Colonel Roosevelt (113 page)

QUENTIN DID NOT
remain in Paris more than forty-eight hours. He was dispatched to Issoudun, in central France, where a huge American aviation instruction center was being built in a quagmire of Auvergnois mud. To his chagrin, it was far from the
zone des armées
where Ted and Archie were girding for battle.

“
I confess I’m sorry,” he wrote Flora, “for I wanted to get started flying and have it over with, I know my back wouldn’t last for very long.”

He doubted that he would get into the air for another two months, so preliminary and bureaucratic was all the organization of the base. It was possible he might not be assigned to the Front until next spring. Remote as Issoudun was, he had already seen enough of the war’s effects in Paris (streets and cafés strangely quiet and lacking in laughter, haunted-looking women in black, a gas-blinded boy his age being helped along) to understand its “
appalling reality,” and how serious was the challenge of “driving the Boche back.” He could feel the wall of German expansionism pressing on France like a tectonic plate. Until the Allies were reinforced by America’s draft army, “no amount of talk,
of airplane fleets that loom large only in the minds of newspapermen,” would relieve the pressure.

Quentin felt changed by his translocation from a life of promise to a life of threat. “
The thing that it brings home the most is the greatness of the responsibility,” he told Flora, “—and the fact that it has got to be fought to a decision. For if there is no decision, we will go through it all again in fifteen years. That would be about the time we had settled down.”

In more cheerful letters he reported being absorbed in mechanical work, as supply officer in charge of a fleet of fifty-two trucks. Since he had an easy command of French, he was also constantly
called on to interpret between American and local officials, and mediate when quarrels broke out—a task that suited his genial personality. He had taken to smoking a pipe, and made friends with a wealthy French family, the Normants, who had a riverside château nearby at Romorantin.

Flora registered the presence of a daughter about her own age
chez
Normant. But the tone of Quentin’s last August letter, written under a full moon, was reassuring: “
Ah, dearest, if I have to pay the price of war, yet I am happy, in that earth has no higher blessing than the knowledge of a love that fills one’s heart and soul.”

AMONG THE LUCRATIVE
speaking and writing opportunities that the Colonel had mentioned to Ted was an invitation to write war commentary for the
Kansas City Star
, one of the most admired newspapers in the country. It paid $25,000 a year. He accepted, liking both the quickness of newspaper publication and the chance to address himself, once again, to a Midwestern readership. War spirit was lacking in many areas of the breadbasket states. At the same time, Harry Whitney (aware, at last, of Flora’s engagement to Quentin) offered a new, nonexclusive contract at the
Metropolitan
. It would pay him $5,000 for a “short monthly editorial” in the magazine, on whatever subject caught his attention. Roosevelt accepted that too, and in the third week of September, set off with Edith to meet with the
Star
’s editorial team in Missouri.

It was therapeutic for them both to get away. Edith found herself constantly imagining the sound of Quentin’s step on the piazza at Sagamore Hill, as if he were about to show up for dinner. Then she would hear the real sound of Flora’s. Every appearance of the girl, however welcome, was a reminder that Quentin and she might never have what Roosevelt delicately called “their white hour.” To that end, he had suggested to Flora that he should try to use his influence to get her over to France, so she could marry Quentin before the Air Corps was ready for frontline deployment. The Whitneys were resignedly agreeable, and Flora had written to see what Quentin thought about the idea. Everybody awaited his reaction.

No less a bandmaster than Lieutenant Commander John Philip Sousa, USN, conducting a two-hundred-piece ensemble, welcomed the Roosevelts to Kansas City with a performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The lovely town rippled with flags and ghastly portraits of the Colonel. Ten thousand citizens cheered his way to the newspaper office, a magnificent Italianate brick pile by Jarvis Hunt. Although Roosevelt was not required to contribute
any articles before October, he wrote a couple before lunch. They observed only the third of the
Star
’s famous style rules (“Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English”), and they were penned on manuscript paper, front and back, to the distress of the production department. His copy editor was tolerant, but the rules were applied to good effect on the prose of the paper’s next recruit, the cub reporter Ernest Hemingway.

