John Pershing of Missouri following Pétain and Nivelle--Training his
chiefs--The solidity of Liggett--From schoolmaster of theory to Army
command--The wiry Bullard--His mark on the pioneer division--The
inexorable Summerall, crusader, martinet, and leader of men--The
imperturbable Hines.
When from the window of a luxurious office thirty stories above the
pavement I looked down upon the human current of Broadway, and over
the roof-tops of the tongue of Manhattan, and across the bridges to
other roof-tops, and upon the traffic of bay and river, I thought of
that little room, first door to the left upstairs, in the town hall
of Souilly, where more men than all of service age in all the city of
New York had been commanded in two of the greatest battles of history.
The "sacred road" to Verdun took the place of Broadway; the volcano of
unceasing artillery fire, the place of the city's muffled roar.
In this little room Pétain had said, "They shall not pass," and so
wrought that they did not pass; and Nivelle had shown me his maps and
plans for the brilliant re-taking of Douaumont and Vaux in the fall
of 1916, which was to make him commander-in-chief as the exemplar of
a system of attack upon which he staked his reputation in the Allied
offensive of 1917. In those days no one dreamed that American khaki
would stream along the "sacred road," and American guns again set the
hills trembling with their blasts; or that John Pershing of Missouri
from this little room would direct the largest force we had ever sent
into action in the battle which was to be the final answer to German
aggression.
The Chief of Staff's room, its walls hung with maps, was across the
hall from the Commanding General's, as it had been in the Verdun
days. Then as now it sent across to the General's desk slips of
paper with the digested news of the battle, which he could follow by
reference to his own maps. Now as then a cloistered quiet pervaded the
building which had been the center of a small town. Orderlies stood
on guard, and adjutants on guard above them. The lights behind the
black-curtained windows burned late, as on the basis of the day's news
plans for the next day's action were made--plans for another advance
against the Germans, this time, instead of resistance to their advance.
"You never know what is in the C.-in-C.'s mind, and how it is coming
out," said his aide. "When it comes, it comes quick and definite--just
like the outburst of a bombardment for an offensive which has been
weeks in preparation."
He listened to many counselors; but the decisive counsels he held
behind the locked doors of his own mind. Those who thought they knew
what he was going to do knew least; those who received the most
affirmative smile bestowed in silence might receive the most positive
of negative decisions when the time came. He was charged with "snap"
judgments on some things; and with unduly delaying over others--while
he smiled over both criticisms. In all events his word was supreme. Men
might contrive to defeat his orders, but no man dared dispute them.
He had continued to grow with the growth of his army; his grip of the
lever strengthened as the machine became more ponderous. Others might
build the parts of the machine; he brought them together in his own way
and his own time.
We had started with divisions; then organized corps staffs; then
appointed corps commanders; then organized the staff of the First Army,
now in the Meuse-Argonne, and afterward the staff of the Second Army,
now at Saint-Mihiel. He was still commanding both armies as general in
the field. When would he choose their commanders? Professional army
gossip had an ear out for rumors. Possibly the Commander-in-Chief did
not know himself; possibly he was waiting on the test of battle to
find the two most worthy to lead. On the night of October 11th his
choice was made; it was announced by his calling up some generals on
the telephone. Two learned that they were promoted from corps to army
command, two that they were promoted from division to corps command.
It was no surprise to learn that Major-General Hunter Liggett was to
have the First Army, and Major-General Robert L. Bullard to have the
Second Army. Liggett, who was already a major-general of regulars,
had been considered as a possible commander of the A. E. F. when we
first decided to send an army to France. If ever a soldier looked as
if he could "eat three square meals a day" without indigestion, it was
Liggett. Over six feet in height and generously built, his majestic
figure would attract attention in any gathering. There was a depth of
experience shining out of his frank eyes, and he radiated mellowness,
poise, and reserve energy. The army knew him as a thorough student,
sound in his views, which he could express with compelling force. No
one questioned that he had a mind capable of grasping military problems
down to their details, and a resourcefulness in the "war game" as
played at the War College which fitted him in theory for the direction
of immense forces.
Large bodies move slowly, though with great momentum when they start,
and the sceptic's question about Liggett was whether or not he had
energy in keeping with his mentality. McDowell made excellent plans for
Bull Run, and lost it. McClellan seemed an ideal leader, but lacked
convincing power of action, though he built a machine which others were
to direct.
