On November 11, 1918, the armistice with Germany was signed by General Foch. The war was over! So many years had passed since that fateful August 1, 1914, that at first the mind of the world was not attuned to peace. It now seemed as incomprehensible that we should be at peace as it had seemed impossible that we should be at war. Just before the armistice was signed the United States had proved by the ballots cast on Election day that the request of President Wilson that a Democratic Congress should be returned was not in accord with the wishes of the American people.

Theodore Roosevelt, in a vivid speech at Carnegie Hall just before Election day, had defined the issues of the future in sharp, terse sentences, and had pleaded for preparedness for peace (for the signs of those days showed that peace was not far off), as he had pleaded so long ago for preparedness for war. He was far from well on the night when he made that speech, which was to prove the last that he would ever make in the hall in which he had so often aroused his fellow citizens to a sense of their civic and national duty. I was ill and could not be present, but Mrs. Roosevelt told me afterward that she had been much concerned for him, for a trouble which he thought was sciatica in his leg was giving him intense pain. No one would have suspected that fact, however, and many in the audience told me afterward that that speech in Carnegie Hall was one of the most convincing and thrilling appeals to patriotism ever made by Theodore Roosevelt.

A few days later, always true to his interest in the colored people, he made an address under the auspices of the Negro Circle, and again I was to have been present and was prevented by my condition of health. The following week when I was better I telegraphed to Oyster Bay to ask him, if possible, to lunch with me in New York, and to my distress received an answer that he was not well enough to come to New York, but would I come out and spend the night at Oyster Bay instead? When I arrived at Sagamore Hill, I could not but feel worried to find him in bed, and in much pain, which, however, he entirely disregarded, and we had one of the most delightful evenings that I ever remember spending with him. I had brought, thinking that it might interest him, Professor William Lyon Phelps’s book on “Modern Poetry,” and during the time that I left his room to take dinner with my sister-in-law, he had read so much and with such avidity that I felt on my return to his bedside that he had assimilated the whole volume. In spite of pain and politics, he threw himself into a discussion of modern American poetry, taking up author after author and giving me rapid criticisms or appreciations. He took much interest in both Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay, struck with the masterful story-telling quality of the one and the curious rhythmic metre of the other, and the strong Americanism of both.

From poetry we wandered across political fields together, and he discussed the armistice which had just been signed, and which he said he could not but regret from the standpoint of the future. He felt that for all the days to come it would have been better had Germany’s army had to return to the Fatherland an insignificant and defeated fraction of its original strength, and had the Allies entered Berlin as victors. This opinion, although very strong, was not in any way advanced as a criticism of the signing of the armistice, which he appeared to feel had been inevitable. We talked until twelve o’clock that night and I have always felt grateful to my sister-in-law for having arranged for me to have that delightful communion with my brother.

There was no serious apprehension about his health when I left the next morning, and the news that he had been taken to the hospital the following week came as a shock and surprise to me. All through those late November and December days, when my brother was an invalid in Roosevelt Hospital (except for a brief thirty-six hours when he was threatened with pneumonia, which trouble he threw off with his usual wonderful vitality), we were not seriously apprehensive of any fatal outcome to his ill health, and, indeed, at times during that detention in the hospital, he gave one the impression of a man fully able to recuperate as he had always done before. Many were the happy hours of quiet interchange of thought and affection passed by me with my brother in the hospital. My sister-in-law had given the order to the nurses that I should always be admitted, and I came and went in the sick-room daily. Sometimes he was well enough to see visitors, and lines of people of the most varied kinds were always waiting in the corridors in the hope of a few words with him. I remember a long talk on American literature to which I listened between Hamlin Garland and himself, and in the middle of December he asked me to telegraph our dear friend Senator Lodge to ask him to come on and discuss certain political matters with him. The senator spent two days with me, and of those two days two whole mornings in the Colonel’s room in the hospital. I was with them during the first morning when they discussed the tentative League of Nations, parts of which in problematical form were already known to the public. The different reservations, insisted upon later by Senator Lodge, when the League in its eventual form was presented to the Senate of the United States, were tentatively formulated at the bedside of the Colonel. I do not mean that definite clauses in the League were definitely discussed, but many contingencies of the document, contingencies which later took the form of definite clauses, were discussed, and the future attitude toward such contingencies more or less mapped out. He took great pleasure in these talks with Senator Lodge, for, although not always in accord in some of their political views, I know no one in whose stimulating mentality my brother took keener pleasure; and on the fundamental issues of “America First,” and of deep-rooted patriotism and practical service to their country, they stood invariably as one man.