“I
T WAS THERAPEUTIC FOR THEM BOTH TO GET AWAY
.”
Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, 1917
.
(photo credit i26.1)

The Roosevelts moved on to Chicago, where on 26 September the Colonel gave a speech for the National Security League, assailing Senator La Follette and other pacifists as “old women of both sexes.” He noticed soldiers among his segregated audience and said he would give anything to go to war with them. “I greet you as comrades, you with the white faces and you with the black faces.” In a separate address at Camp Grant, he sarcastically complimented the troops in training on having one rifle for every three men, saying that he had seen camps on Long Island where recruits were still drilling with broomsticks. A spokesman for the War Department promised that there would be guns aplenty when America’s new army was ready to go overseas.

Edith became concerned about her husband’s psychological and physical condition as she accompanied him to several more speaking engagements in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. “He is in good spirits with his head up,” she wrote Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, “but at times the horrid futility of beating the air comes upon him in a great wave.” On occasion he publicly allowed his gloom to show, and said that he felt “blackballed” by the Wilson administration. He was graying faster now, his mustache almost white, his belly and buttocks massive. Energy still animated his speeches, but it came in sporadic bursts, as from a fading battery.

Other women besides Edith—the novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ida Tarbell, and Josephine Stricker, his new secretary—noticed how quickly the Colonel had deteriorated. He was prone to irrational rages. Back in New York at the beginning of October, he showed such fatigue in an appearance at Madison Square Garden that Edith sentenced him to two weeks at Jack Cooper’s Health Farm, outside Stamford, Connecticut.

He reported there on the tenth, and found himself the camp’s only patient. Arrangements had been made to keep his treatment private. “
The household enthralls me,” he wrote Eleanor. “The men are professional athletes, touching the underworld on one side, and gilded youth and frayed gilded age on the other.” Jack Cooper was “an old-time skin-glove fighter [and] intimate friend of noted criminals and millionaires.” His partner was another retired pugilist, whose only reading seemed to be
YMCA Weekly
. An Irish domestic and a dismayingly fat Hungarian cook made up the rest of the establishment.

Cooper examined Roosevelt and told him that he was hypertense and thirty-five pounds overweight. “
What’s the matter, Colonel?”

“Well, I feel myself slipping a bit both mentally and physically. I’m an abnormal eater and I can’t see how you’re going to do much good … but I’m told you can.”

Cooper said that he could continue to eat as much as he liked, providing he consented to a daily routine of long hikes, gym exercise, massage, and sessions on something called “the Reducycle.” Roosevelt was agreeable. For the next ten days, until he could stand the monotony no longer, he obeyed every house rule—even breaking his lifetime habit of dressing for dinner.

The Reducycle, a machine of Cooper’s own invention, was designed to cause prodigious sweating. Roosevelt had to pump its pedals for twenty-five minutes every morning, while steam nozzles enveloped him in a miasma of humid heat. He lost up to two pounds per session. Cooper monitored his heart and lungs, which performed satisfactorily.

On 22 October, the Colonel returned to Sagamore Hill, looking much thinner but exhausted. “
Cooper’s not a success,” Edith wrote in her diary.

FLORA RECEIVED A
chilling rejection from Quentin. He wrote that he dreaded “temporarily” marrying her, only to be killed a month later, or becoming one of the war’s many paraplegics, “a useless chain to which you were tied.” In a follow-up letter, he changed his mind and asked what she thought of a wedding in Paris next summer, when he should have completed his term of duty at the Front and would be eligible, with luck, for some leave.

He wrote that he was back to flying practice and enjoying it, although cramped hours in the cockpit of a little French Nieuport, at freezing high altitudes, badly bothered his back. “
I don’t see how the angels stand it.” He also liked the male comradeship of camp, but referred often to a dull longing for Flora that would not go away.

She felt the same. “Oh, Quentin … I want you so desperately & the hollow, blank feeling that is a living nightmare almost kills me at times.” His letters came irregularly, sometimes one a day, sometimes none for a week. Their datelines indicated that the fault was not always due to shipping delays. Like Flora, Quentin was easily cast down.
He confessed to her that all he saw ahead was “endless gray vistas of war.” His engineer’s nature, loving coordination, was outraged by the reshufflings and reversals that kept the Aviation Service in a perpetual state of organizational flux. At any given moment he was truck officer, groundskeeper, pilot, purchasing agent in Paris, or recalled to Issoudun to fly again. About his only certainty was that he would, eventually, be put into service as a “fighter up in the ceiling,” not as “a bomb dropper.” His commander had promised him that, but warned that he would not be sent forward to the line for at least three months.