Colonel Roosevelt (87 page)

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 most 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.

Dr. Richard Derby read about Louvain, and Liège, and the Battle of the Marne, and decided to go to France to help treat the wounded. He volunteered his services as a surgeon in the American Hospital in Paris. Ethel insisted on accompanying him as a nurse. Little Richard was only five months old, but her parents were glad to look after him while she was away. She promised to return, with or without Dick, in December.

Kermit and Belle took the opportunity to book their own departure, on the same ship but to a different final destination. During his wife’s illness, Kermit had negotiated a job in Buenos Aires, Argentina, better than the one he had planned to take in Brazil. It was to be assistant manager of a new branch of the National City Bank. A house and servants came with it, plus plenty of fashionable society to keep Belle happy. He would have to learn Spanish, of course, but for him that was as easy as switching to a new brand of breakfast cereal.

The war had wrought such havoc with ocean traffic that it was not possible to get to Buenos Aires from New York except by crossing to Liverpool and reembarking from there. Hence the double departure of the two young couples from New York on 26 September.

Edith said goodbye to them in bright, windy weather. The Colonel was off on another campaign tour, this time of the Midwest. She hated his absence and knew that he did too. Fortunately he had his voice back, and looked well again, although he complained often of rheumatism. Having encouraged him to found the Progressive Party in 1912, she could not complain about him taking, as he put it, “a violent part in the obsequies.” But with him gone, Quentin back at Groton, and Archie at Harvard, Sagamore Hill was a lonely place. Edith’s only company was a baby that slept fifteen hours a day. She occupied herself, as she had since childhood, with incessant reading.

As he traveled, Roosevelt pondered the text of an extraordinary letter from Sir George Otto Trevelyan:

Trevelyan had never quite recovered from being the recipient of the Colonel’s gigantic epistle describing his “royal” tour of Europe in the spring of
1910. It and dozens more in their long correspondence demonstrated a mastery of foreign affairs that made the old historian dream of having Roosevelt back in the White House.
Other representatives, official and unofficial, of the belligerent nations exhibited a similar desire, as the war on all sides lost momentum and gained in ferocity. Each believed they had his sympathy. Count Albert Apponyi and Baron Hengelmüller, the retired Austrian ambassador to Washington, wrote pleading the causes respectively of Budapest and Vienna.
Sir Edward Grey asked him to receive J. M. Barrie and A. E. W. Mason, two English writers touring America as propagandists for His Majesty’s Government.
Rudyard Kipling reported that female Belgian refugees in Britain were thankful to have been only raped by German soldiers, not executed as well. “Frankly we are aghast at there being no protest from the U.S.” The antisemitic Cecil Spring Rice complained that Oscar Straus and other wealthy Jews were preaching pacifism at the White House, so that Wall Street would continue to profit from war-related exports. “
It is no good arguing with these financiers—appealing to their sense of honor is like shooting them in the foreskin.”

Roosevelt reminded his correspondents that the only influence he retained was that of his pen. And he still wanted to be fair to Wilson. “
An ex-President,” he reminded Kipling, “must be exceedingly careful in a crisis like this how he hampers his successor in office who actually has to deal with the situation.” Trevelyan’s salute, however, inspired him to publish a major essay, “The World War: Its Tragedies and Its Lessons,” in
The Outlook
on 23 September. For the first time he gave the full range of his views on the war, writing with strong feeling but also with objectivity and erudition.

“THERE CAN BE NO HIGHER
international duty,” he declared, “than to safeguard the existence and independence of industrious, orderly states, with a high personal and national standard of conduct, but without the military force of the great powers.” Examples of these were Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, and Uruguay. The first had just been trampled underfoot—was still being trampled—while the United States, the world’s most righteous republic, raised no objection.

Roosevelt did not blame any of the belligerents for taking up arms, allowing that each had reasonable grievances. Austria-Hungary was right to punish Serbia for the murder of Franz Ferdinand, yet Serbia was right to oppose Austrian expansionism in the Balkans. Tsar Nicholas, as the protector of all Slavs, could not have remained passive after Hötzendorf attacked Belgrade; Kaiser Wilhelm felt a similar ethnic compulsion to defend Vienna; and Germany had been wise to strike France before that nation, unreconciled to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, struck
her
. The British had acted nobly in honoring their ancient pledge to uphold Belgian neutrality, and they were wise to oppose Prussian
militarism.
Even in the Far East, where the war had spread, Japan was justified in besieging Germany’s naval base at Kiaochow,
^*
China, thus ending a nineteen-year provocation. The fall of that garrison looked imminent, and in Roosevelt’s opinion would greatly improve the local balance of power.

He took no side except that of Belgium. “
It seems to me impossible that any man can fail to feel the deepest sympathy with a nation which is absolutely guiltless of any wrongdoing.” That was, any man whose ethics were not perverted by the amorality of war. Roosevelt noted that Britain had ignored the neutrality of Denmark when fighting France in 1807, “and with less excuse the same is true of our conduct toward Spain in Florida nearly a century ago.” The only principle that applied in major conflicts, those that wrought fundamental change, was “the supreme law of national self-preservation,” a deterministic force that had no scruples.

“But Germany’s need to struggle for her life,” he went on, “does not make it any easier for the Belgians to suffer death.”
He had read German military textbooks, and the tactician in him accepted the logic of Friedrich von Bernhardi’s “necessary terror” in attack. However, as a human being, he was revolted at its injustice. King Albert’s subjects had fought with wonderful courage against a force they could not withstand. As a result, they were suffering, “
somewhat as my own German ancestors suffered when Turenne ravaged the Palatinate, somewhat as my Irish ancestors suffered in the struggles that attended the conquests and reconquests of Ireland in the days of Cromwell and William.” The agony of the Belgians might not yet compare with that of the Germans themselves at French hands in 1674 and 1689. Even so, the sack of Louvain was “altogether too nearly akin to what occurred in the seventeenth century for us of the twentieth century to feel overmuch pleased at the amount of advance that has been made.”

He remarked with a touch of disdain that it was probably impossible for most Americans, “
living softly and at ease,” to feel what it was like to be crushed by a conquering power. If they did not read European history, they could not understand how complicated a policy neutrality was, and how morally compromising. This brought on his
idée fixe
about peace and arbitration treaties.

The last two sentences were too provocative for Lawrence Abbott, who cut the one about Wilson, and deleted the sarcastic clause in the other. Roosevelt was not the only eminent person to speak out against the administration’s apathy on the Belgian issue—William Dean Howells and Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi were just as disapproving—but he was, after all, the President’s most visible political opponent, and might deter Wilson from coming around slowly to Belgium’s side.