A full corps in the plans of the A. E. F. was six divisions; and when,
early in 1918, Liggett was assigned to the Command of the First Corps,
he had one division which had been in the trenches, and three others
about ready to go into the trenches under the direction of the French.
All the other corps which were to come would look to his example in
pioneer organization. Settling down in the little town of Neufchâteau,
he formed his staff and set to work organizing his G's of operations,
intelligence, supply, transport, preparatory to taking over our first
permanent sector.
Thus far his authority had been little more than paper routine under
the French. He was a schoolmaster of theory. Then the March German
offensive against the British left him with a corps staff which was a
fifth wheel in present plans, just as he was about to have his sector.
His best divisions were being sent to the Picardy battlefront while
he remained at Neufchâteau, having an internal American authority
over any divisions in the trenches in Lorraine, but even these were
under the direct command of French corps. He accepted the situation in
a manner in keeping with his mental and physical bigness. He kept on
working on his "war college" organization at his headquarters while,
operating under the French at the other side of France, his divisions
were taking Cantigny and making a stand on the Paris road and on the
Marne.
The commanders of these divisions, however, were winning distinction
for themselves through actual battle experience, and some of them
would soon be taking command of our new corps composed of our rapidly
arriving divisions, which raised the question if, when the time came to
have a commander for the First Army, Liggett would not be passed over
from very want of any except theoretical preparation. No one worried
less about this than Liggett. He seemed anything but ambitious. Yet,
pass over Liggett? That enormous, calm, thoroughgoing Liggett! He
loomed tall as his six feet, and broad in proportion, at the thought.
I always think of him leaning over a table studying a map, with the
intensity of a student who was never mentally fatigued.
When was he to have any battle experience? If we were to have an
integral army to attack the Saint-Mihiel salient, our corps commanders
must have other than paper training. General Pershing arranged that
Liggett take corps command of an American and a French division in the
Marne counter-offensive. This brought him into close association with
the French army command in the midst of a great movement. Later, in
its operations at Saint-Mihiel, everybody said that "Liggett's corps
had done well," and said it in the way that took for granted that
Liggett was bound to do well. He is not the kind of man, as I see him,
who sets people into a contagion of cheers, or the kind of man who
makes enthusiastic enemies or equally enthusiastic partisans. Rather
he is like some sound office member of a great law firm, who does not
make speeches or appear in court, but who, other lawyers say, is the
buttress of the firm's strength.
I remember a distinguished civil official from home talking of our
generals, and saying, when I suggested Liggett: "Why, he is the one I
didn't meet," which was not surprising. A certain isolation that he had
was due less to any personal exclusiveness than to the fact that he was
a large body well anchored to his maps and his job.
In the Meuse-Argonne battle his corps had the wicked front on the left
against the Argonne Forest and the valley of the Aire; and again he
did well, leaving no doubt that he had energy as well as capacity,
or that he deserved the three stars of a lieutenant-general which
General Pershing now placed on his shoulders. Later, in the drive of
November 1st, his maneuvering of our corps and divisions, in that
swift movement in pursuit and in the crossing of the Meuse which gave
us the heights on the other bank, seemed without a tactical fault in
its conception and execution, and it warranted the use of the word
brilliant in thinking of Liggett, who in the closing days of the war
had the opportunity to show the cumulative results of his study of
his maps from the days when he began sawing wood in Neufchâteau. He
was a modest, sound soldier, an able tactician, and a delightful,
simple gentleman, who did his country honor in France both as soldier
and as man. His place at the head of the First Corps was taken by
Major-General Joseph T. Dickman.
Both he and Major-General Robert Lee Bullard, who received command
of the Second Army, then holding our line won in the Saint-Mihiel
operation, were broad-minded men of the world who would have made their
mark in any profession. Physically you could make two Bullards out of
one Liggett. My most distinct picture of him was of his slight figure
in his big fur coat in the midst of winter rains and sleet, while his
small head, with his close-fitting overseas cap, only made the coat
appear the larger. In his command of the 1st in the Toul sector and
in our first offensive at Cantigny, he had set his mark on our pioneer
division. The French liked him, and he could speak their language with
the attractive Southern accent of his boyhood days. He took the French
_liaison_ officers into his family and set them to work, and they
became so fond of his family that one of them was overheard telling
French staff officers what a lot they had to learn from the Americans.
