PERSHING
Nobody will ever call him "Papa" Pershing. He is a stepfather to the
inefficient and even when he is pleased he says little. In the matter of
giving praise the General is a homeopath. For that reason he can gain
enormous effect in the rare moments when he chooses to compliment a man
or an organization. Pershing believes that discipline is the foundation
of an army.
"I think," said one young American officer, "that his favorite military
leader is Joshua because he made the sun and the moon stand at
attention." In other words Pershing is a soldiers' soldier. No man can
strike such hard blows as he does and leave no scars. There are men here
and there in the army who do not love him but their criticism almost
invariably ends, "but I guess I'll have to admit that he's a good
soldier."
Pershing is not a disciplinarian merely for the sake of discipline but
he believes that it is the gauge of the temper of any military
organization. His interest in detail is insatiable. He can read a man's
soul through his boots or his buttons. Next to the Kaiser, Pershing
hates nothing so much as rust and dust and dirt. Perhaps round shoulders
should go in the list as well, and pockets. Certainly he makes good the
things he preaches. There is no finer figure in any army in Europe. The
General is fit from the tip of his glistening boots to his hat top. We
saw him once after he had walked through a front line trench on a rainy
day. There were sections of that trench where the mud was over a man's
shoetops and the back area which had to be crossed before the trench
system was reached was a great lake of casual water fed at its fringes
by roaring rain torrents. And yet the general came out of the trench
without a speck of mud on his boots in spite of the fact that he had
plunged along with no apparent regard for his footing.
There was dust behind him, though, on the afternoon he first came to
the training area to see his men. News reached our town that the general
was up in the northern end of the training zone and moving fast. An
officer passing by gave me a lift in his car and when we arrived at the
next village half a dozen soldiers who were sitting on a bench jumped up
for dear life and jarred themselves to the very heels with the stiffest
of military salutes.
The officer grinned. "Pershing's in town," he said and so he was.
We found him in a kitchen talking about onions to a cook. He asked each
soldier in turn what sort of food he was getting. Some were too
frightened to do more than mumble an inaudible answer. A few said, "Very
good, sir." And one or two had complaints. The General listened to the
complaints attentively and in each case pressed his questions so as to
make the soldier be absolutely concrete in his answers. Next he turned
upon an officer and wanted to know just what the sewage system of the
town was. The officer was a dashing major and he seemed ill at ease when
Pershing asked how many days a week he inspected the garbage dump.
"That isn't enough," said the General when the major answered. "I want
you to pay more attention to those things."
From the kitchen he went into every billet in the village. In two he
climbed up the ladders to see what sort of sleeping quarters the men had
in their lofts. In one billet a soldier stole a look over his shoulder
at the General as he passed. Pershing turned immediately.
"That's not the way to be a soldier," he said. "You haven't learned the
first principle of being a soldier." He turned to a second lieutenant.
"This man doesn't stand at attention properly," he explained. "I want
you to make him stand at attention for five minutes."
The next offender was a captain who had one hand in his pocket while
giving an order. The General spoke to him just as severely as he had to
the enlisted man. Then he was into his car and away to the next village.
Pershing is always on the move. One of his aides told me that he never
had more than five minutes' notice of where the General was going or
how long he would stay. No man in the army has covered so much territory
as Pershing. He has been in practically every village occupied by the
American troops. He has inspected every hospital and every training
camp. One day he will be at a port looking at the accommodations which
are being made for incoming vessels and on the next he will have jumped
from the base to a front line trench. He has been on all the Western
fronts except the Italian. His French and British and Belgian hosts find
him a most ambitious guest. He wants to see everything. Once while
observing a French offensive he expressed a desire to go forward and see
a line of trenches which had just been captured from the Germans. The
French tried to dissuade him but the General complained that he could
not see just how things were going from any other position and so into
the German trench he went.
