Colonel Roosevelt (114 page)

Ted and Archie were already there, but they were not seeing any action. The Allies, concerned at the AEF’s greenness, had persuaded Pershing to dig his First Division into a relatively quiet sector of the Front, near Nancy. Ironically, it was Kermit, the last brother to be commissioned, who looked likely to taste battle first.
Belle had allowed him to proceed to Mesopotamia, where he was now on duty with the British army, and ranked as an “honorary” captain.

For Theodore Roosevelt, as his fifty-ninth birthday approached, the mere fact that all his sons were trained and ready for war was thrilling. He hung a huge service flag, with four stars on it, from the upper story of Sagamore Hill. In a letter to Ted, who had just turned thirty, he wrote, “You and your brothers are playing your parts in the greatest of the world’s great days, and what man of spirit does not envy you? You are having your crowded hours of glorious life; you have seized the great chance, as was seized by those who fought at Gettysburg, and Waterloo, and Agincourt, and Arbela and Marathon.”

AT THE BEGINNING OF
November, Russian troops defending imperial outposts in the Baltic yielded to Bolshevik calls that they lay down their arms and fraternize with the enemy. Kerensky’s provisional government, weakened by transport and railroad strikes, desperately ordered the Petrograd garrison to reinforce the Eastern Front. There was no response. Nor would troops outside the capital move to prevent Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s revolutionary detachments from seizing control of key communications, banking, and transport infrastructures. On the morning of the sixth, Lenin published a proclamation of “Soviet” government in Russia, undertaking to give all citizens communal ownership of land, control over industrial production, and freedom from war. Kerensky’s government took refuge in what used to be Nicholas II’s Winter Palace.

For forty hours, civilian, military, and naval forces besieged the gilded redoubt, threatening to destroy it if power was not transferred to the proletariat. By daybreak on 8 November, Lenin was the presumptive ruler of Russia. He was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars later in the day, and Trotsky became his commissar for foreign affairs. Their first joint action was to issue a decree of peace with Germany, pending negotiation of a formal armistice.

Coincidentally, Roosevelt had just finished writing a foreword to Herman Bernstein’s edition of
The Willy-Nicky Correspondence: Being the Secret and Intimate Telegrams Exchanged Between the Kaiser and the Tsar
. He said the telegrams not only illuminated the dark relationships of despots just before the war, but that they were prophetic in showing “
the folly of the men who
would have us believe that any permanent escape from anarchy in Russia can come from the re-establishment of the autocracy, which was itself the prime cause of that anarchy.”

IN THE MIDDLE
of the month, he suffered the most devastating review of his literary career. Stuart P. Sherman, chief book critic of
The Nation
, took advantage of the publication of
The Foes of Our Own Household
to speak out on behalf of all the antiwar mollycoddles Roosevelt had sought to emasculate over the years.
He argued that the Colonel had become a split personality because of his tendency to be “impressed with the two-sidedness of things.”
Foes
, consisting of twelve reprinted articles on domestic and foreign policy, was really two books, Sherman observed. “Just as one of them was written by a judicious, progressive, and patriotic Aristotelean, exactly in the same way the other was written by a willful, angry, and furiously inequitable extremist.” Roosevelt’s musings on social and political questions were “judicious, progressive … timely and weighty,” the thought of an eminently skilled polemicist. But when dealing with matters of defense and warfare, he perverted the words of past statesmen to suit his rhetorical purpose. “Any man who desires to believe that Washington and Lincoln saw eye to eye with Mr. Roosevelt,” Sherman remarked, “should give his days and nights to the study of
The Foes of Our Own Household;
but any man who desires to know what [they] actually thought and said had better go to the original documents.”

The critic was less effective in comparing Roosevelt’s executive philosophy to that of Wilhelm II, if only because Woodrow Wilson had also come to believe in strong central control, compulsory military service, national self-assertion, patriotism, and preparedness. But Sherman drew attention to the “pervasive and sustained ugliness” of the Colonel’s personal campaign against Wilson, and to his love of war for war’s sake. “Apparently he cannot contemplate with equanimity a future in which our children shall be deprived of the ‘glory’ of battle with their peers.”