If Bullard could not eat three square meals a day, it did not interfere
with his belligerent spirit. His brain was just as good a fighting
brain as if he had eaten beefsteak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
However bad his neuritis in the winter days, his blue eyes were always
twinkling, and when he came into his mess and the officers rose, his
smiling request that they dismiss the formality was all in keeping with
the atmosphere of that division command.
His dry, pungent wit was not affected when the doctor put him on a
diet of an egg and a bit of toast. It always came back to the fact
that war was fighting. We had much to learn from the French, from
the British, from all veterans, and you could not be too brave or
too skillful. If you made up your mind to lick the other fellow, you
were going to lick him. When his neuritis was very bad at one time,
he told General Pershing that he did not want to stand in the way of
a successor. General Pershing replied that he would not forget the
reminder; and remarked to someone else: "Bullard's division is doing
well. The neuritis hasn't gone to his head." His body seemed to be made
of elastic steel wire that always had the spring for any occasion, and
the more fighting he had the better his health became. In the Argonne
battle his neuritis entirely disappeared.
He never seemed very busy. In the midst of battle you would find him
appearing at seeming leisure; and his attitude always was: "What a
fine, able lot of men I have around me! They do all the work for me."
Thus he developed brigadiers out of his colonels.
When he corrected subordinates, it was with a simple phrase that cut
through the fog of discussion. One day, before an operation, one of
his colonels who was a little wrought up on the subject told him of a
number of young officers in his regiment who might be brave, but who
were not up to the mark of leadership. "You think it over coolly and
make me a list of those you are sure about," said Bullard. "It's a
matter for your judgment. Perhaps these officers will do better in some
service that is not combatant, or perhaps they need a little lesson
which will make them all right in some other regiment. Make me the
list, and I'll have everyone on it relieved right away"--and you may
be sure that the colonel made the list with care.
The Third Corps had been tried out in the Marne salient. In the
Meuse-Argonne battle it had seized the bank of the Meuse to protect
our right flank, and against superior raking artillery fire from the
heights of the whale-back and across the river, on the slopes and in
the woods of the Meuse trough, gained the Cunel-Brieulles road with an
indomitable skill, which proved his contention that, however heavy the
odds, if you make up your mind to lick the other fellow you will.
In the instances of Liggett and Bullard, both general officers before
the war, high rank had shown its worthiness of higher rank in the swift
merciless test of war's opportunities, while the other two officers who
received telephone messages from the Commander-in-Chief had both been
majors when we entered the war. I had first met Charles P. Summerall as
a lieutenant in Riley's battery on the march to the relief of Peking.
When I next met him, he had the artillery brigade of the 1st Division.
He was given the command of the 1st when Bullard was given a corps.
The way in which he sent the veteran division through toward Soissons
in the Marne counter-offensive was a precedent for the way in which he
sent it as a wedge over the Aire wall, which won him command of the
Fifth Corps.
In the last days of the war no one of Pershing's generals was more
talked about in the A. E. F. than he. His was a personality of the
kind which was bound to make talk. No one ever denied that he was a
fighter and that he knew his profession. He could make men follow him,
and make men fear him. They called him a "hell-devil of a driver," but
won victories under him. If he had started as a private in the French
Revolution, and had not been killed too early in his career, I think
that he would have had one of the marshal's batons which Napoleon
said every private carried in his knapsack. If no general expected
more of his soldiers than Summerall, no general expected more of
himself. Sturdily built, of average height, he was tireless. He could
go about the front all day, and work at headquarters all night; or go
about the front all night, and work at headquarters all the next day.
When officers and men were numb from fatigue, he gave an example of
endurance as a reason for his further demands on their strength. "If
you win, your mistakes do not count," he told a group of officers one
day. "If you lose, they do. If you win, your men have their reward for
their wounds and suffering, and those who have fallen have not died in
vain. If you fail, your men feel that all their effort has been wasted.
Do not fail. Go through!"
It was said of him, as it was said of Grant, that he was not afraid
of losses. Like Grant, he was a hammerer. Pershing could depend upon
him, as Pétain could depend upon Mangin, to "break the line," and as
Lee depended upon Jackson to arrive on time and ahead of the enemy.
