CHAPTER 19
A Hurricane of Steel

No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies
To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;
But there, where western glooms are gathering,
The dark will end the dark, if anything:
God slays himself with every leaf that flies,
And hell is more than half of paradise.
No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—
In eastern skies.

“THE SITUATION² IN EUROPE is really dreadful,” Roosevelt wrote to his youngest son on 2 August 1914. “A great tragedy impends.”

Had Quentin not been in the canyonlands of Arizona, about as un-European an environment as could be imagined, he might have agreed with his father. Or more likely, yesterday’s triple mobilization of Germany, Belgium, and France would have thrilled him, fascinated as he was with any kind of synchronized movement involving wheels, weight, oil, and fire. At the moment he was beyond the reach of news bulletins, and distracted by a riding accident that had badly wrenched his back. A packhorse³ had slipped and rolled over on him, dislodging two ribs where they joined the spine. It was not the kind of trauma a youth needed just when he was testing the limits of his new adult body.

Of all Roosevelt’s children, Alice was the one most drawn to furor teutonicus, the German war rage that had been suppressed for so long. As a little girl⁴, she had listened to recitations of the Nibelungenlied at her father’s knee, and reveled in the violent parts. There was a savage streak in Alice: she approved of the strong overriding the weak. Except that she did not require, as he did, that the strong should have a moral reason to do so. She was never entirely sure what he meant by “righteousness,” and why it meant so much to him. Righteousness had killed a goodly number of Filipinos during his presidency, and discharged a regiment of black soldiers without honor or due process, and separated Panama from the Colombian federation. But if he maintained these actions had been necessary, she took his word for it.

“SHE WAS NEVER ENTIRELY SURE WHAT HE MEANT BY ‘RIGHTEOUSNESS.’ ”
Father and daughter, thinking their separate thoughts, summer 1914. (photo credit i19.1)

His attitude to the developing war had so far been pessimistic yet detached. It was “a great black tornado” threatening Europe only, although Africa and Asia Minor might get sucked in. If Great Britain chose to fight, his emotions would be more engaged, insofar as he felt a solidarity with the English and their empire. (What would he be doing now, had Balfour’s dream⁵ of a Roosevelt-led Anglo-Saxon federation come true?) Yet he also had his “Saxon” side⁶, with boyhood memories of living in Dresden and bonding with a pair of scar-faced swordsmen from the University of Leipzig. Their father had been a member of the Reichstag. Their sister had taught him German poetry, which he grew to love almost as much as English. Only recently, Roosevelt had confessed in his autobiography: “From that time⁷ to this it would have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans really were foreigners. The affection, the Gemütlichkeit (a quality which cannot be exactly expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work and science, the pride in the new Germany … these manifestations of the German character and of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did not in the least define at the time, but which is still very vivid forty years later.”

Millions of Americans outside New England felt a similar empathy, in contrast to the hot, inscrutable loyalties of Slavic immigrants. But the ethnic complexity of the United States weighed against any national leaning one way or another. Roosevelt himself delighted in finding, or inventing, common strains of ancestry with voters (“I wish I had⁸ a little Jew in me.”). Three thousand miles of seawater made the European war seem, for the moment, the Old World’s problem.

ON 3 AUGUST, Germany declared war on France, for supporting Russia, and decided to override Belgium’s refusal to open its roads and railways to forces of the Reich. Luxembourg, another neutral state, was already invaded and occupied. Rectors of universities from Bavaria to Schleswig-Holstein urged students to enlist in what one scholar called “the battle forced⁹ upon us for German Kultur.”

Britain’s House of Commons met that afternoon, to hear Sir Edward Grey confirm that his government would regard an invasion of Belgium as sufficient reason to declare war on Germany on behalf of France. Even the pacifists among his cabinet colleagues were agreed that a threat to the lowland countries was a threat to the English Channel—not to mention the web of support that France and Russia provided to the Empire in North Africa and the Far East.

The foreign secretary’s speech was momentous, if academic, since Falkenhayn’s troops were already attacking Liège. More in despair than in hope, Grey undertook to give the Germans a twenty-four-hour deadline to quit Belgian soil. “If they refuse¹⁰, there will be war,” he said to Paul Cambon, the French ambassador.

At the end of the day, he stood at the window of his suite in Downing Street and watched a lamplighter moving from post to post below. The same operation, presumably, was taking place on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, dark would have come an hour sooner.

