Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

After the Japanese bowed their way out, bearing copies of the speech exquisitely calligraphed on rice paper, Trubee Davison took Roosevelt aside and asked, “What hope have you for Quentin?”

  Roosevelt reached into his pocket. “Trubee, just twenty minutes before you arrived, I received this telegram from President Wilson.”

  The telegram confirmed that Quentin had been killed in action. His death had been certified by German military authorities and broadcast by the Wolfe press agency in Berlin. A handwritten translation of the dispatch was brought to the Roosevelts later in the day:

  On Saturday July 14th an American squadron comprising of 12 planes tried to break the German defense over the Marne. In a violent combat one American aviator stubbornly made repeated attacks. This culminated in a duel between him and a German non Commissioned officer who after a short fight succeeded in getting a good aim at his brave but inexperienced opponent whose machine fell after a few shots near the village of Chamery 10 kilometers north of the Marne.

  His pocket case showed him to be Lieut. Quentin Roosevelt of the Aviation section of the U.S.A. The personal belongings of the fallen airman are being carefully kept with a view of sending them later to his relatives.

  The earthly remains of the brave young airman were buried with military honors by the German airmen near where he fell.

  * “The good Lord only had ten.”

  * Courtly in manner, courageous in action.

  * A family friend was visiting.

  CHAPTER 28

  Sixty

  Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,

  Ye that have eyes for all man’s agony,

  Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen,—

  Look with a just regard,

  And with an even grace,

  Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,

  Here on a suffering world where men grow old,

  And wander like sad shadows till, at last,

  Out of the flare of life,

  Out of the whirl of years,

  Into the mist they go,

  Into the mist of death.

  WHEN AMERICAN FORCES ADVANCED through the tiny village of Chamery, in the Marne province of France, they came upon a cross-shaped fragment of a Nieuport fighter sticking out of a field just east of the road to Coulonges. Some German soldier had taken a knife and scratched on it the word ROOSEVELT. It marked Quentin’s grave, and a few yards away the rest of his plane lay wrecked. By the time the last troops passed on toward Reims, nothing was left except the cross. All other bits of the Nieuport had been reverently stolen.

  The autopsy performed by the Germans before Quentin’s burial indicated that he had been killed before he crashed. Two bullets had passed through his brain. He had been thrown out on impact, and photographed where he fell.

  WOODROW WILSON’S TELEGRAM of Saturday, 20 July 1918 (“Am greatly distressed that your son’s death is confirmed. I had hoped for other news”), was not the last blow to strike the Roosevelts that weekend. It was followed within hours by a cable from Eleanor stating that Ted had been hurt in action. She said his wound was not serious. But she had also been reassuring about Quentin.

  Ted was a casualty of the counteroffensive headlined in forty-two-point type across the top of Sunday morning’s front page of The New York Times: ALL GERMANS PUSHED BACK OVER THE MARNE; ALLIES GAIN THREE MILES SOUTH OF SOISSONS; NOW HOLD 20,000 PRISONERS AND 400 GUNS. Under such a banner, the story about him (“Oldest Roosevelt Son Is Wounded: News of Theodore’s Injury Comes on Heels of Confirmation of Quentin’s Death”) drew the eye much more than another given exactly the same columnar weight: “Ex-Tsar of Russia Killed by Order of Ural Soviet.”

  Theodore and Edith therefore had an added reason to attend early mass and adjust, or try to adjust, to the enormity of the void that had opened so suddenly in their landscape. But they had to brace for a special order of service. That Sunday happened to be the third of the month, when the names of all parish members serving the country were read out. Quentin’s was not included. He was the first citizen of Oyster Bay to be killed in the war.

  They returned home in luxurious sunshine to receive what promised to be an unendurable number of condolence calls. One, late in the afternoon, was from Flora. She was, in Ethel’s words, “perfectly wonderful … calm and controlled.” A less sentimental person might have perceived that the girl was in a state of near catatonia, so stiff with shock that she could neither think nor feel. Flora wanted to be alone, but irrationally wanted to share her solitude with those equally bereft—the Colonel above all. As he received mourners and endured their attempts at comfort, he gave no sign of desolation, emanating only what Corinne called an “ineffable gentleness.”