One day—in fact, it was the last day that I sat with him in the hospital—he seemed particularly bright and on the near road to recovery. His left arm was still in bandages, but with his strong right hand he gesticulated as of old, and sitting in his armchair, his eyes clear and shining, his face ruddy and animated, he seemed to me to have lost nothing of the vigorous and inspiring personality of earlier days. As usual, he shared my every interest, reiterated his desire to have my little grandson, Douglas, and his sisters pay a visit in the holidays to Sagamore Hill, told me delightedly how he would show Douglas every trophy in the large north room where his trophies were kept, and said that he wanted to know all the children intimately. From family affairs we branched off to public affairs, and speaking of the possibilities of the future, he said he knew much depended upon his health, but that he recognized that even amongst those who had been opposed to him in the past, there was now a strong desire for him to be the Republican candidate for President in 1920. Alluding to his birthday so lately passed, he said: “Well, anyway, no matter what comes, I have kept the promise that I made to myself when I was twenty-one.” “What promise, Theodore?” I asked him. “You made many promises to yourself, and I am sure have kept them all.” “I promised myself,” he said, bringing his right fist down with emphasis on the arm of the chair, “that I would work up to the hilt until I was sixty, and I have done it. I have kept my promise, and now, even if I should be an invalid—I should not like to be an invalid—but even if I should be an invalid, or if I should die [this with a snap of his finger and thumb], what difference would it make?” “Theodore,” I said, “do you remember what you said to me nearly a year ago when you thought you were dying in this same hospital? You said that you were glad it was not one of your boys that was dying at that time in this place, for they could die for their country. Do you feel the same way now?” “Yes,” he said, “just the same way. I wish that I might, like Quentin, have died for my country.” “I know you wish it,” I answered, “but I want to tell you something. Every one of us—even those not as courageous, not as patriotic, as you are—would, I feel sure, if our country were in peril, be willing to bare our breasts to any bullet, could we, by so doing, protect and save our country; but the trouble is that the very people who, in peril, will give themselves, with absolute disregard of the consequences, to their country’s service, fail, utterly, in times of peace, to sacrifice anything whatsoever for their country’s good. The difference, Theodore, between you and the majority of us is that you not only are willing and anxious to die for your country, but that you live for your country every day of your life.”

Within a few days, in fact on Christmas day, he was moved to Oyster Bay, and at first seemed benefited by the change. On Friday, January 3, I had arranged to go out and spend the day with him, but a message came that he was not quite as comfortable and would I wait until Monday, when he hoped to feel much better and enjoy my visit.

On the Sunday he seemed better again, my sister-in-law told me later, and enjoyed the whole day. He loved, passionately, his home at Sagamore Hill, and the view from it over the Sound on which he had rowed so often from boyhood up. He loved the beauty of the shrubs and trees and undulating wooded hills, and he loved best of all the sense of home there, and the happy family life which, even with a vacant chair, he knew would continue. He expressed his content that evening to Mrs. Roosevelt, in whose companionship he took the same delight as when in their youth he had brought her to be the adored mistress of that home. Later in the evening he did not seem quite so well and she sent for the doctor, who, after testing him in various ways, pronounced his condition as very satisfactory. Relieved in mind, Mrs. Roosevelt left him in charge of his faithful attendant, James Amos, and shortly after she went out he turned to James and said, “Put out the light.” Once again his devoted wife came to his bedside, thinking she heard him stir, but found him sleeping peacefully. At four o’clock James detected a change in the breathing, and realizing that all was not well, called the trained nurse. In a few moments, as Senator Lodge said later in his great oration on his friend before the joint houses of Congress in Washington, “Valiant-for-Truth passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.”

That Sunday evening, just before Theodore Roosevelt told his faithful servant to “Put out the light,” there was a meeting held in New York under the auspices of the American Defense Society, at which he had hoped to be present. Not able to be there in person, he sent them a letter, and at the moment that he, at his beloved home on the hill, closed his eyes for the last time, his faithful followers listened to his ringing exhortation that there should be “no sagging back in Americanism.” The youth, twenty-three years of age, as an assemblyman at Albany had come to his native city to make his maiden address on that theme so near his heart, and the man, whose life-work, replete with patriotism, was drawing to a close, sent the same fervent message in his last hours to his fellow countrymen. All his life long he had been for those fellow countrymen “the patriotic sentinel; pacing the parapet of the Republic, alert to danger and every menace; in love with duty and service, and always unafraid.”—From Senator Warren G. Harding’s address on “Theodore Roosevelt” before the Senate and House of Ohio, late in January, 1919.

At six o’clock on that very Monday morning when I was hoping to go to him and enjoy his dear companionship, the telephone-bell in my room rang and my sister-in-law’s voice, gentle and self-controlled, though vibrant with grief, told me that he was gone, and that she wanted me to come at once to Sagamore. It was not long before my eldest son and I were climbing the familiar hill. As we neared the house, I could not bring myself to believe that the great personality who had always welcomed me there had passed away.

That afternoon Mrs. Roosevelt and I walked far and fast along the shore and through the woodlands he had loved, and on our return in the waning winter twilight we suddenly became conscious that airplanes were flying low around the house. In a tone of deep emotion Mrs. Roosevelt said: “They must be planes from the camp where Quentin trained. They have been sent as a guard of honor for his father.”

That night as I stood alone in the room where my brother lay, these lines came to me—I called them “Sagamore,” that old Indian word for which my brother cared so much. It means chief or chieftain, and Sagamore Hill, the chieftain’s hill.

SAGAMORE