Exhausted, Grey spoke to a friend who was standing with him. Afterward he could not remember what he had said, until the friend quoted his words back to him: “The lamps are going out¹¹ all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

THE EXTREME TENSION that gathered in Parliament on Tuesday, 4 August, communicated itself to Sagamore Hill, where Roosevelt practically danced, Navajo-style, round his library, and piped at Charles Booth, the British humanitarian: “You’ve got to¹² get in! You’ve got to get in!”

Four Progressive intellectuals—Felix Frankfurter and the journalists Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—watched half-amused, half-awed by the Colonel’s vehemence. They recognized, with conflicting emotions, that if Britain did in fact enter the war, sooner or later America might be forced to “get in” too. Booth would only say¹³ that he supposed his government must make good on its threat. He was chairman of a shipping line based in Liverpool, and knew that he would be responsible for the lives of uncountable thousands of passengers if the war became general.

Roosevelt saw the issue as one of simple right and wrong. Germany was treating its neutral neighbors as dirt underfoot, on the unbelievable premise that France and Russia meant to destroy the Reich. By any definition, this was militarism gone mad: the Triple Entente had no choice but to fight. If Germany defeated France and took over her colonial possessions, the strategic and economic balance of the whole Occident would be upset. What particularly disturbed Roosevelt was the possibility of Germany being defeated and disarmed. This would be a double tragedy, because in his opinion, the United States would one day need Germany as an ally against the power that had always worried him most—Japan. Furthermore (and here his guests agreed with him), a collapsed Reich “would result in¹⁴ the entire western world being speedily forced into a contest with Russia.”

President Wilson saw no such eventuality. “The European world¹⁵ is highly excited,” he told reporters visiting him for comment, “but the excitement ought not to spread to the United States.” He said that he would issue a proclamation of neutrality soon. Americans should have “the pride of feeling” that one great nation, at least, remained uninvolved and stood ready to help the belligerents settle their differences. “We can do it and reap a great permanent glory out of doing it, provided we all cooperate to see that nobody loses his head.”

Wilson spoke with considerable self-control, not revealing that his ailing wife apparently had just days to live.

By Wednesday, furor teutonicus was general both east and west of the Central Powers. The front page of The New York Times required so many headlines to summarize all the cable dispatches from Europe that there was scarcely room for body text:

KAISER HURLS TWO ARMIES
INTO BELGIUM AFTER
DECLARING WAR.
—
LIEGE ATTACK REPULSED
—
German Guns Are Reported to
be Bombarding Both That
City and Namur.
—
BELGIANS RUSH TO ARMS
—
Parliament Acclaims King’s
Appeal and Votes $40,000,000
for National Defense.
—
FRENCH BORDER CLASHES
—
Stronger German Forces Crossing
the Border Near
Mars-la-Tour and Moineville
—
RUSSIANS ATTACK MEMEL
—

The most momentous bulletin of all confirmed that since eleven the previous evening, a state of war had existed between Great Britain and Germany. Seventeen million soldiers of eight nations were now at arms. When other powers¹⁶ joined in, as they surely would (Italy, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire had yet to align themselves) and some of the world’s biggest navies began to clash at sea, the conflict would become global. If even tiny Switzerland was mobilizing, how long could the United States delude itself that engines of foreign war would not sweep west across the Atlantic? And pass into the Pacific via the soon-to-be-opened Panama Canal, Theodore Roosevelt’s gift¹⁷ to the battleships of all nations?

ON 6 AUGUST, Ellen Wilson died. “God has stricken me,”¹⁸ the President wrote privately, “almost more than I can bear.”

In the circumstances, Roosevelt’s first statement on the war attracted little attention. Issued that day from his new office at 30 East Forty-second Street in Manhattan, it was as neutral-sounding as anything Wilson had said. “Let us be¹⁹ thankful beyond measure that we are citizens of this Republic, and that our burdens, though they may be heavy, are far lighter than those that must be borne by the men and women who live in other and less fortunate countries.” He pledged himself and his party to “work hand in hand with any public man” or combination of citizens “who in good faith and disinterestedly do all that is possible to see that the United States comes through this crisis unharmed.”

If this sounded like an endorsement of the President and his administration, Roosevelt felt that as a patriotic American he could say neither more nor less. “I simply do not²⁰ know the facts.”

Having lost²¹ a wife to Bright’s disease himself, he understood Wilson’s anguish. But empathy did not stop him confiding to Arthur Lee that he had deep doubts about the administration’s ability to defend the United States. Just as Europe was becoming a battleground, the President and his “prize idiot” of a secretary of state were continuing to tout the peacekeeping potential of arbitration treaties. “It is not²² a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state, nor a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people … and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.”