  Quentin had died so young, without building an adult life away from home, that Sagamore Hill was still infused with his personality. Edith, better equipped to handle the catastrophe than her husband, saw that what was needed for them all was to get away from the house. She said to Ethel, “Why not come to Islesboro to see you?” Theodore had never visited that part of Maine, where the Derby family had summered for decades. Its strangeness alone would be a distraction. Little Richard and tiny “Edie” would be there to administer innocent therapy, and Flora could come too, if she felt like it.

  Ethel went north at once to prepare to receive them. Behind her she left details of the itinerary they were to follow on Thursday. They must take an overnight Pullman from New York to Rockland, then transfer to a small steamer that would deposit them on the south end of Islesboro, at a place called Dark Harbor.

  THE LANDING DID NOT at first sight justify its depressing name, being an inlet full of morning light. But the gray and brown-shingled “cottages” of New England patriarchs looming through stands of pine, hump-roofed and dormered above their rubblestone terraces, did their best to uglify the shoreline and camouflage the fortunes that secluded Dark Harbor from poorer parts of Islesboro. If Ethel had hesitated to marry, she had at least married well. This year she was staying not in the big Derby house, with its black timbers and prisonlike Norman tower, but in a smaller cottage owned by a Wall Street accountant. It surveyed Penobscot Bay from the top of a knoll and had the virtue of a breezy piazza sheltered from the afternoon sun. Importantly for Roosevelt, who liked to keep mobile even when reading, there was a rocking chair on the porch, and a rowboat at the foot of some granite steps cut down to the sea.

  He and Edith arrived on Friday unannounced, but an islander at the dock recognized them and called out, “Three cheers for the man who ought to be in France.” Ethel was waiting to greet her parents. As they rode off in a buggy—Islesboro permitted no automobiles—the Colonel was seen to be already deep in conversation with Richard and Edie.

  “In time of trouble, the unconsciousness of children is often a great comfort,” he wrote Belle later.

  That was even more so for Edith than for himself. Although she had to be, in her own expression, the central card upon which the rest of the Roosevelt pack leaned, her pain was unassuageable. She could not indulge, as Theodore did, in conventional pieties about Quentin dying “as the heroes of old died, as brave and fearless men must die when a great cause calls”—words that betrayed his inability, so far, to grasp his own responsibility in the matter. For Archie, born to fight and be wounded and fight again, Edith was capable of smashing a triumphal glass to the floor; for Quentin, constituted differently, she made a gesture more womanly than melodramatic. She said she would not wear black for him. White summer linen better expressed his obliteration.

  There was blackness enough, in and around Dark Harbor, to reflect her husband’s grief and guilt over the next two weeks. He often rowed out alone, past coal-black rocks and pebble beaches blackening as the tide washed in. Great piles of blue-black clamshells along the shore memorialized the island’s vanished Indians. Black-headed loons yodeled. He wrote Kermit that from out in the bay, “I can see the moose, caribou and black bear in the glades or by the pools—ghosts all!”

>   Nevertheless, the place was purifying, with its salt- and balsam-scented breezes and lack of mainland noise. Pious Ethel conducted household prayers every night. Except for a patriotic address that Roosevelt felt he had to give one Sunday at the Islesboro Inn, he and Edith were left undisturbed. An almost mute Flora came north on 6 August to be with them for their last four days. She confided to Ethel that she seemed incapable of feeling anything “except occasionally a great overpowering hurt.”

  “It is no use pretending that Quentin’s death is not very terrible,” Roosevelt wrote Belle on the eve of their departure from the island. “There is nothing to comfort Flora at the moment; but she is young.… As for Mother, her heart will ache for Quentin until she dies.”