Considering the objectives he gained, his admirers regarded him as a
master economist of lives, as he was, comparing what he gained for a
given number of casualties with what many other divisions gained for
their casualties. With an iron will be applied the principle that he
who hesitates in war is lost. If you keep the upper hand, the enemy
suffers more heavily than you. Summerall's standard was always what he
was doing to the enemy, and his attitude toward the enemy was not that
of a professional soldier who regards war as a game in which you are
testing your wits against an adversary. He would at times exhibit a
Peter the Hermit fervor when he spoke of his soldiers' crusade against
the barbarians, or pointed out to them ruined villages and heart-broken
peasants as another reason for charging again. With his staff around
him in the midst of an action, he gave an impression of thorough grasp
of their parts and his. In this, as in everything he did, he had a
touch of the histrionic. He was most concretely modern in arranging his
patterns of barrages, and at the same time it occurred to an observer
that it would have taken only a change of garb and hardly of mood
to make him perfectly at home among the knights before the walls of
Jerusalem. By this time you will understand that he is of a type whose
characteristics entreat a writer to fluency, and that there are several
Summeralls.
There was the Summerall who might turn up at any point on his front at
any time and talk to his men, while an officer stood apprehensively
by, wondering what might happen to him; a Summerall who rounded on
officers and men for carelessness about details that would mean a habit
of carelessness which would accompany them into action; a Summerall
surprising young officers who considered him a ruthless driver by
telling them that they were working too hard--when it seemed to them
that they never could work hard enough to please him--and that they
must not worry over their maps and orders in a way to keep them from
getting enough sleep to insure the strength necessary for self-command
and the command of their men. Again, he would speak of his men and
particularly of their deeds of initiative with a gentle, worshipful
awe, as if every one were greater than any marshal of France in his
estimation; again, he would be telling his young officers that they
could not be worthy of their men, but that he expected their most
devoted effort to that end. The men would always follow if they knew
how to lead. He made it an almighty honor and a responsibility to be
a second lieutenant, and yet he would censure colonel, lieutenant, or
private in a manner which assuredly no politician would ever use in
order to win the vote of a constituent. When an officer and a number
of men standing in a group were all hit by the same shell, he had a
glaring example to demonstrate how untrained we still were when an
officer would allow soldiers to gather round him and become a target
for the enemy's artillery, thus losing their lives without taking a
single German life in return. The sight of those bodies spoiled the
victory for Summerall. He burned the picture in the minds of his men in
the course of their drills. One lieutenant said that if the spirit of
the officer who had been the center of the group could have been given
the chance to come back to earthly life, he might refuse it in fear of
the lecture he would receive from Summerall for his inefficiency.
All the different Summeralls were the different strings to his bow in
applying his teachings and gaining his ends, while he was unconscious
of there being more than one Summerall. He was the A. E. F.'s negation
of the propagandic habit of building up the characters of generals
from one common attribute, when every one of them, whether French or
British or American, was an individual human being.
When you went to Summerall's headquarters by day, you were pretty
certain, unless there were a big action in progress, to find him
absent, looking in on divisional, brigade, regimental, or battalion
headquarters, moving about among the guns and transport and
troops--wherever it pleased him to go in his insistence upon keeping in
close human touch with the forces under his command. He left routine to
his staff officers, and he expected much of his chief of staff. How his
staff officers, hard master though he was, respected his ability!
He could be forensic on occasion, as he was searchingly brief at
others. It was not beneath his military dignity to make a speech,
either. On the day before the great final attack on November 1st,
when the German line was broken, he was out from morning to night,
gathering officers in groups around him and addressing his soldiers,
reminding them of their duties on the morrow, when there must be no
faint-heartedness. They must go through. When he returned to his
headquarters, hoarse from talking in the raw open air, General Maistre,
who had come from Marshal Foch, was there, and General Pershing came in
a little later. Both asked the one question of Summerall: would he go
through? He answered that he would, with the positiveness that he had
been instilling into his troops.
If he had ever failed in one of his drives, there would certainly have
been a smash, but he made no blind charges. He wanted to know where he
was going, and he wanted to be sure that he had his bridge of shells
for the men to cross in their advance. He prepared his lightnings well,
but when they were loosed he would not stay them.