Yet for the moment, Roosevelt believed that it was right for America to stay neutral. Newspapers were reporting that no rules of war had so far been broken. “The melancholy thing²³ about this matter to me,” he wrote Hugo Münsterberg, a Prussian-born professor at Harvard, “is that this conflict really was inevitable and that the several nations engaged in it are, each from its own standpoint, right under the existing conditions of civilization and international relations.”

The only one he felt had a moral (as opposed to strategic or economic) reason to fight was Belgium, which had courageously vowed to defend its honor and sovereignty. He made this plain when an emissary from Wilhelm II visited him. Count Franz von Papen was military attaché to the German Embassy in Washington, and the only soldier in the diplomatic corps representing the Central Powers. Young and handsome, with a noble lineage extending back to the fifteenth century, Papen was a Westphalian gentleman of the finest sort, except that there was something unctuous about him that irritated Roosevelt.

The message he²⁴ brought was more than eight months old, and consisted of nothing more than one of the Kaiser’s typical protestations of esteem, updated to suit the current emergency. Papen obviously meant to take advantage of it by enlisting Roosevelt as a voice for the German cause. Bowing, he said that His Imperial Majesty had never forgotten how pleasurable it had been to entertain the Colonel four years before, “as a guest in Berlin and at the palace at Potsdam.” In view of these fond memories, Wilhelm “felt assured” that he could count on Roosevelt’s “sympathetic understanding of Germany’s position and action.”

Roosevelt bowed back²⁵. He said that he too had never forgotten the royal way the Kaiser had treated him, “nor the way in which His Majesty King Albert of Belgium received me in Brussels.”

Silence fell. Papen’s expression did not change. He clicked his heels, bowed again, and left the room without uttering another word.

The visit only confirmed Roosevelt’s intent to support Wilson and Bryan as they pursued their policy of noninvolvement. He made his commitment clear in one of the occasional articles he now contributed to The Outlook: “In common with²⁶ the immense majority of our fellow countrymen, I shall certainly stand by not only the public servants in control of the administration at Washington, but also all other public servants, no matter of what party, in this crisis; asking only that they with wisdom and good faith endeavor … to promote the cause of peace and justice throughout the world.”

He commended an early offer by the President to act as a mediator in Europe, although evidence mounted daily in black headlines²⁷ ( swamping even, on 15 August²⁸, news of the inauguration of the Panama Canal) that the war was irreversible.

The truth was, Wilson had no diplomatic qualifications. His only exposure to the outside world—unless Bermuda counted as a foreign power—had been gained on two or three vacations in Britain, visiting universities and bicycling through the Cumberland and Scotland of his ancestors. Roosevelt had gone on four grand tours of Europe and the Middle East before he was thirty, amassing an international circle of acquaintance that now extended from emperors down to his barefoot camaradas in Brazil. He could converse in three languages and read in four. He had been blessed by a Pope, honored by the mullahs of Al-Azhar, and asked to mediate an international war. He had heard Casals play Bach, confronted Cubism, and watched the gyrations of snake priests and Diaghilev’s dancers²⁹—not to mention the goose-steps of German troops at Döberitz. He had killed a man in battle and just four months before, on the shore of a river unknown to any cartographer, confronted death himself.

These and maybe a thousand other aspects of wisdom were embodied in the retired statesman who found few journalists, that summer, interested in his views on any subject other than Progressive politics. Ray Stannard Baker visited him at Sagamore Hill and got the impression that Roosevelt was chafing in unaccustomed obscurity. “It must indeed be³⁰ a cross for him not to keep on the front page!”

THE PRESIDENT’S TENDENCY to talk in the abstract was demonstrated in his salute to the Panama Canal as a waterway that would permit “a commerce of intelligence, of thought, and sympathy” around the world, as if such things were dry goods. On 19 August³¹, he formally called upon Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as in name.”

But to the handful of his countrymen who were still in Brussels, the spectacle of the German army marching into town next day was so overwhelmingly physical as to negate philosophy. Richard Harding Davis of the New York Tribune had seen war before—in Cuba, where he had followed Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to Santiago—but he realized that the new technological century was going to make it infinitely more horrible.