  THEY WERE ALL BRACING for the delivery of a trunk of personal effects that Ham Coolidge had promised Quentin he would send to Sagamore Hill, in the event of it becoming surplus equipment.

  It arrived, packed by Ham but also reflecting, in the orderliness of its contents (such as a sheaf of Flora’s letters, neatly numbered and tied) Quentin’s integrated personality. The mechanic in him had enjoyed fitting things together, in sequences that made for power or taut structure. Even his poems were balanced, their meter meticulous, their rhyme schemes sometimes complex—abcccb, adcccd—but logical.

  As Edith and Flora undertook the task of going through these leavings of a life, Roosevelt and Miss Stricker tried to extract, from an inpouring of condolence letters and newspaper tributes, some sense of the man Quentin had become during the year he had spent in France. The most informative testimony came from fellow aviators, who wrote that he was a reincarnation of his father—specifically, the young “Teedie” who had so enlivened the Harvard class of 1880. Emerging from their reminiscences was a jovial, toothy, myopic, often wildly exuberant youth, garrulous and gregarious, courtly toward women, with a habit of bursting into rooms and attracting instant attention.

  There was little evidence, however, of the personal momentum that had always characterized the Colonel. Quentin’s energy had been explosive rather than propulsive. And often he had suffered the drag of depression—a “black gloom” that he could not hide from Ham Coolidge, and freely confessed to Flora. It was more chronic than the rare attacks of melancholy that Roosevelt had no trouble surmounting. As Edith had long ago remarked, Quentin was “a complex sort of person,” with a tendency to “smoulder.”

  Only in two respects had he ever approached fulfillment: as a boy born to fly, and as Flora’s lover. Test-piloting a French Spad, he wrote that he had felt “part of the machine,” as if it were an extension of his own body. “It asks you for what it wants.… If it gets a puff under a wing and wants an aileron to take care of it, you can feel it in the pressure of the stick.… Same with the flippers.” His last 120 h.p. Nieuport had been just as responsive: “You can climb at the most astonishing rate,—& do perfectly wicked chandelles.”*

  So Quentin had written Flora, confident she would share his delight, even if she wondered what candles had to do with it. As he was part of his plane, she was part of him. “The months that have gone, instead of blurring, have etched you deeper and deeper into my heart.”

  The most consolation she could give herself was to say, numbly, “His back will never hurt him now.”

  IN HIS OXFORD LECTURE on biological analogies in history, Roosevelt had spoken of the tertiary period, wherein “form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of development and death.” He was now in his own such transition, moving into a precipitous decline that was as much disillusionment as grief. Only twice before had he suffered as much—at nineteen, when his father died, and at twenty-four, when the loss of his first wife and mother, in the same house on the same night, had almost unhinged him. But then he had been young and full of growth. Neither catastrophe had taught him anything about himself except that he was strong enough to survive.

  The death of Quentin, in contrast, hit him after a spring in which he had himself nearly died, and toward the end of a decade that he had always said would be his last. Archie’s narrow escape and Ted’s gassing had prepared him for worse news from the Front, but the tension inherent in such anticipation had, paradoxically, weakened him, the longer he braced himself. Roosevelt had little physical resilience any more. Cuban and Amazonian pathogens were rampant in his system, which had been further battered by erysipelas and a recent attack of ptomaine poisoning.

  But what made this loss so devastating to him was the truth it conveyed: that death in battle was no more glamorous than death in an abattoir. Under some much-trodden turf in France, Quentin lay as cold as a steer fallen off a hook. Look now, in your ignorance, on the face of death, the boy had written in one of his attempts at fiction. The words seemed to admonish a father who had always romanticized war.

  “There is no use writing about Quentin,” Roosevelt told Edith Wharton, “for I should break down if I tried.” But by the end of August he had steeled himself enough to write a generalized eulogy for all the Quentins fallen and still falling in Europe:

  Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure.… Never yet was a country worth dying for unless its sons and daughters thought of life as something concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual, but as a link in the great chain of creation and causation, so that each person is seen in his true relations as an essential part of the whole, whose life must be made to serve the larger and continuing life of the whole.

