by Jane Brown
He went so far as to write to the State Department, to his best man William Phillips, now Assistant Secretary, about ‘scourging pot-bellied Major Generals, incompetent brigadiers and rotten colonels’ – that such men could keep their positions ‘it makes me sick at heart’. To Dorothy he went further, saying that nobody liked him on the staff or appreciated anything that he had done, or realised that he had that rare quality that brought out the best in fighting men. He confessed to using his letters to express his troubles (he may never have sent the letter to Phillips) but he was clearly under great strain. His batman George Bennett persuaded him to see a doctor, who ordered him off to the hospital base at Trouville on the Normandy coast for rest and sea air. Unfortunately – did Dorothy admit it? – he was no longer the athletic polo player of Cecil Davis’s portrait, he was approaching middle-age, he had put on weight and was losing his hair, and that pathetic image of him taking off his spectacles as he ‘sloshed’ along in the mud (could he even keep up with the younger men?) must have pained her. He had a wound on his leg that refused to heal, a persistent cough and insomnia.
He returned from Trouville refreshed, and was assigned to personnel work at First Army headquarters; ‘I’ll make the best of a bad job,’ he told Dorothy, ‘but I need your wise head and your comforting voice.’ For their seventh wedding anniversary on 7th September 1918, George Bennett arranged a dinner and they drank to her health. Worryingly Willard’s reading was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, that disturbing fantasy by Mark Twain, which he had not read since childhood.104 Every piece of news took his fancy – could he go as an envoy to the Russians? Mention of reviving the Chinese loan made him think of going back to Peking – and withal he is so endearingly candid, he knows he has not the right background, that he has not been to West Point, just as he had no banking training, and he understands that because he is married to Dorothy he has access to people that otherwise would not notice him, particularly Colonel House. He is being shunted around the Western Front, never in danger. Dorothy, writing when she is exhausted and sometimes through the night, draws phrases from her memory: ‘I’m so proud of you – you are such a really big person that I feel I can never truly deserve you – your spirit is the most magnificent thing I have ever known, and I thank God that men are made such as you.’
She had been leading her friends in a marathon harvest of vegetables and fruits, picking, bottling and jam-making for the Settlement houses. She was following the Allied advance on her map, and went into the city to hear the president on his conditions for peace, his famous Fourteen Points, and his hopes for the League of Nations.105 Then a more insidious enemy, the Spanish influenza, invaded America and she struggled to keep her YMCA work parties together, which meant harrowing journeys, one to Philadelphia where the streets were ‘just a long funeral procession’. ‘You can’t imagine how terrible it is – it is just a hideous plague,’ she told Willard.
He was happier, transferred to Marshal Foch’s headquarters at Senlis, north of Paris, at the end of October. In early November, with the Germans in retreat, he met a jubilant Colonel House who assured him of an assignment at the peace negotiations. On 10th November with the news that the Kaiser had fled and Germany had capitulated, he drank champagne with his brother officers and wrote to Dorothy:
When the Armistice is signed I’ll close this letter – this is the last line written during war time – you have been so wonderful – all these hard months you have grown so tremendously – and been such an inspiration to all about you, my Dorothy – you are the Wonder of the World – I am grateful that you have given me your love – My Sweetheart – I pray that I may be worthy, always.
There was a postscript: ‘5.40 a.m. Nov 11th – hostilities will cease at 11 a.m., it is Peace, Best Beloved, think what it means.’