Major-General John L. Hines, the new commander of the Third Corps, had
been a colonel under Bullard in the 1st Division, and had commanded the
bull-dog 4th Division in the Third Corps, under Bullard, in the trough
of the Meuse. He was of a wholly different type from Summerall, with
whom he shared the honor for swift promotion won in the field. It was
said of him that he was the best linguist of the A. E. F., as he could
be equally silent in all languages, including English. If the accepted
idea of General Grant is true, he and Grant could have had a most
sociable evening together by the exchange of a half dozen sentences, of
which I am certain that General Hines would not have used more than his
share.
He came to France with General Pershing as a major in the
adjutant-general's office, where he served for some time before he was
sent to a regiment. He seemed to be out of place at a desk. It was
like asking taciturn Mars--and I suppose that Mars was taciturn--to do
drawn work. Sandy of complexion, sturdily built, he had that suggestive
quiet strength, militarized by army service, which we associate with
Western sheriffs who do not talk before they shoot. Without his having
said a word, you understood, by the very way in which he was taciturn,
that if you were in a tight place you would like to have him along. I
used to think that if a section of the floor had been blown up in front
of his desk while he was signing a paper, the shock of the explosion
would not have interfered with the legibility of his signature. There
was something in his manner which soldiers would respect. They, too,
saw that he would be a good companion in a tight place. When someone
had a troublous problem on hand, he would say: "Let me have it. I'll
take care of it." He took care of it promptly too, once he had the
paper in his strong hands.
Whether as a major or as a corps commander, he was quick to appreciate
that a subordinate was preoccupied with unimportant things, and he had
seen enough red tape in the old adjutant-general's office to know how
to amputate it without too much hemorrhage. In common with Summerall
he too had the endurance which no amount of work seems to faze, and
that clarity of thought and readiness of decision which thrive on
crises. He, too, went among his troops, impressing them with his cool,
unchanging personality, his bull-dog tenacity, and his implacably
aggressive spirit.
Having spoken his messages over the telephone which called to greater
service the adjutants who had served him well, General Pershing might
move about his far-flung kingdom again, though he was not to be long
away from the battlefront. Nothing in the A. E. F. was better regulated
than his own time and movements. Wherever he was, his special train
was waiting upon him. In these later days he had a car fitted up as
an office, with aides and stenographers in attendance. When the train
pulled out from a station, two automobiles were on board. They were in
readiness when the train arrived at its destination. If he had only a
hundred miles to go, it was covered in the night while he was asleep.
The day's beginning found him where he chose to be, at Marshal Foch's
headquarters, at the main headquarters at Chaumont, in Paris, or at
either Army headquarters. If he wished to speak over the wires, they
were instantly cleared of other messages. The President of the United
States may only ask a senator or a governor to come to see him; but a
word from the C.-in-C. for any officer to report to him at a certain
hour and place was an order. One might come clear across France for
the ten-minute conference which was set down in the schedule of
appointments on the pad of the aide to the C.-in-C. The democracy had
bestowed unlimited autocracy and responsibility, too, upon John J.
Pershing.
He had become the creature of this responsibility, determined to
be equal to it, his human impulsiveness of other days now and then
flashing out at the circle of authority that hedged him in, and his
indignation cleaving with broad-sword blows the links of bureaucracy
that plotting minds had forged around him.
At last after fifteen months his plans had achieved fruition. If he had
not had imagination, he could not have visualized the structure before
he began its building. Out of his window in that little room of the
town hall, which had a significance that none of his other headquarters
had, as he turned from his map he looked down upon the "sacred road"
to Verdun, which was the main street of Souilly. Motor trucks came
and went, and at one side of the town hall the staff cars stood in
military line, waiting upon the commands of generals and colonels
whom they served. The houses of the little town had not room for all
the office force of First Army Headquarters. This had overflowed
into many temporary buildings with walls of tar-paper, where all the
different branches, to the tune of the hosts of typewriters which was
the "jazz" of staff command, worked and had their messes. They sent
out the leading, if not always, perhaps, the light, through the battle
area, where the trucks surged all night and all day on the roads,
going forward laden with ammunition and food and returning empty,
where the ambulances went forward empty and returned laden, behind the
vortex of the struggle. How was all this power, and how were the men
who exerted it on a twenty-mile front in France, brought from home?
Long before Marshal Foch had summoned our troops to the attack in the
Meuse-Argonne, General Pershing had made his plan of how they should be
concentrated as the right flank of an Allied movement. To carry this
out he was to depend upon another adjutant.