  After this magnificent beginning, his tribute degenerated into an embarrassing argument that the bed and battleground were equal fields of honor. Prowess on each was necessary to militate against race suicide. Straining for eloquence, Roosevelt sank to a level of bathos more suited to the death of Little Nell. He went on at length about dark drinks proffered by the Death Angel, and girls whose boy-lovers were struck down in their golden mornings. But the hackneyed images did not work. Theodore Roosevelt was just another bereaved father unable to say what he felt. Much more expressive were the words he was heard sobbing in the stable at Sagamore Hill, with his face buried in the mane of his son’s pony: “Poor Quentyquee!”

  “LOOK NOW, IN YOUR IGNORANCE, ON THE FACE OF DEATH.”

  Quentin photographed by the Germans in front of his crashed plane. (photo credit i28.1)

  WHEN THE ARMY offered to exhume and repatriate Quentin’s body, the Roosevelts declined. “We greatly prefer that Quentin shall continue to lie on the spot where he fell in battle, and where the foemen buried him,” the Colonel wrote. He had heard from Pershing that the crash site had become a shrine for passing troops. “After the war is over, Mrs. Roosevelt and I intend to visit the grave, and then to have a small stone put up … not disturbing what has already been erected in his memory by his French and American comrades in arms.”

  In another gesture of sympathy, a Congressional commission released the Nobel Peace Prize money—$45,483 in cash and liquidated securities—that Roosevelt had been trying to get back for years. He was perversely pleased that the fund’s trustees had never been able to agree how to spend it, because he now had his own ideas for its disbursal. Every cent would go to war-related charities, or individuals and organizations planning to improve social conditions in the postwar world. His list of major recipients included the American, Japanese, and Italian Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Jewish Welfare Board, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., now working in the Y.M.C.A. in France,” Herbert Hoover, for use in Belgian war relief, a hospitality council for “colored troops [and] colored women and girls in and about the camps and cantonments,” and Maria Bochkareva of the Women’s Death Battalion, “as a token of my respect for those Russians who have refused to follow the Bolshevists in their betrayal to Germany of Russia, of the Allies, and of the cause of liberty through the world.” He allocated small, but attention-getting amou
nts to ethnic groups persecuted or fighting for freedom against autocracies—Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and Assyrian Christians. In something of a first for a former president, he promised to allocate “further sums of money from my royalties on certain scenarios of motion pictures.”

  One of the movies he had in mind was to be a McClure Productions six-reeler entitled The Fighting Roosevelts, starring three different actors as himself in boyhood, youth, and maturity. The draft script called for a dramatic final climax, with one of his sons dying on the Western Front—an ending that could obviously be reshot, should any more of them fall.

  On 4 September, Archie, transferred back to the United States for advanced therapy on his paralyzed left arm, returned limping to Sagamore Hill. The splendor of his blue and gold sleeve stripes, denoting a year’s service at the Front, in no way impressed Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., whom Grace had rushed down from Boston to show to him. Little Archie was only five months old, so both father and son were strangers. They eyed each other with a mutual lack of interest, while the rest of the family party tried to adjust to “Big” Archie’s worryingly limp arm. Two operations in Paris had failed to reconnect the severed main nerve well enough to restore full mobility.

  Archie had become skeletal during his long convalescence. His hollow cheeks drew back from protruding teeth, and he wore a new, habitual frown. He admitted to be suffering from a “bad case of nerves.” Even if doctors at the Columbia Base Hospital in the Bronx—who had granted him only temporary home leave—were successful in fixing his arm and digging the shrapnel out of his leg, they had warned him he might not be able to rejoin Ted’s regiment for another eight months. Which was all Archie wanted to do. Like many soldiers who had seen the worst of the war, he had become addicted to it.