第105页 Babylon, Mespot - Iraq

Kermit Roosevelt 
    BLond-haired Kermit Roosevelt was Teddy's second son. Two years Denys's junior, after graduating from Harvard he had worked for a railroad company in Brazil, but lacked his father's ambition and unlike his elder brother he was not a corporate man. Although silghtly built, Kermit, like Denys, had immense physical stamina. He was by far the most literary of his five siblings and one half-sister, and he and Denys exchanged books while marooned in the Adriatic, both eager to beef up their acquaintance with Babylonian history before arriveing in Mesopotamia. Kermit had chosen to serve, at least initailly, with the British Expeditionary Force. Apart from a penchant for gambling he was a solitary figure. 'Very few outsider care for him' his mother Edith once commented, 'but if they like him at all they like him very much.' Introspective like her and adventurous like his father Teddy, Kermit was both a man of action and a sensitive, imaginative thinker. So was Denys, but he had the character to reconcile the two. Kermit, in the end, did not; it was his personal tragedy. There was alcholism on both sides of the family, and in the 1920s and 1930s Kermit drank himself almost to death, eventually finishing the job by shooting himself while serving in Alaska in the Second World War. He was his mother's favourite; among her children, she wrote , he was, 'the one with the white head and the black heart.'