Belgium’s defense strategy, modeled on that of Russia against Napoleon in 1812, had been to leave the capital unprotected. By ten in the morning, all non-official citizens were off the streets and hidden behind shuttered windows. The first German to appear on the Boulevard de Waterloo was a captain on a bicycle, no more fearsome than Woodrow Wilson en vacance. He was followed by a pair of privates, also pedaling, their rifles casually slung. But right behind came such a gray mass of men and matériel, advancing row on row, hour after hour till sunset and beyond, that Davis was at first amazed, then numbed, then stupefied.

Boredom gave way³² to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman.…

All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army. And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken.… This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller. And for three days and three nights through Brussels it roared and rumbled, a cataract of molten lead. The infantry marched singing, with their iron-shod boots beating out the time. They sang “Fatherland, My Fatherland.” Between each line of song they took three steps. At times two thousand men were singing together in absolute rhythm and beat. It was like the blows from giant pile-drivers. When the melody gave way the silence was broken only by the stamp of iron-clad boots, and then again the song rose.

Davis was conscious mainly of sound: the rumble of howitzers and siege cannons, the jingling of machine guns, chains clanking on cobbles, sharp bugle calls, the squeal of ungreased axles and grinding of steel wheels on stone. To another American reporter, Will Irwin, what was more of an onslaught on the³³ senses was “the smell of a half-million unbathed men, the stench of a menagerie raised to the nth power. That smell lay for days over every town through which the Germans passed.”

Neither reporter could quite express the sense each had that something entirely new and wholly frightening had been revealed to them, implicit in the gray colorlessness, the engineered sameness, the loud, crushing force of human aggression turned to science. There was not a noun for it yet, but if the young tribune of “Red Week” in Emilia-Romagna had his way, it would be coined from the Italian word³⁴ fasci.

COMPARISON OF THE developing war to a tornado, or cyclone, was so common among public figures that month that few of them noticed its precise applicability to Germany’s opening military maneuver. By curving up through Flanders and then around to encircle Paris, the plan—named after its designer, Count Alfred von Schlieffen—envisaged hitting the main French defense line from behind, in a whirl timed to last just forty-two days. Russia’s inadequate railroad system should delay any major offensive from beyond the Vistula for at least six weeks. France would have capitulated by then, so Germany could concentrate all its firepower in an eastern Hunnenschlacht that would settle the Slav problem forever.

Roosevelt had been confidentially³⁵ aware of the essentials of the Schlieffen Plan since 1911. The best that could be said of the tornado in action was that it was weaker than it might have been. General Moltke, the Kaiser’s chief of staff, had deflected the curve through Flanders and Luxembourg only, sparing Holland. At the same time, he was so nervous of a French reprisal in the Marne that he transferred a considerable amount of strength there. This slowed his advance in the north, where fierce resistance by the Belgians—buttressed by an expeditionary influx of seventy-five thousand British troops—cost him precious days.

“If the Franco-British³⁶ armies hold their own against the Germans,” Roosevelt wrote Arthur Lee, “whether they win a victory or whether the result is a draw, it is in my judgment all up with Germany.” Even if Moltke succeeded in conquering France, his forces, the Colonel thought, would be too “enfeebled” afterward to mount an effective defense against Russia. Nor could they expect much help from Austria, which had its own problems in the Balkans. Germany was faced, in short, with the prospect of being reduced to “international impotence” after forty-three years of unrestricted growth.

The same prospect³⁷, mixed with panic, seemed to strike General Alexander von Kluck’s commanders on the road west of Liège. Their march was hampered by sabotage and the sniping of francs-tireurs, freelance sharpshooters with a maddening ability to remain invisible in flat terrain. The result, on 26 August, was a German bombardment of the ancient university town of Louvain that added new dimensions to Goethe’s warning, “The Prussian³⁸ was born a brute and civilization will make him ferocious.” Flamethrowers set fire to street after street of private houses, and people who ran from them were rounded up—the men to be bayoneted, then shot, the women and children for imprisonment in concentration camps. “Big Bertha,” a cannon so huge it had to be dragged by thirty-four horses, reduced churches and dormitories to flints. One of the world’s richest medieval libraries was burned to the stone. By dark, the seat of six hundred years of learning had become a huge hearth. Richard Harding Davis was there to record a modern Gotterdämmerung:

It was all³⁹ like a scene upon a stage, unreal, inhuman. You felt that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark ruins came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children.

DISPATCHES CONFIRMING THE destruction and evacuation of Louvain reached the United States on 28 August and caused the first wave of anti-German revulsion to spread across the country. The imperial embassy⁴⁰ in Washington stated without apology that the Belgian city had been “punished” for “a perfidious attack” by civilians upon the soldiers of the Reich.