Pershing has developed in France. Like every other man in the American
army he has had to study modern warfare, but more than that he has
caught something of the spirit of the French. He has acquired some of
their ability to put a gesture into command, to utilize personality in
the inspiration of troops. He is not yet the equal of the French in this
respect. Joffre, for instance, fully realized the military usefulness of
his enormous popularity and capitalized it. It was not mere luck that he
became a tradition. Pétain, while by no means the equal of Joffre on the
personal side, knows how to talk to soldiers and to townsfolk and to
make himself a big human force.
While he is still a homeopath, General Pershing realizes more than he
ever did before the value of a pat on the back given at the right time.
I saw him do one of those little gracious things in a base hospital
which was caring for the first American wounded. A youthful doughboy was
lying flat on his back wondering just how long it was going to be before
supper time came round when all of a sudden there was a clatter at the
door. The doughboy was afraid it was going to be some more nurses and
doctors. They had bothered him a lot by bandaging up his arm every
little while and it hurt, but when he looked up at the foot of his bed
there stood the man with four stars on his shoulders. The little
doughboy grinned a bit nervously. He thought it was funny that he should
be lying on his back and General Pershing standing up.
The General was somewhat nervous and embarrassed, too. He still lacks a
little of the French feeling for the dramatic in the doing of these
little things. He had to clear his throat once and then he said, "I want
to congratulate you. I envy you. There isn't a man in the army who
wouldn't like to be in your place. You have brought home to the people
of America the fact that we are in the war."
The doughboy didn't say anything, but the nurse who made the rounds that
evening wondered why a patient who was doing so well should have a pulse
hitting up to ninety-six.
Earlier in the summer General Pershing encountered some far more
embarrassing tests. He had to handle bouquets. The donor was usually a
French girl and a very little one. When Pershing and Pétain made a joint
trip through the American army zone there were two little girls and two
bouquets in each village. General Pétain, after receiving his bouquet,
would bend over gracefully and kiss the little girl, adding one or two
kindly phrases immediately following "ma petite." General Pershing began
by patting the little girls on the head, but he realized it was not
enough and after a bit he began to kiss them, too; only once or twice he
got tangled up in their hats and found it hard to maintain military
dignity. He handled the flowers gingerly. He seemed to regard each
bouquet as a bomb which would explode in five seconds but each time
there was some aide ready to step forward and relieve him.
The attitude of the average West Pointer towards his men is generally
speaking the same as that of General Pershing. Some observers think the
West Point attitude too strict, but I was inclined to believe that the
men from the academy handled men better than the reserve officers. They
are strict, it is true, but at the same time they have been trained to
look after the needs of their men closely. The trouble with the average
reserve officer is that he has not had time to learn how much he must
father his men and mother them, too, for that matter. He does not know
probably just how dependent the average soldier is upon his officer.
Perhaps the strictest officer of all is the man who was once a non-com.
The former doughboy knows the tricks of the enlisted man and he is
determined that nobody shall put anything over on him. He is often just
a little bit afraid that the soldiers are going to trade on the fact
that he was once an enlisted man. I once saw a soldier offer some cigars
to two officers. One of the officers was a West Pointer and he laughed
and took a cigar but the former non-com. refused very sternly. He could
not afford to be indebted to an enlisted man.
I do not wish to imply that the men who come up from the ranks do not
make good officers. As a matter of fact they are among the best, once
their preliminary self-consciousness has worn off. The transition from
stripes to bars is perfect torture to some of them. One company had a
crack soldier who had been a sergeant for seven years. He was
recommended for promotion and was sent to an officers' training school
in France. He did very well but just a week before he was to receive his
commission he succeeded in gaining permission to be dropped from the
school and go back to his old company as sergeant. At the last minute he
had decided that he did not want to be an officer.
I watched him put a company through its drill two days after his return.
They moved with spirit and precision under his commands but when it was
all over I found one reason why he didn't want to be an officer.
"That was very good today," he said. "You done well."
The first lieutenant smiled. He had a right to smile, too, for the
return of the sergeant to his company had almost cut his work in half.
He knew his value well enough.
"The best I can do is teach the men," he said. "It takes an old sergeant
to learn them."