For once, Roosevelt elected to let a pacifist berate him without reply. His silence implied, more than an attempt at self-defense would have, that he was beginning to doubt himself. He had entered his sixtieth year. An impotent old age was being forced on him, while Georges Clemenceau had been made prime minister of France at seventy-six. “
I have never regretted anything so much as the absence of the Roosevelt army, nor understood the reason for it,” his fellow Cassandra wrote him.

A bitter winter was settling in, with a national coal famine threatening, and obligatory fasts imposed upon all citizens by the President’s new food czar, Herbert Hoover.
Flora no longer offered youthful cheer. Quentin had inexplicably
stopped writing to her, and she exuded misery. Her visits became fewer, and in early December stopped altogether. Just before Christmas, subzero temperatures gripped Oyster Bay. Theodore and Edith found themselves so alone and cold that they closed off most of Sagamore Hill and tried to keep warm in just two or three west-facing rooms with wood-burning fireplaces. In blustery weather, the flag with four stars flapped loudly enough to disturb their sleep. Often they repeated to each other the lines of Edwin Arlington Robinson that most addressed their situation:
There is ruin and decay / In the House on the Hill: / They are all gone away, / There is nothing more to say
.

ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH
, who could be relied upon to be
au centre
of the gayest, most fashionable crowd on New Year’s Eve, was
partying with the Ned McLeans at their annual dance in Washington when the lights doused, signaling the approach of midnight. As the hour struck, a huge electric sign at the end of the ballroom blazed out in red, white, and blue:
GOOD LUCK TO THE ALLIES IN 1918
.

Her parents, at the same time, were trying to keep warm in one of the last big houses on Long Island that still relied on gaslight after dark. The northeastern weather that January was so arctic—colder than any ever recorded—that they decided to make their third great concession to modern times, after buying an automobile and paving the driveway.
The Colonel agreed to pay an electrical contractor something over $1,500 to wire his mansion. Unfortunately, the system promised only light, not warmth. But he would no longer have to strain his one good eye when he read, and the freezing hallways and bathrooms would at least look more welcoming.

Comforts, real or imagined, had to be seized upon in a season that offered little in the way of good news. Quentin’s long silence was disturbing. Even allowing
for the irregularity of military mail (with as much as four or five weeks needed for an exchange of letters), something had to be wrong with him. It was likely not serious, or his commanding officer—or Ted, or Archie, or Eleanor—would have cabled. Edith was so exasperated at his failure to reply to her letters that she refused to write any more until he became ashamed of himself.

Roosevelt felt Flora’s desolation enough to have sent Quentin a stern reproof: “
If you wish to lose her, continue to be an infrequent correspondent. If however you wish to keep her, write her letters—interesting letters, and love letters—at least three times a week. Write no matter how tired you are … write if you’re smashed up in a hospital; write when you are doing your most dangerous stunts; write when your work is most irksome and disheartening; write all the time!” He signed himself, “Affectionately, a hardened and wary old father.”

The strange thing was that Quentin was the most epistolary of his children, quick to pour out jokes, stray observations, confessions, even poems on paper. Not that the others were slack correspondents.
Ted and Dick Derby sent long letters through Eleanor, whose house in Paris functioned as a Rooseveltian hostel and information center. Kermit’s mail from Mesopotamia took many weeks to come, but could otherwise be relied on. Even taciturn Archie (due to become a father in six or seven weeks’ time) kept Grace fully briefed in Boston. His latest proud news was that he had been promoted to captain. Neither he nor Ted had much to say about Quentin, but being at the Front, that was not surprising. Or were they holding something back?

IF SO, THEY WERE AMATEURS
compared to Woodrow Wilson, preparing with fanatical secrecy to make yet another surprise appearance before Congress. He had sensed a misalignment among the war’s strategic blocks since the Bolshevik coup of last November, and especially after Russia’s negotiation of a provisional peace with Germany. Now, thanks to the transferal of 77 German divisions from the Eastern Front to the Western, the Central Powers were at last ascendant over the Anglo-French Entente, at 177 divisions to 173. And they could draw on a further 30 divisions in consequence of Austria’s epic defeat of the Italian army at Caporetto.
This imbalance would prevail until General Pershing’s army (still only four divisions strong, and untested in any major engagement) began to swell with a steady influx of stateside troops in the summer.