Later he dined with friends, Martin and Eleanor Egan, and wrote from the Hôtel Crillon that Paris was alive with dancing and singing in the streets. It was also rapidly filling with people he knew, Harry Davison, Walter Lippmann, Daisy Harriman, Dorothy’s friend Ruth Morgan who was with the Red Cross, Grayson Murphy and Bill Delano (bearing gifts from Dorothy). He cabled ‘Peace Greetings’ and ‘going strong – our day someday soon’, and he was already busy at the Peace Commission, ‘a whale of a job!’ On the Sunday after the Armistice he went on a motor tour with Colonel House and Gordon Auchincloss, House’s assistant and son-in-law, to the battlefields around Château-Thierry and Reims. The next day both the colonel and Willard were ill; the colonel soon improved, Willard did not. In his room at the Hôtel Crillon he was attended by army doctors and nurses, and Daisy Harriman, who had always been so fond of him, appointed herself his guardian. On 25th November he was no better and severe influenza had been diagnosed. Daisy cabled Herbert Croly to tell Dorothy, who was in her office at the YMCA. In Paris Willard, hazily aware it was Thanksgiving, asked Daisy to take some money from his dressing table and buy a turkey – ‘I love people to be happy.’ In New York Dorothy was trying to keep in touch with Washington, for news via the State Department and because she intended to sail on the George Washington that was taking the president and Mrs Wilson to France on 3rd December. On 28th November she cabled Daisy, who was at his bedside, saying ‘Please hold his wrists for me – it helps him. I am there with him every moment.’
But, as Daisy later wrote – it was 30th November – ‘Walter Lippmann came in and at 11.30 that night we realised he was going fast.’ They sent for the Reverend Billings who had married Daisy’s daughter, and he ‘made three beautiful prayers and two minutes after he stopped Willard quietly stopped breathing. Just as he went I kissed him and said “that’s from Dorothy” – there was no struggle, no suffering so far as human sense could see, only a great weariness from the long fight.’
Once again it was Herbert Croly who carried the news to Dorothy. She sent a cable with her thanks to all who had cared for him: ‘No words can express my gratitude to you. I should like to have Willard buried in France somewhere with the American soldiers he loved and admired so much. Will this be possible? Please do not worry about me. I know that he is safe and that is all that matters.’
Five: ‘DWS, the Argosy of Grace’
Their marriage had lasted for seven years, Willard’s magical number. A flurry of crossings-out surrounds 1st December in her 1918 diary, and then it is silent. Words of sympathy and love fell on her as snowflakes from everywhere, from her brother Payne, from her godmother Frances Cleveland Preston, from Beatrice and Prather, from her closest friends, sometimes with a touching formality as from her Book Class – ‘we want to try and tell you of our sympathy’, the signatures headed by Harriet Aldrich and tailed by Gertrude, who, with Harry, had certainly been with her. Beatrice Fletcher wrote again quickly, saying she would come and look after the children if she needed to leave. But Dorothy stayed, reading Daisy Harriman’s careful accounts of Willard’s ending: ‘There never was any look of pain or suffering, but at the last moment a decided look of relief – like a tired child dropping asleep – passed over his face – dear, darling Dorothy, how I ached to hold him here for you.’
Daisy, though exhausted from her vigil, felt she must write everything that Dorothy might need to know. Pneumonia and septicaemia were the causes of his death.106 Colonel House, who told Dorothy that Willard’s death ‘has troubled me too deeply’, asked a personal favour of the Secretary of War that Willard’s body might be taken home, but then Dorothy’s wish was made known. He was laid to rest in the American military cemetery at Suresnes, on the opposite bank of the Seine from the Bois de Boulogne, on 3rd December. There were many mourners and more than three dozen wreaths and bunches of flowers, red roses from General Pershing, white roses from the staff at The New Republic, roses and violets from J.P. Morgan and Company. Bishop Brent’s committal address spoke of Willard’s ‘living a long life in a few years’ and that ‘by added purpose and activity [we will] endeavour to make up what has been lost to us by his going’. Daisy made sure Dorothy
knew who was present, and that the cards and ribbons, including the tricolour ribbon from Marshal Foch’s tribute, came home to her.107 The last flowers mentioned were a bunch of carnations from George Bennett, and his letters perhaps caused her most pain: ‘Oh! Madam, how could God take him?’ Bennett had been badly injured in a motor accident some weeks earlier and he felt certain that the Major would never have become so ill had he been there to look after him. Daisy went to see Bennett in hospital and wrote that she had never seen such distress. Bennett’s long testaments to Dorothy spoke of the Major’s endless kindnesses to his fellows – ‘I think it’s too cruel that one of God’s best men should be called away like this’ – of how he should have stayed longer at Trouville, ‘but just like the Major he would never rest up’. He knew that Willard didn’t care for his work and was always trying for his battalion, ‘but for all that he was cheerful’, and making plans for when the war was over to take Dorothy to Langres and other places he had seen; ‘everywhere he went everybody adored him especially the French people’.108
