Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The message he brought was more than eight months old, and consisted of nothing more than one of the Kaiser’s typical protestations of esteem, updated to suit the current emergency. Papen obviously meant to take advantage of it by enlisting Roosevelt as a voice for the German cause. Bowing, he said that His Imperial Majesty had never forgotten how pleasurable it had been to entertain the Colonel four years before, “as a guest in Berlin and at the palace at Potsdam.” In view of these fond memories, Wilhelm “felt assured” that he could count on Roosevelt’s “sympathetic understanding of Germany’s position and action.”

  Roosevelt bowed back. He said that he too had never forgotten the royal way the Kaiser had treated him, “nor the way in which His Majesty King Albert of Belgium received me in Brussels.”

  Silence fell. Papen’s expression did not change. He clicked his heels, bowed again, and left the room without uttering another word.

  The visit only confirmed Roosevelt’s intent to support Wilson and Bryan as they pursued their policy of noninvolvement. He made his commitment clear in one of the occasional articles he now contributed to The Outlook: “In common with the immense majority of our fellow countrymen, I shall certainly stand by not only the public servants in control of the administration at Washington, but also all other public servants, no matter of what party, in this crisis; asking only that they with wisdom and good faith endeavor … to promote the cause of peace and justice throughout the world.”

  He commended an early offer by the President to act as a mediator in Europe, although evidence mounted daily in black headlines (swamping even, on 15 August, news of the inauguration of the Panama Canal) that the war was irreversible.

  The truth was, Wilson had no diplomatic qualifications. His only exposure to the outside world—unless Bermuda counted as a foreign power—had been gained on two or three vacations in Britain, visiting universities and bicycling through the Cumberland and Scotland of his ancestors. Roosevelt had gone on four grand tours of Europe and the Middle East before he was thirty, amassing an international circle of acquaintance that now extended from emperors down to his barefoot camaradas in Brazil. He could converse in three languages and read in four. He had been blessed by a Pope, honored by the mullahs of Al-Azhar, and asked to mediate an international war. He had heard Casals play Bach, confronted Cubism, and watched the gyrations of snake priests and Diaghilev’s dancers—not to mention the goose-steps of German troops at Döberitz. He had killed a man in battle and just four months before, on the shore of a river unknown to any cartographer, confronted death himself.

  These and maybe a thousand other aspects of wisdom were embodied in the retired statesman who found few journalists, that summer, interested in his views on any subject other than Progressive politics. Ray Stannard Baker visited him at Sagamore Hill and got the impression that Roosevelt was chafing in unaccustomed obscurity. “It must indeed be a cross for him not to keep on the front page!”

  THE PRESIDENT’S TENDENCY to talk in the abstract was demonstrated in his salute to the Panama Canal as a waterway that would permit “a commerce of intelligence, of thought, and sympathy” around the world, as if such things were dry goods. On 19 August, he formally called upon Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as in name.”

  But to the handful of his countrymen who were still in Brussels, the spectacle of the German army marching into town next day was so overwhelmingly physical as to negate philosophy. Richard Harding Davis of the New York Tribune had seen war before—in Cuba, where he had followed Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to Santiago—but he realized that the new technological century was going to make it infinitely more horrible.

  Belgium’s defense strategy, modeled on that of Russia against Napoleon in 1812, had been to leave the capital unprotected. By ten in the morning, all non-official citizens were off the streets and hidden behind shuttered windows. The first German to appear on the Boulevard de Waterloo was a captain on a bicycle, no more fearsome than Woodrow Wilson en vacance. He was followed by a pair of privates, also pedaling, their rifles casually slung. But right behind came such a gray mass of men and matériel, advancing row on row, hour after hour till sunset and beyond, that Davis was at first amazed, then numbed, then stupefied.

  Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman.…

  All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army. And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken.… This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller. And for three days and three nights through Brussels it roared and rumbled, a cataract of molten lead. The infantry marched singing, with their iron-shod boots beating out the time. They sang “Fatherland, My Fatherland.” Between each line of song they took three steps. At times two thousand men were singing together in absolute rhythm and beat. It was like the blows from giant pile-drivers. When the melody gave way the silence was broken only by the stamp of iron-clad boots, and then again the song rose.

  Davis was conscious mainly of sound: the rumble of howitzers and siege cannons, the jingling of machine guns, chains clanking on cobbles, sharp bugle calls, the squeal of ungreased axles and grinding of steel wheels on stone. To another American reporter, Will Irwin, what was more of an onslaught on the senses was “the smell of a half-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power. That smell lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed.”

  Neither reporter could quite express the sense each had that something entirely new and wholly frightening had been revealed to them, implicit in the gray colorlessness, the engineered sameness, the loud, crushing force of human aggression turned to science. There was not a noun for it yet, but if the young tribune of “Red Week” in Emilia-Romagna had his way, it would be coined from the Italian word fasci.

