In another speech at about the same time, he said, in characteristic fashion: “I frequently meet one of those nice gentry in whom softness of heart has spread to the head, who say: ‘How can we guaranty that everybody will love one another at the end of the war?’ The first step in guarantying it is to knock Germany out!”
On September 12 my husband, Douglas Robinson, the unfailing friend and devoted brother of Theodore Roosevelt, died very suddenly, and my brother and sister-in-law hurried to the old home on the Mohawk Hills which my husband had loved so well. Putting themselves and their own grief for Mr. Robinson and their own late personal sorrow entirely aside, they did all that could be done by those we love to help me in every way. My brother had always cared for Henderson House, its traditions and its customs, and even in the midst of the sorrow which now hung over the old place, he constantly spoke to me of his appreciation of its atmosphere. At the time of my husband’s death my eldest son came quickly back for two days from the camp where he was training, to his own home adjoining mine, and his children were with us constantly during those days, as were the children of my nephew and niece, Hall and Margaret Roosevelt, who occupied a little cottage on my place. I remember with what tender thoughtfulness my brother withdrew himself on the Sunday afternoon after the funeral and wrote a long letter to my second son, Monroe, a captain in the 77th Division, then in the Argonne Forest in France. Just as he had found comfort in his own little grandchildren during those hard days at Dark Harbor, Maine, so, while facing the great loss of his lifelong and devoted friend and brother-in-law, he turned to an affectionate intercourse with the little ones of the youngest generation of the family, and on September 19, when he had left me and gone to Oyster Bay, he writes: “I think of you with tenderest love and sympathy all the time. I cannot get over my delight in Helen and Teddy’s darling children; and I loved Margaret’s brace of little strappers also. Archie and Gracie have hired a little apartment in town.” His son Captain Archibald Roosevelt had returned from France sorely wounded in both arm and leg, wounds and disabilities which he bore with undaunted patience and courage.
On October 13, in response to a letter of mine in which I told him that a Monsieur Goblet had wished the honor of dedicating to him a poem, and at the same time had also asked the privilege of translating my verses “To France” into the French language, he writes to me:
“I have written to M. Goblet as you suggested; I feel that you have every right to be really pleased with what he says about your poem—a noble little poem.
“How admirably Monroe has done. It is astonishing how many men I meet who speak of Douglas [my husband] not only with deep affectionate regard but with a keen sense of the loss of an exceptionally vigorous and powerful personality. Tell Helen that I am really counting on that visit from her delightful children. Their attitude touched me very much. I am much concerned at what you tell me about gallant Bye’s health. Give her my dearest love.”
My sister, Mrs. Cowles, was even more delicate than usual that autumn, and I was with her at the time he wrote me the above letter. His admiration for our older sister was unbounded, and her splendid dauntless attitude toward the physical pain she suffered, and her unbroken patience through suffering, never failed to awake in him a responsive appreciation.
About that time President Wilson entered into a correspondence with Germany of which my brother disapproved. On October 13 he dictated the following statement at his home on Sagamore Hill:
“I regret greatly that President Wilson has entered into these negotiations, and I trust they will be stopped. We have announced that we will not submit to a negotiated Peace, and under such conditions, to begin negotiations is bad faith with ourselves and our Allies.”
Again on October 25, in an open letter to his intimate friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “Let us,” he says, “amongst other things, dictate Peace by the hammering of guns, and not talk about Peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters.”
Although the extracts which follow were written and published several weeks later than the above quotations, I prefer to give them in this connection, for Colonel Roosevelt’s attitude toward “Peace without victory” and a probable League of Nations has been so often misrepresented. The Kansas City Star, the newspaper with which Colonel Roosevelt had actual connection during the last year of his life, published an editorial after his death in answer to a remark made by Senator Hitchcock, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, in which he expressed the opinion that if Colonel Roosevelt were alive, “he would be found supporting the League of Nations as ardently as President Wilson.”