Woodrow Wilson remained silent.

No American soul was more tried than Theodore Roosevelt’s. “I am an ex-President⁴¹,” he apologized to Arthur Lee, “and my public attitude must be one of entire impartiality.” Criticism by him of Wilson’s foreign policy would be seized on by Democrats as a campaign issue in the fall congressional elections. What had happened in Belgium enraged him, but for as long as the war did not threaten the United States in its own hemisphere, patriotism required that he address himself only to domestic issues.

That did not stop Roosevelt from doing a little private lobbying on the subject of “preparedness,” a word that had begun to dominate his vocabulary. “If you have⁴² any influence with the President,” he wrote a Harvard classmate close to Colonel House, “I wish you would get him to assemble the fleet and put it in first-class fighting order, and to get the army up to the highest pitch at which it can now be put. No one can tell what this war will bring forth.”

If you have any influence with the President. Phrases like that, dictated through his teeth, betrayed his political impotence now that Democrats controlled the executive and legislative branches of government. All he could do about it was to help as many Progressives and moderate Republicans as possible get elected in November. Bracing himself for more of the speaking tours he had sworn to renounce, he tried to see as much as possible of his children and grandchildren.

An unexpected feature of the summer had been postponement of Kermit’s departure for South America. Belle had fallen⁴³ ill with a mild case of typhoid, and took her time recuperating. In the resultant flutter of home care and doctoral visits, deeply satisfying to the female Roosevelts, she and Edith had at last bonded. Ethel and Dick and little Richard also clustered around. Roosevelt wrote Emily Carow to say how much he liked having the old house full of young people. “Ted and Eleanor⁴⁴ frequently motor over with their two babies. Gracie is the dearest small soul you ever saw and my heart is like water before her.”

IN A CRESCENDO of carnage⁴⁵, Germany and France took out on each other the accumulated antipathy of four decades. By early September, clashing mainly in Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes, they had together lost more than a quarter-million men. The almost unbelievable death toll came from two new forms of firepower—the horizontal “hail” of machine guns and the vertical destruction inflicted by cannons capable of lobbing twenty shells a minute—that mocked the pretensions of cavalry regiments still prancing around with swords and lances. Airplanes patrolling the unsettled front (not yet realizing that they might effectively exchange pistol shots) looked down on skirmishes reduced, by altitude, to the comings and goings of insect colonies.

Roosevelt, working at Sagamore Hill on the preface to his new book, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, had seen it all before. “The fire-ants⁴⁶ [of Mato Grosso do Sul] bend the whole body as they bite.… These fighting ants, including the soldiers even among the termites, are frantically eager for a success which generally means their annihilation.”

Elsewhere in Brazil⁴⁷, and throughout his own life, he had noted the compulsion of predators to exterminate both “types and individuals.” This war was too enormous for individuals to matter, or even be registered before they were blown to bits. But it was clear that certain types were marked for extinction: not just the prancing cavalry officers but generals who could not adapt to mechanized slaughter (Joseph Joffre, the French chief of staff, had already replaced more than fifty), and the emperors in whose name the individuals fought.

Perhaps the type most feared by the emperors, for as long as they clung to their crowns, was the socialist with his red flag and ominously universal hymn:

Masses, slaves, arise⁴⁸, arise,
The world must shift its base,
We are not nothing in men’s eyes.
This is the fraught finale—
Together and forever
The Internationale
Shall be the human race!

The government of⁴⁹ every nation currently at war—even Serbia, even republican France—feared socialism and its derivative doctrines, communism and anarchism, as more perilous to the stability of the state than alien armies. In Germany, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg deluded himself if he thought that the war would ingratiate Prussians with the proletariat. France’s first martyr of the war had been the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, assassinated by a paranoid right-winger. Britain had postponed, rather than averted class war by joining in; Russia was ripe for revolution; Austria had a large Marxist minority; even “poor little Belgium,” as members of the Entente had taken to calling it, was a socialist hothouse, overpopulated and harshly governed by the ruling elite.