The very efficient Miss Bogue, for whom Dorothy was truly grateful, would leave the letters in piles on her desk for her to read when the children were in bed. They came from afar in time and space. ‘I first knew Willard as a handsome four-year-old,’ wrote a stranger to her. ‘Pardon an old soldier intruding,’ wrote Lieutenant Healy who had served under Willard – ‘always my idol’; they came from the high command of the American Expeditionary Force even now advancing into Germany, from friends from Peking days, from Chester Aldrich with the American Red Cross, from the Reverend Slattery at Grace Church, where a memorial service for the war dead included a prayer for Willard, from Lillian Wald and friends at Henry Street, and from Dorothy’s favourite, the Music Settlement. Letters from people who searched for their words, who didn’t know how to write but managed anyway; a simple tribute: ‘with love, your friend T.R.’, sympathies from ‘Papa’ Harriman’s widow, from Mrs Edward House, from Beatrix Farrand, from all the Junior Leaguers working at Camp Upton, ‘even the maids’. There were formal In Memoriam addresses from the staff at Asia and The New Republic, high-flown eulogies from those she knew well, led by Herbert Croly and including Walter Lippmann, who had been at Willard’s bedside and was now home.
The letters and cables continued in their hundreds, ‘My dear Dorothy’ falling from page upon page, tumblings of shock, distress and sympathy and outpourings of love.109 One in particular could not help being noticed: it was from May Kinnicutt, her school friend with whom she had had that first carefree jaunt to Paris and Rome (was it only fifteen years ago?) – perhaps May spoke for them all, her generous rounded handwriting filling each page with few words:
Carina, I always want to tell you when I’m with you how much I love you & how wonderful I think you’ve been but I’m such a poor one at expressing myself & I never can trust my voice without crying – all I can say is that I never knew what real goodness was before & to have been with you at all has been the greatest privilege I could have ever asked for. I resent so terribly that Willard should have been taken from such a wife & children – I would rather have had this thing happen to anyone but you, because you didn’t need it. But I suppose the way you have taken it all will be a lesson to all who know you & will be an inspiration for always.110
Theodore Roosevelt died on 6th January 1919. ‘The old lion is dead,’ Archie cabled to his brothers Kermit and Theodore in France. Dorothy went to the little church at Oyster Bay and sat with Ethel and Flora for his simple funeral service, and they stood together for his burial in the Young’s Memorial Cemetery nearby. The president’s sister, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, a loving champion of Dorothy ever since her engagement to Willard, had written to her, ‘You have the power of giving & therefore you will always carry other people’s burdens.’ To Flora, who had been enfolded into the Roosevelt household and making herself useful as T.R.’s secretary, Dorothy wrote, ‘You have been wonderful – I feel that you and Quentin are more truly one in spirit than you have ever been before.’ Louisa Weinstein had told George Bennett, ‘You know how very quiet Mrs Straight is, she is now more so than ever – [she is] so sad and still keeps up her appearances as if she is interested in everything [and] in the meantime her poor heart flows over with grief.’111
She had no rest. Herbert Croly and Louis Froelick at Asia magazine were full of questions for articles about Willard’s life and work. Willard had written fully of his experiences at every stage of his life, there were notebooks and journals, diaries and letters, hundreds of paintings and drawings as well as his extraordinarily vivid photographic record of life in the Far East. They decided that Herbert Croly should write a biography but Dorothy took upon herself the task of reading and sorting all this material. In the quiet of her evenings this brought him close, though sometimes she found herself in tears. She worked until mid-July then took the children to summer camp on Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks, to Camp Deerlands where she had been with her father. They did lazy, far-away things, fishing, stalking beaver, lying out on the porch; ‘too heavenly’, she wrote. They caught trout and cooked them on the campfire, tossing scraps to the fox cubs that came out to watch; Beatrice’s birthday on 2nd August was celebrated with a boating party, then their idyll was interrupted by a cable from General Pershing suggesting Dorothy should go to France. Her arrangements were hastily made, and gathering up Flora along the way – they would cheer each other along – they sailed on 14th August.