  COMPARISON OF THE developing war to a tornado, or cyclone, was so common among public figures that month that few of them noticed its precise applicability to Germany’s opening military maneuver. By curving up through Flanders and then around to encircle Paris, the plan—named after its designer, Count Alfred von Schlieffen—envisaged hitting the main French defense line from behind, in a whirl timed to last just forty-two days. Russia’s inadequate railroad system should delay any major offensive from beyond the Vistula for at least six weeks. France would have capitulated by then, so Germany could concentrate all its firepower in an eastern Hunnenschlacht that would settle the Slav problem forever.

  Roosevelt had been confidentially aware of the essentials of the Schlieffen Plan since 1911. The best that could be said of the tornado in action was that it was weaker than it might have been. General Moltke, the Kaiser’s chief of staff, had deflected the curve through Flanders and Luxembourg only, sparing Holland. At the same time, he was so nervous of a French reprisal in the Marne that he transferred a considerable amount of strength there. This slowed his advance in the north, where fierce resistance by the Belgians—buttressed by an expeditionary influx of seventy-five thousand British troops—cost him precious days.

  “If the Franco-British armies hold their own against the Germans,” Roosevelt wrote Arthur Lee, “whether they win a victory or whether the result is a draw, it is in my judgment all up with Germany.” Even if Moltke succeeded in conquering France, his forces, the Colonel thought, would be too “enfeebled” afterward to mount an effective defense against Russia. Nor could they expect much help from Austria, which had its own problems in the Balkans. Germany was faced, in short, with the prospect of being reduced to “international impotence” after forty-three years of unrestricted growth.

  The same prospect, mixed with panic, seemed to strike General Alexander von Klu
ck’s commanders on the road west of Liège. Their march was hampered by sabotage and the sniping of francs-tireurs, freelance sharpshooters with a maddening ability to remain invisible in flat terrain. The result, on 26 August, was a German bombardment of the ancient university town of Louvain that added new dimensions to Goethe’s warning, “The Prussian was born a brute and civilization will make him ferocious.” Flamethrowers set fire to street after street of private houses, and people who ran from them were rounded up—the men to be bayoneted, then shot, the women and children for imprisonment in concentration camps. “Big Bertha,” a cannon so huge it had to be dragged by thirty-four horses, reduced churches and dormitories to flints. One of the world’s richest medieval libraries was burned to the stone. By dark, the seat of six hundred years of learning had become a huge hearth. Richard Harding Davis was there to record a modern Gotterdämmerung:

  It was all like a scene upon a stage, unreal, inhuman. You felt that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark ruins came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children.

  DISPATCHES CONFIRMING THE destruction and evacuation of Louvain reached the United States on 28 August and caused the first wave of anti-German revulsion to spread across the country. The imperial embassy in Washington stated without apology that the Belgian city had been “punished” for “a perfidious attack” by civilians upon the soldiers of the Reich.

  Woodrow Wilson remained silent.

  No American soul was more tried than Theodore Roosevelt’s. “I am an ex-President,” he apologized to Arthur Lee, “and my public attitude must be one of entire impartiality.” Criticism by him of Wilson’s foreign policy would be seized on by Democrats as a campaign issue in the fall congressional elections. What had happened in Belgium enraged him, but for as long as the war did not threaten the United States in its own hemisphere, patriotism required that he address himself only to domestic issues.

  That did not stop Roosevelt from doing a little private lobbying on the subject of “preparedness,” a word that had begun to dominate his vocabulary. “If you have any influence with the President,” he wrote a Harvard classmate close to Colonel House, “I wish you would get him to assemble the fleet and put it in first-class fighting order, and to get the army up to the highest pitch at which it can now be put. No one can tell what this war will bring forth.”

  If you have any influence with the President. Phrases like that, dictated through his teeth, betrayed his political impotence now that Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches of government. All he could do about it was to help as many Progressives and moderate Republicans as possible get elected in November. Bracing himself for more of the speaking tours he had sworn to renounce, he tried to see as much as possible of his children and grandchildren.

  An unexpected feature of the summer had been postponement of Kermit’s departure for South America. Belle had fallen ill with a mild case of typhoid, and took her time recuperating. In the resultant flutter of home care and doctoral visits, deeply satisfying to the female Roosevelts, she and Edith had at last bonded. Ethel and Dick and little Richard also clustered around. Roosevelt wrote Emily Carow to say how much he liked having the old house full of young people. “Ted and Eleanor frequently motor over with their two babies. Gracie is the dearest small soul you ever saw and my heart is like water before her.”