One Western power alone, in the late summer of 1914, stood secure, able by virtue of its enormous size, constitutional freedoms, and industrial capacity to determine the outcome of the war. But that potential was, for the time being, moot. Its president was so numb with personal grief that he could concentrate only on the driest details of domestic policy: tariff tinkerings, farm loan refinance, updated definitions of antitrust practices, a federal trade commission act. When Wilson thought⁵⁰ about foreign policy at all, he brooded over the still-unsettled situation in Mexico. He listened sympathetically to the plaints of European ambassadors, and proclaimed a national day of prayer for peace in October, when it would benefit his party in the fall elections. But he lacked the international stature—and more important, he could not summon up the moral energy—to do what Roosevelt had done in 1905, and coax the belligerents to the negotiating table. In any case, none except Belgium was ready to accept mediation. “I gather,”⁵¹ Cecil Spring Rice wrote, “that when you intervened in the Russo-Japanese conflict you had conclusive evidence that your aid was wanted.”

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 ROOSEVELT⁵² 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 most⁵³ 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 be⁵⁴ 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 steel⁵⁵.

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 wrought⁵⁶ 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 goodbye⁵⁷ 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:

I have something special⁵⁸ to tell you. In the course of the last nine or ten months I have been brought into singularly intimate relations with a new class of American friends belonging to the Democratic party; and I have entertained here, or have received long and spontaneous letters from, old friends and acquaintances of the Republican party who did not support you at the last election. Three distinguished Democrats, two of them public men, and the other of exceptional literary and educational note … talked with me freely of your immense administrative power and success—as evinced in such questions as the Panama Canal, the Russian and Japanese war, the Labour troubles, and other like matters—and they all spoke of, and seemed to sympathize with, the widespread affection which your countrymen feel for you. The Republicans, men of the highest eminence, held the same [opinion]. They seemed in this respect to share the sentiment of a great mass of their party.…

The deduction I draw from these conversations and letters is a conviction that it is of untold importance that you should have a leading part at this conjuncture.… Your mode of thought⁵⁹ on international policy, and your deep and wide interest in the history of the past, would be of immeasurable service now and hereafter. I may be biased in this matter by my own regard for you, and my earnest desire to see you at the center of the world’s affairs; but, after all, that is on my part no ignoble motive.

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 representatives⁶⁰, 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 asked⁶¹ 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 reported⁶² 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 good⁶³ 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,”⁶⁴ 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 blame⁶⁵ 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 East⁶⁶, 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 me⁶⁷ 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 read⁶⁸ 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 own⁶⁹ 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 softly⁷⁰ 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.

I suppose that few of them now hold that there was value in the “peace” which was obtained by the concert of European powers when they prevented interference with Turkey [in 1894–1896] while the Turks butchered some hundreds of thousands⁷¹ of Armenian men, women and children. In the same way I do not suppose that even the ultrapacifists really feel that “peace” is triumphant in Belgium at the present moment. President Wilson has been much applauded by all the professional pacifists because he has announced that our desire for peace must make us secure it for ourselves by a neutrality so strict as to forbid our even whispering a protest against wrong-doing, lest such whispers might cause disturbance to our ease and well-being. We pay the penalty of this action—or rather, supine inaction—by forfeiting the right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians at present.

The last two⁷² 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.

Roosevelt emphasized that he was not advocating military intervention. Americans, he wrote, had no quarrel with any of the belligerents, although the Japanese (perpetually resentful of “yellow peril” prejudice in California) needed watching. The United States was therefore in a position to try to bring about peace. Whoever represented it in negotiations (he was careful not to ascribe that privilege exclusively to Wilson) should make clear that Congress would not tolerate any accord that compromised the national security.

The only possible good he saw coming out of the current conflict was a spread of democracy in Europe, or “at least a partial substitution of the rule of the people for the rule of those who esteem it their God-given right to govern the people.” He noted approvingly that socialist parties in the belligerent countries had all backed the decisions of their governments to fight. Having watched old Franz Joseph rinse and spit, and marveled at the Kaiser’s ignorance, and marched among all the monarchs now bridling at one another, he felt it would be a good thing if most of their crowns toppled.

Probably, after the war, there would be an increase in the number of international disputes submitted to justice, because justice was what democracy aspired to. But what court should administer it? Roosevelt, coming to the end of his long essay, echoed what he had said to the Nobel Prize committee about the impotence of the Hague tribunal. Work must begin at once to replace it with “an efficient world league” for peacekeeping. “Surely the time⁷³ ought to be ripe for the nations to consider a great world agreement among all the civilized military powers to back righteousness by force.”

RUMORS BEGAN⁷⁴ TO CIRCULATE that private citizens lobbying for an American peace committee thought that Theodore Roosevelt would be the ideal person to press for a diplomatic settlement of the war. The New York Times reported that Oscar Straus was spending many hours with the Colonel, both in New York and Oyster Bay, and that both men were cagey about their discussions. Sources in Washington were quoted as acknowledging that Roosevelt had “a thorough knowledge of the conditions in Europe,” and enjoyed cordial friendships with many of the belligerent leaders, particularly Wilhelm II.

