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A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

<h2>CHAPTER VII PERSHING</h2> 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." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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