. Demonstrations against the Ninety-ninth Regiment resumed. On 28 November, a huge crowd assembled in the square outside the barracks, as if miming the attack on the Bastille. Reuter finally lost patience. He sent sixty bayoneted troopers into the mob and arrested twenty-seven Alsatians, including three members of the Zabern judiciary. The offenders, judges and all, were thrown into jail overnight, and accounts of the incident telegraphed to Berlin.

  The anti-Prussian majority in the Reichstag was sufficiently alarmed to demand an explanation from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and his war minister, General Erich von Falkenhayn. When Bethmann-Hollweg rose in response on 3 December, the situation in Zabern had deteriorated further. Lieutenant Forstner, freed from house arrest, was accused of molesting a fourteen-year-old girl, and, for good measure, befouling the linen of a local hostelry. Enraged by shouts of “Bettscheisser,”* he had slashed one Alsatian across the face.

  The Chancellor, sounding old and weary, announced that the lieutenant was to be court-martialed. Citizens of the Reichsland would, he promised
, no longer be referred to as Wackes. On the other hand, they had no more right to complain about ethnic discrimination “than any other branch of our people.” He hedged his way through a defensive review of the situation, over roars of contempt from socialists and centrists. General Falkenhayn—every bit as bristling as his Austrian counterpart—followed with a speech praising Forstner as a young Prussian of the best military type. The majority needed no further excuse to move that Germany’s entire military government be censured.

  During the debate that followed, Bethmann-Hollweg tried to forestall what was in effect a vote of no confidence by offering to withdraw the ninety-ninth Regiment from Zabern. But his conciliatory gesture was ignored, and on the evening of 4 December the Reichstag demanded his resignation by a vote of 293 to 54.

  TO THE AMAZEMENT of democracies around the world, the Chancellor declined to step down. He stated that he served the Kaiser, and would continue in office, with Falkenhayn at his elbow, as long as His Majesty needed him. Court-martial proceedings against Reuter and Forstner were intitiated, but their ultimate acquittals, given Prussian solidarity, were not in doubt. Socialist demonstrations of rage and shame broke out in seventeen German cities, including Leipzig and Berlin. The government’s only reaction was to punish two army recruits for publicly confirming Forstner’s reported insults.

  By the end of 1913, l’affaire Zabern was yesterday’s news. But the oracular Georges Clemenceau remained under no illusion as to what tomorrow’s would be. In an editorial addressed to his peace-minded younger countrymen, he bade them hear (if they would not see) “the cannons on the other side of the Vosges,” and warned that the noise would soon be too loud to ignore.

  One day, at the fairest moment of blossoming hope, you will quit your parents, your wife, your children, everything you cherish, everything that holds your heart and fortifies it, and you will go forth, singing as you always have, yet a different song this time, with brothers (true brothers, they will be) to confront the ugly killer that mows down human lives in a veritable hurricane of steel.

  * Corpse-head! You prematurely whitened rabbit!

  * Bed-shitter.

  PART TWO

  1914–1919

  CHAPTER 15

  Expediçào Cíentifica Roosevelt-Rondon

  ’Twere better late than soon

  To go away and let the sun and moon

  And all the silly stars illuminate

  A place for creeping things,

  And all those that root and trumpet and have wings,

  And herd and ruminate,

  Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,

  Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees

  Hang screeching lewd victorious derision

  Of man’s immortal vision.

  ON THE FIRST DAY of 1914, Roosevelt got up before dawn to hunt tapir in the marsh country east of Corumbá, Brazil.

  For a week he had been cruising the headwaters of the upper Paraguay in a chartered side-wheeler, the Nioac. It was less grand than the presidential gunboat that had brought him up the big river, courtesy of the Paraguayan navy. But it was flat-bottomed enough to steam inland along such shallow tributaries as the Rio São Lourenço, where it now lay at anchor, a few kilometers above the inflow of the Cuyabá. Neither stream was easily distinguishable at present: Brazil’s rainy season had set in, and an annual flood was coursing down from the central divide, filling the vast sump of the flats to capacity.

  Knowing that he had a long wet day ahead of him, Roosevelt stoked himself with hardtack, ham, sardines, and coffee. Breakfast was his favorite meal, preferably including beefsteak or buttered hominy grits, and fruit with cream. When he got the chance, he could eat twelve fried eggs in a row. Over the last couple of years, he had become portly. His paunch did not compare with the world-class embonpoint of William Howard Taft, but he lacked Taft’s compensatory height. Edith was concerned enough to have persuaded him to do without lunch whenever possible. He joked to Ethel that the only result was to make him greedier at either end of the day.