These qualifications also occurred to the editor of the mass-market New York World. He sent a representative, John N. Wheeler, to Oyster Bay to ask if the Colonel would be willing to go abroad as a war correspondent, at the staggering salary of three thousand dollars a week. Roosevelt hesitated, then declined.

“It would reflect⁷⁵ on the dignity of this country and the position I have held.”

John Wheeler, who had just formed a popular-press syndicate, had another idea. “How about doing a series on the lessons this country should learn from the war?”

Roosevelt thought he had written plenty about that already in The Outlook, but the opportunity to broadcast his views to the largest possible audience was irresistible. “You will hear from me,” he said.

HE WROTE FOUR PIECES at once, because he had to spend most of October on the road. Deliberately adopting a journalistic style, he compared what had happened to prosperous, pleasure-loving Europe to the fate that had befallen the Titanic. “One moment⁷⁶ the great ship was speeding across the ocean, equipped with every device for comfort, safety, and luxury.… Suddenly, in one awful and shattering moment, death smote the floating host, so busy with work and play.” The “lesson” for Americans in Europe’s catastrophe was to see how quickly even the most civilized nations reverted to barbarism, and how vulnerable great powers were to sudden attack. The United States was no exception, now that the Panama Canal was open. Its army was as small as Persia’s. Its navy was by some counts third in the world, but a single lethal blow to its battleship fleet, and San Francisco or New York would be as open to destruction as Louvain. “Under such circumstances⁷⁷, outside powers would undoubtedly remain neutral exactly as we have remained neutral as regards Belgium.”

Although he did not⁷⁸ refer to Wilson or Bryan by name, his evident contempt for them caused the pro-Democratic New York World to pass on the series. So did the Hearst news organization. The New York Times, however, ran the first article prominently in its Sunday edition on 27 September. It increased the paper’s circulation by several thousand copies. Other periodicals rushed to reprint Roosevelt’s series, and by mid-October he was reaching a readership of fifteen million. Wheeler urged him to continue with as many more war articles as he pleased.

He obliged with⁷⁹ another five, dashed off between whistle-stops, for weekly publication through the end of November. By the time he was through, he had thoroughly unburdened himself on the responsibilities of the United States to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907; on the causes of the war (chiefly “fear … and the anger born of that fear”); on the development of an “international conscience” to chasten national self-interest; on the dangers inherent in disarmament; on the necessity for active, rather than passive neutrality; on preparedness (“the one certain way⁸⁰ to invite disaster is to be opulent, offensive, and unarmed”); and on the current dereliction of the American military.

In his public appearances, Roosevelt stuck to Progressive domestic boilerplate, drummed out with more energy than enthusiasm. It was clear to him that the electorate had lost interest in political reform. So had he, although he insisted he was as radical as ever. His mind was elsewhere. When he encountered⁸¹ old friends on the road, he wanted to talk only about the war, and about the burning of Louvain in particular. Word that German⁸² troops had virtually destroyed the great cathedral at Reims caused him further anguish.

EDITH ROOSEVELT WORRIED about her husband’s gloom whenever he climbed onto another train. To cheer him up after an especially onerous trip to Philadelphia, where the Pinchots had pushed him for speech after speech, she went into New York to meet his train and spent the night of 29 October with him. He had no time to come home: he was needed the following day in Princeton, New Jersey.

She brought with her a long letter from Ethel in Paris. “You cannot imagine⁸³ the conditions here—If we knew them at home our country would not be able to be neutral—It’s appalling.” The American Hospital was full of Belgian soldiers, hideously mutilated by shrapnel and shell, “—hardly any from bullets.” Every day, more civilian refugees arrived, including many unattached children, “—alone, not knowing even their own names—put on the train by the mayors of the towns just to get them out of the way, and after all had been ruined, some of them wounded, very few boys, & many of the boys with their right hands cut off.”

Roosevelt had received⁸⁴ similar reports, and worse, from Kipling and other witnesses better informed than his credulous daughter. All wanted to convince him that German soldiers on the warpath were Neanderthal in their savagery. The Colonel reserved judgment on most of their stories. Mutilated soldiers were what a nurse should be expected to see, thirty miles from the front in wartime. But Ethel had plainly only heard about handless little boys, as Kipling had only heard about rapes and mass executions. “My experience in⁸⁵ the Spanish war has taught me that there is a tendency to exaggerate such outrages,” Roosevelt wrote him.

