"Great-Heart": The Life Story of Theodore Roosevelt

by Daniel Henderson

Archie, after the same course of training, left Plattsburg with the rank of lieutenant under confidential orders to proceed to General Pershing’s headquarters in France. He was later transferred to the 26th Regiment of the line, and while leading his men in an attack was wounded by a bullet and lay for fourteen hours unattended in No Man’s Land. For his gallantry he was later recommended by General Pershing for promotion to the rank of captain. He received the French War Cross while lying on an operating table. He came back to Sagamore Hill to recover from his wounds, and he was the only one of the Colonel’s sons who was with him when he died.

Kermit was appointed a captain of the United States National Army and left Plattsburg to accept a position in the British army, where, after serving as a captain and receiving the British Military Cross, he was transferred, in accordance with his wishes, to the army in France.

Then there was Quentin—the youngest—who derived his name from an ancestor who left France 225 years ago. Quentin suffered from a defect of vision, which led to his rejection in the first officers’ training camp. He was wild to get to the front; and his next thought was to become an airman. It was natural that the father, who had ridden bucking broncos, should be pleased to see in his youngest a desire to gain mastery over a bucking airplane. And it was also very natural that the father should want to try the aerial steed for himself. Hence it was that early one morning the car of the Colonel, driven by Charley Lee, his colored chauffeur, shot down Sagamore Hill to the aviation camp at Mineola, Long Island.

The Colonel’s arrival had been anticipated, for a group of army officers left a nearby hangar and strode forward to greet him. For a moment the Colonel was a youth again, keenly interested in the mechanics of the car and as eager as Quentin to explore the virgin reaches of space. With nonchalance, yet with a heart that no doubt thumped with excitement, the Colonel climbed into the airplane and helped the pilot to buckle him in. The next moment the former President of the United States had soared away on his first air flight. After a forty minutes’ ride over and about Long Island Sound, in which all of the eccentricities of aerial travel were demonstrated, the Colonel was volplaned to the ground. Every other experience in the realm of sportsmanship had been his—and now the climactic experience had been accomplished.

Having met his own boy Quentin on his own ground, and having, as a father, learned for himself just what his son was proposing to do, he went back to that interview with Quentin, which resulted in his giving his consent to his enrollment in the most dangerous branch of the service. Quentin was on the verge of applying for enlistment in the Canadian Flying Corps when it was announced that the War Department had accepted him in the U. S. Aviation Section. He went with the first flying unit to France in July, 1917, reaching France a few weeks after Archie and Theodore, Jr.

One day, just after his brothers, Theodore and Archie, had gone to France, Colonel Roosevelt was entertaining about a thousand visitors at a patriotic rally at Sagamore Hill. An army airplane soared up the bay. The airman performed various maneuvers that thrilled the throng but the father did not know till days afterward that the daring aviator was Quentin.

It was one of the ironies of life that not long after this episode there came an overseas cable to Colonel Roosevelt which brought the war home to him in a way that can only be realized by the man who has lost a son.

Mr. Philip E. Thompson, a newspaper man stationed at Oyster Bay, has thus described how the Colonel and Mrs. Roosevelt bore the news of their loss:

“At 7:30 on the following morning the newspaper man at Oyster Bay rang the bell at Sagamore Hill. The Colonel came to the door. There was no need to speak.

The two walked to the old-fashioned veranda of the Roosevelt house. And there, with the early morning breezes sweeping from the Sound, the Colonel heard the positive confirmation of the tragedy of the trenches—that the previous night’s cablegrams had been too cruelly verified.