The Versailles Peace Treaty had been signed in June but there were still many Americans in Paris. Daisy Harriman met them, taking them first to the Christian Science church as a preparation for what they were to see – the Suresnes cemetery was all heaps of bare earth and rows of unfinished graves, the rawness of its purpose all too painfully evident. Later, at dinner at the Hôtel Crillon, where Willard had died, it was hardly surprising that Dorothy was sick and collapsed into a faint. The blessing of having Flora with her was that they comforted themselves with some shopping. At lunch at the Ritz with General Pershing and the expatriate sculptor Herbert Haseltine (a friend of Gertrude’s), the purpose of the invitation was made clear: they rather hoped that Mrs Straight would pay for the fencing, gates and memorial pavilion for Suresnes, and that Jo Davidson’s tribute figure ‘Doughboy’ would be placed there.
Dorothy and Daisy were taken to the Louvre by Bernard Berenson to polish their ‘taste’. Was there a suggestion that the young widow needed an occupation for her mind, as well as her fortune? She found herself surrounded by the many converts to Christian Science, dining with Philip Kerr, Nancy Astor’s great friend who shared Nancy’s enthusiasm for the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, and Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary and a discreet sympathiser with his sister Eleanor Sidgwick’s Society for Psychical Research. There was much talk about Raymond, the best-selling account of the physicist Oliver Lodge and his wife’s conviction of their meetings with their son, who was killed in 1915, through the medium Mrs Leonard, who ‘spoke in the voice of a young Indian girl called Feda’. The desolated parents needed to believe, but only when they visited his grave at Ypres and saw ‘the great company’ all dead and laid in the earth, could they accept the truth.112
Flora and Dorothy were driven to Château-Thierry and north to Chamery where Flora found Quentin Roosevelt’s grave. Dorothy realised she was in a countryside familiar to Willard, ‘the towns all destroyed but [the] country green and smiling’. She spent a ‘most wonderful and happy day’ going alone on the train to Langres, where she found his house and the staff college, and spent time in the cathedral, as Willard had done. On her last day she went to Suresnes in the late afternoon on her own, and sat by Willard’s grave, and found ‘such a peaceful experience of Reality there’.
After crossing to England to meet her widower brother-in-law Almeric Paget, she and Flora sailed home on the Mauretania. The shipboard company was good, the adventurer Moreton Frewen, Sir Arthur Whitten Brown – the half of Alcock and Brown who had flow
n the Atlantic in record time – and Viscount Grey of Falloden, the new British ambassador to Washington.113 It was ‘too lovely coming up harbor’, she wrote.
The Dorothy that returned from visiting Willard’s grave was ready to pick up his fallen banner. She had his love for always, she would be his ‘Wonder of the World’, as if time had simply stopped when he wrote that, the night before the Armistice. From the deck of the Mauretania she had gazed out to sea, as she was always to do, ‘with an intensity that burned something out’; she admitted ‘although my own pain now seems only the smallest part of the world’s suffering, still it is always there – and always part of my bond with the rest of humanity’. At home she had her luxuriant hair cut to a sleek shingled bob, her skirts were shortened to calf-length, her waistbands dropped and she entered the 1920s as a modern woman, slim and sleek and invariably dressed in black, her heeled court shoes clipping along the Fifth Avenue sidewalks with serious tread. She bought a motor with a self-starter, a Buick, so that she could drive herself and the children. In April, Flora Whitney married Roderick Tower, a friend of Quentin Roosevelt’s. They managed a crowd-pleasing procession of limousines along Park Avenue, one carrying Dorothy with Beatrice and Whitney. Whitney stood tall, a determined ‘little man’ despite his white satin trousers, frilled shirt and posy of flowers. Beatrice and little Gladys Szechenyi were the smallest flower girls. It was a family reunion, especially for Dorothy and her childhood friend, Countess Szechenyi; it was almost like all those other weddings in the world before the war. Almost, but not quite.
To her friends she was the ‘Samaritan of all’, in a child’s mishap or a kitchen crisis:
She sails, the Ship of our Delight, To every little port, Nor rests by day, nor sleeps by night, nor gives herself a thought.
Her cargo is the gift of Light, the Mariners’ report.114