  This morning he ate with more purpose than pleasure. He had come north from Patagonia intent on natural history and exploration. The trouble was, wealthy Brazilians ranching along the Paraguay still thought of him as a mighty hunter. They were slowing his ascent to Mato Grosso, the central wilderness, with elaborate shooting parties in his honor. (He had managed to beg off a “Roosevelt rodeo.”) The great fazendas of Las Palmeiras and São João, with hundreds of peons and well-stocked stables, had been placed at his disposal. He did not want to appear ungracious toward his hosts. They and their governmental colleagues in Rio de Janeiro—not to mention the similar elites of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile—had treated him so royally, and paid him such large lecture fees, that he had to conceal his impatience to be done with “state-traveling.” In any case, he felt obliged to collect, in behalf of the American Museum of Natural History, some of the large, water-loving mammals of southern Brazil, before proceeding north on his expedition proper.

  He had already shot a large female jaguar, fulfilling a dream he had confessed to Father Zahm five years before. Kermit (a bridge builder no longer, having signed on as his companion and interpreter) had bagged an even larger one, male, the next day. But that was the luck of youth. The earlier cat was at any rate a good specimen—probably the last dangerous game Roosevelt would ever pursue. In his fifty-sixth year, his interest in hunting was waning. He had not found jaguar meat as good to eat as the elephant heart that so satisfied him on Mount Kenya.

  All he wanted now was a tapir, and maybe a white-lipped peccary, to present to George Cherrie and Leo Miller for preservation. Then he would be free to embark on a inland journey quite different from the one he had originally planned—for that matter, the most antipodean contrast to his African safari imaginable. It was a Brazil-backed venture, focusing on geography rather than mammalogy or ornithology, called the “Expediçào Cíentifica Roosevelt-Rondon.”

  THE LAST NAME belonged to Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, a tiny man with a sun-bleached mustache, also preparing for today’s hunt. Roosevelt had met up with him only twenty days before, in a Livingstone-Stanley encounter downriver. The two colonels had bonded at once, with a mutual sense that fate had brought them together. Their common language was French, which each spoke as well, or as badly, as the other.

  Dr. Lauro Müller, Brazil’s courtly minister for foreign affairs, was the authority behind their joint mission. It had been he who, welcoming Roosevelt to Rio last October, had persuaded him to abandon Father Zahm’s idea of going down the Tapajoz and up into Venezuela. The Tapajoz was well mapped, and the dry, stony hills beyond were of little interest to anybody but collectors of cacti. Müller suggested that the American expedition might more profitably divert itself inland to Utiariti, the virtual center point of Brazil. From there, it could march eastward along the rim of the Amazonian drainage basin, to the threshold of—quem sabe?—thrilling discoveries.

  So deep a venture into Mato Grosso, passing through dangerous Indian country, would require the services of an expert guide. Happily, Müller knew an army engineer who hailed from that region and was part Indian himself. Cândido Rondon was not only “an officer and a gentleman,” but also “a hardy and competent explorer, a good field naturalist and scientific man, a student and a philosopher.” For years he had been on assignment for the national telegraphic commission, laying lines across some of the remotest parts of the Brazilian interior. In the course of his duties, which included surveying, he had made many findings of geographical and cartographical interest.

  One such, Müller said, was the source of a mysterious river on the high western slope of Mato Grosso. It was assumed to flow north, possibly into the Rio Madeira, a major tributary of the Amazon. If so, it might be more than a thousand kilometers long. Rondon could not guess any more than that, and had named it Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt.

  Perhaps Roosevelt would like to go down this river with him, for the mutua
l benefit of the American Museum and the Brazilian government, which was eager to develop the resources of Amazonas. There were vast stands of rubber trees in that province, but until all its rivers were mapped, it would be difficult for prospectors to stake valid claims. Perhaps, also, Roosevelt would advertise the open spaces of Mato Grosso as ideal for European settlement, as he had those of British East Africa in African Game Trails. In return, the two colonels could count on the support of a team of Brazilian army officers, all trained in field specialties, and as many camaradas—muleteers, porters, guards, and tent-raisers—as they needed to back up their descent of the Dúvida.

  Short of throwing in an unlimited supply of canned peaches, Roosevelt’s favorite dessert, Müller could not have more shrewdly sabotaged the itinerary Father Zahm had worked on for so long. His scheme was that of a master politician, whom many expected to be president of Brazil one day. It made sense at many levels, promising a rich harvest of specimens and topographical information, while increasing the commercial potential of Roosevelt’s book, and almost literally putting Mato Grosso on the map. (Müller dreamed of building a new capital city for Brazil there.) Strategically, too, the symbolism of a Brazilian-American expedition into Amazonas, quasi-military in character and headed by the former President of the United States, would be salutary at a time when expansionist imperialism was rampant in Europe. Brazil was a gigantic, not fully formed republic whose land borders had been defined only in the last ten years. Unless it assured itself of American protection, Müller could see a day when the Amazon basin might be co-opted as a free-passage, free-trade zone, like that of the Congo after the Treaty of Berlin.