  IN A CRESCENDO of carnage, Germany and France took out on each other the accumulated antipathy of four decades. By early September, clashing mainly in Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes, they had together lost more than a quarter-million men. The almost unbelievable death toll came from two new forms of firepower—the horizontal “hail” of machine guns and the vertical destruction inflicted by cannons capable of lobbing twenty shells a minute—that mocked the pretensions of cavalry regiments still prancing around with swords and lances. Airplanes patrolling the unsettled front (not yet realizing that they might effectively exchange pistol shots) looked down on skirmishes reduced, by altitude, to the comings and goings of insect colonies.

  Roosevelt, working at Sagamore Hill on the preface to his new book, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, had seen it all before. “The fire-ants [of Mato Grosso do Sul] bend the whole body as they bite.… These fighting ants, including the soldiers even among the termites, are frantically eager for a success which generally means their annihilation.”

  Elsewhere in Brazil, and throughout his own life, he had noted the compulsion of predators to exterminate both “types and individuals.” This war was too enormous for individuals to matter, or even be registered before they were blown to bits. But it was clear that certain types were marked for extinction: not just the prancing cavalry officers but generals who could not adapt to mechanized slaughter (Joseph Joffre, the French chief of staff, had already replaced more than fifty), and the emperors in whose name the individuals fought.

  Perhaps the type most feared by the emperors, for as long as they clung to their crowns, was the socialist with his red flag and ominously universal hymn:

  Masses, slaves, arise, arise,

  The world must shift its base,

  We are not nothing in men’s eyes.

  This is the fraught finale—

  Together and forever

  The Internationale

  Shall be the human race!

  The government of every nation currently at war—even Serbia, even republican France—feared socialism and its derivative doctrines, communism and anarchism, as more perilous to the stability of the state than alien armies. In Germany, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg deluded himself if he thought that the war would ingratiate Prussians with the proletariat. France’s first martyr of the war had been the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, assassinated by a paranoid right-winger. Britain had postponed, rather than averted class war by joining in; Russia was ripe for revolution; Austria had a large Marxist minority; even “poor little Belgium,” as members of the Entente had taken to calling it, was a socialist hothouse, overpopulated and harshly governed by the ruling elite.

  One Western power alone, in the late summer of 1914, stood secure, able by virtue of its enormous size, constitutional freedoms, and industrial capacity to determine the outcome of the war. But that potential was, for the time being, moot. Its president was so numb with personal grief that he could concentrate only on the driest details of domestic policy: tariff tinkerings, farm loan refinance, updated definitions of antitrust practices, a federal trade commission act. When Wilson thought about foreign policy at all, he brooded over the still-unsettled situation in Mexico. He listened sympathetically to the plaints of European ambassadors, and proclaimed a national day of prayer for peace in October, when it would benefit his party in the fall elections. But he lacked the international stature—and more important, he could not summon up the moral energy—to do what Roosevelt had done in 1905, and coax the belligerents to the negotiating table. In any case, none except Belgium was ready to accept mediation. “I gather,” Cecil Spring Rice wrote, “that when you intervened in the Russo-Japanese conflict you had conclusive evidence that your aid was wanted.”

  The war ministers, sea lords, and commanders who now largely governed Europe were persuaded by the war’s extreme violence that it would be short, or, if not, long enough for a desirable number of revolutionaries to be killed.

  BEFORE ROOSEVELT LEFT New York on 5 September on a campaign trip to Louisiana, he assured nervous Progressives that he would not make an issue of Wilson’s pacifism. An enormous number of voters were of German ancestry and supported the Reich, while those sympathetic to Britain and her allies were not so passionate that they wanted to end American neutrality.

  Returning to the hustings afflicted him with an ennui he could not conceal. “He is m
ost pessimistic,” Cal O’Laughlin noted after meeting up with him in Baltimore. “He says his usefulness in public life is at an end and that any cause he supports is foredoomed.… He believes the country is reactionary.… I encouraged him as greatly as I could, but he has the blues.” Only when their conversation switched to the war did the Colonel show any animation. Neutrality, he argued, was no guarantee of security. The United States should at once train half a million men to defend itself. Germany could not be allowed to win, but neither should it be broken up in defeat. After the war, Roosevelt said, “there should be three great peoples—the Slavs, the Germans, and the English.” He was negative about France, which he felt was on the way to becoming “a second class nation,” due to “her failure to increase her birth rate.”

  He had cause to rethink these words after returning home to the news that General Joffre’s troops in the Marne, aided by the tiny British Expeditionary Force, had held a line extending from the environs of Paris to Verdun. The Germans had been forced into retreat, and were now entrenching themselves beyond the Aisne. Joffre was a hero and Moltke disgraced. The slaughter had been terrible on all sides. France estimated its losses at 250,000 men, Britain at 12,733. Germany declined to release any figures at all, but the litter of gray-clad bodies on French soil gave full weight to Clemenceau’s phrase ouragan de fer, a hurricane of steel.