He granted that⁸⁶ when millions were at war, “some thousands of unspeakable creatures will commit unspeakable acts,” but did not see that nationality was any constraint. He reminded Kipling that even so patriotic a historian as William Lecky had found that “frightful atrocities” were committed by English soldiers in the Irish uprising of 1798, and that in 1900, Britain’s current allies, the French and the Russians, had behaved abominably on the march to Peking. In an admission he would never have made before he met Natalie Curtis, he added: “I have known Americans do unspeakable acts against Indians.”

Ethel’s letter, all the same, brought the war home in a personal way that made him forget, at Princeton, his promise not to make it a campaign issue. The fact that the university’s former president was now President of the United States may also have prompted him to launch into an impassioned speech⁸⁷ on preparedness that had his audience, mainly students, cheering vociferously.

ON 3 NOVEMBER, the Progressive Party lost all its state contests except in California, where Hiram Johnson was reelected. Only one Progressive kept his seat in the House of Representatives. Nationwide, the Party registered just two million votes—half its strength in 1912—to six million apiece for the two major parties. This was good news to the GOP, an effectively leaderless force that regained many of its defectors from 1912. But it was not good news to Woodrow Wilson, who had hoped those defectors would vote Democratic, as a show of confidence in him. He was still far from popular. A prolonged recession had disillusioned the electorate with New Freedom, and by extension, New Nationalism. In a post-election poll⁸⁸ of nine thousand “leading men of the country” byThe Lawyer and Banker, Wilson came second to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane as their preferred Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1916. And Lane was far behind their favorite Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.

Of the twelve names polled, Theodore Roosevelt came in last, with only 11 votes to Hughes’s 1,584. Having made a career out of attacking precisely the combination embodied in the phrase Lawyer and Banker, he could not expect readers of such a magazine to rank him much higher, even if he was a declared candidate. Still, he had just participated in his third failed campaign in five years—confessedly an “utter and hopeless⁸⁹ one” as far as Progressivism was concerned. His words from a past moment of triumph resounded hollowly: We, here in America⁹⁰, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.

Once again the Colonel returned to a Sagamore Hill deserted by politicians and reporters. Little Richard was pining for Ethel. So was he. She gave off and attracted more love than any other of his children. “I wish I could stroke⁹¹ your neck and hair,” he wrote her. Happily, both Derbys would be back home in time for Christmas. Alice was likely to be less difficult, this festive season, now that Nick had been reelected to Congress. And Edith too⁹² should be happier, once she heard that Kermit and Belle were safely settled in Buenos Aires.

Roosevelt persuaded himself⁹³ that he looked forward to private life, although Wilson’s cool refusal to speak out about Belgium tormented him. For the moment, he did not have a big book to write, nor was any publisher asking for one. An Autobiography had been a disappointment for Macmillan, and Life-Histories of African Game Animals was so technical that Scribners had printed it almost as an act of charity. Through the Brazilian⁹⁴ Wilderness, just out, was earning excellent reviews, and in narrative quality was probably the best thing he had ever done. But its early sales did not compare to those of African Game Trails.

For as long as⁹⁵ the European war lasted, Roosevelt felt inclined to focus on journalism. Next February⁹⁶ he would have a new editorial platform, as guest columnist for Metropolitan magazine. Pacifism, preparedness, and moral cowardice were to be his themes; he was bored with partisan argument. Let those intellectuals who were more policy-minded than he was— brilliant young men⁹⁷ such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann—adapt what survived of Progressivism to suit a magazine they had just founded, The New Republic.

“It is perfectly obvious⁹⁸ that the bulk of our people are heartily tired of me,” Roosevelt wrote William Allen White, in a posterity letter tinged with regret.

I shall fight in the ranks as long as I live for the cause and the platform for which we fought in 1912. But at present any attempt at action on my part which could be construed … into the belief that I was still aspiring to some leadership in the movement would, I am convinced, do real harm. It has been wisely said that while martyrdom is often right for the individual, what society needs is victory. It was eminently proper that Leonidas should die at Thermopylae, but the usefulness of Thermopylae depended upon its being followed by the victory of Themistocles at Salamis.… When it is evident that a leader’s day is past, the one service he can render is to step aside and leave the ground clear for the development of a successor. It seems to me that such is now the case as regards myself. “Heartily know⁹⁹ that the half-gods go when the Gods arise.”

* Now Tsingtao.