Colonel Roosevelt (12 page)

Carnegie, disgusted, gave up all faith that the Colonel would serve as his personal peace envoy at Potsdam. “
There’s a trace of the savage,” he wrote, “in that original compound.”

THE NEXT ROYAL PERSON
to greet Roosevelt, at Stockholm’s Central Station early on the morning of 7 May, was Crown Prince William. He had news that threw into disarray all the future plans and protocol Lawrence Abbott had been working on. King Edward VII had died of pneumonia during the night.

Coughing and feverish himself, Roosevelt was relieved to have an excuse to shorten his stay in Sweden. Five weeks of being the most famous man in the world had been enough for him. He was happy to cede his title to a corpse, and did not care if he never stayed in another palace with European plumbing.

He sent a telegram to Berlin, asking if the Kaiser—King Edward’s nephew—might “in view of the circumstances” like to withdraw his gracious offer of accommodations in the Royal Castle. Word came back that the German court had gone into official mourning. His Majesty, however, looked forward to entertaining Colonel Roosevelt privately, and to riding with him at the military exercises in Döberitz Field. After that, Wilhelm would leave for Great Britain, to attend the royal funeral. So would almost every other head of state and government leader on the Continent. The exact date of the ceremony
would not be announced for several days. Only then could Roosevelt decide what to do about his own British engagements.

Meanwhile, there hung in the sky over Europe, fading slightly in the light of dawn, the immense apparition of Halley’s Comet.
It had shone with peculiar radiance in the small hours just after Edward died.

THE FIRST THING
Roosevelt noticed, when his train reentered Germany on Monday, 9 May 1910, was the smallness of the crowds at every railway station. Some depots offered no welcome at all. Throughout every country he had traversed so far, he had been greeted “not as a king, but as something more than a king”—to quote one reporter in his entourage. Here, people who bothered to notice him at all were at best civil.

It was not dislike that showed on their faces, so much as lack of interest. They stolidly believed that Germany was
the foremost nation in Europe, and would soon eclipse Britain as the world’s dominant power. To them, Theodore Roosevelt represented a republic of inferior culture, distant, disorganized, racially inchoate. Their press was free, their educational system unsurpassed, their economy explosive, their social security the envy of other states. They had the strongest army on earth, and the second strongest navy. How long could Britain—with aging, inefficient factories, acute class conflict, and twenty-one million fewer citizens—afford to keep ahead of the
Kaiserreich
in battleship construction?

Germany’s fields and forests were beautifully tended, its towns clean, its roads and rails smooth, its factories new and thrumming with energy. There were no equivalents of the peasant hovels of Hungary and Belgium, the slums of Italy, the trash heaps and hideous advertising that blighted the American scene. Neat shops and markets bulged with produce. The efficient movement of traffic in the streets, obedient to every police signal, bespoke a national desire for order and discipline. This was plainly a country where everything worked.

Except, to Roosevelt’s amusement, the timing and choice of terminus for his arrival in Berlin.
There was a frenzied scurrying of imperial officials before he was apologetically received at Stettiner Bahnhof at 9:15
A
.
M
. on Tuesday. They said that the Kaiser would have been present if protocol had not confined him to Potsdam. His Majesty expected the whole Roosevelt family there at noon.

Checking in first at the American Embassy, Roosevelt sprayed his bronchi and prepared to meet a ruler he felt he had gotten to know almost personally as president. The prospect was not intimidating.
Wilhelm II in 1910 was no longer the most dangerous man on the international scene.
Two years earlier, he had come close to abdicating, after boasting too frankly about the German naval program to a British reporter. Since then, he had been further embarrassed by a homosexual scandal involving his circle of intimates. The hushed-up details were lurid enough for Wilhelm to remain in dread of the oligarchy of generals, admirals, and professors who held real power in Germany.

“T
HEY STOLIDLY BELIEVED THAT
G
ERMANY WAS THE FOREMOST NATION IN
E
UROPE
.”
The Reich around the time of Roosevelt’s visit
.
(photo credit i2.2)

Fortunately for him, those Prussians were archtraditionalists, devoted to Hohenzollern rule. They thought of him as
their
homeland king, more than they cared about him being emperor of the multipartite Reich, which had yet to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. And
he
(
a fantasist of Münchausian dimensions) saw himself as Frederick the Great reincarnated, with his love of male society, his need for performance art, and his obsession with military display.

He received the Roosevelts outside Frederick’s Neue Palais, wearing the white-and-gold tunic of the Garde du Corps and a brass helmet, on which rode a silver spread eagle. Removed, the helmet revealed gray hair fast turning to white. At forty-nine the Kaiser was still, with his slate-blue eyes and erectile mustache, a transfixing figure—even if some of the fixity was provoked by his too-small left arm, cramped by forceps at birth.

Were it not for that deformity, and the laughable contrast between his finery and Roosevelt’s black frock coat and top hat, the two men were alike enough to be brothers. They were the same height at five feet nine, the same
weight at two hundred–odd pounds, and both hyperenergetic, with punchy gestures and body-shaking laughs. Their diction was clipped (the Kaiser spoke flawless English) and their talk torrential. But whereas Roosevelt was a careful listener and responder, Wilhelm heard little. He deviated in all directions, not out of evasiveness, but instability.

“H
E … SINCERELY BELIEVED HIMSELF TO BE A DEMI-GOD
.”
Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, ca. 1910
.
(photo credit i2.3)

They sat apart during lunch in the Jasper Room, doing duty with each other’s wives. Elsewhere around the six small tables, Kermit and Ethel followed suit with diplomats and government officials, including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. When the party adjourned to the Shell Room, Wilhelm and Roosevelt began a marathon conversation.
They stood
face-to-face under corals and iridescent
coquilles
, taking no notice when their aides consulted pocket watches.

Reporting afterward to the British historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Roosevelt wrote that he found the Kaiser affable and modest, and more humorous than most Prussians—although the humor turned to pomposity when Wilhelm was quizzed on subjects that he did not understand, “such as matters artistic and scientific.” Military, economic, and social affairs found them both on equal ground, as did the “fundamentals of domestic morality.” But Wilhelm would not go as far as Roosevelt in applying those fundamentals to foreign policy.

Roosevelt asked about the possibility of a moratorium in the Anglo-German arms race. Wilhelm at once stiffened, saying there was no point in discussing it. Germany “was bound to be powerful on the ocean.” However, with his immense army, he was happy to let the Royal Navy maintain a strategic edge at sea. But English politicians must stop demonizing Germans as people bent on war.

This sounded reasonable enough to Roosevelt, and confirmed his impression that neither the Kaiser nor Bethmann-Hollweg had designs across the Channel. Wilhelm seemed much more concerned about the “Yellow Peril” of Japanese expansionism. “This I was rather glad to see, because I have always felt that it would be a serious situation if Germany, the only white power as well organized as Japan, should strike hands with Japan. The thing that prevents it is Germany’s desire to stand well with Russia.”

BY THE TIME
the Colonel got back to Berlin that night, his voice was completely gone. He was diagnosed with laryngitis on top of bronchitis, and begged off a dinner in his honor. But before he could retire, a cable from the White House removed all doubts about his future itinerary: