General’s Wife

TOGETHER: ANNALS OF AN ARMY WIFE (307 pp.)—Katherine Tupper Marshall —Tupper & Love ($3.50).

When widowed Katherine Tupper Brown told her sons that she was inviting an Army officer named Colonel Marshall to visit them at their home on Fire Island, the lads at once smelt a rat. “If it makes you happier, mother, it is all right with me,” said Clifton (14). “I don’t know about that. . . .” muttered Allen (12). But soon afterwards, the future Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army received a brief, secret note from Allen: “I hope you will come to Fire Island. Don’t be nervous, it is O.K. with me. (Signed) A friend in need is a friend indeed. …” A few months later, Lieut. Colonel George Catlett Marshall became Allen’s stepfather.

Katherine Marshall has written what she frankly calls “this homespun account” because “General Marshall has told me that he will never write his own memoirs, his knowledge of people and events being too intimate for publication.” The result is a friendly, chatty, modest collection of data and trivia that rarely goes beyond the bounds of domesticity.

Katherine Marshall began to glimpse her new husband’s extraordinary military qualities when she followed him to Fort Moultrie, S.C., where he commanded the 8th Infantry, in 1933. “No detail was too small for his attention, no soldier too lowly. … If the post was shabby, with poorly kept grounds, he began fixing up his own garden and lawn; and within a few weeks all the lawns and gardens down the line began to take on a different complexion. There was never a word said, rarely an order given.”

Usually, says Author Marshall, her husband “would start [a new job] with the . . . enthusiasm of a young lieutenant on his first assignment.” But when, in 1933, approaching a colonel’s retirement age, he was ordered to leave his regiment and become Senior Instructor of the Illinois National Guard, he dashed off a letter to Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, pleading that such a shift would be “fatal to his future.” MacArthur was adamant, and for months Author Marshall watched her husband go about his new duties with “a grey, drawn look.” When Colonel Marshall’s generalcy came through in 1936, husband and wife sat staring at each other, speechless.

Through the long, exhausting war years the General went home in the evenings, too tired even to talk. She saw to it that he had plenty of relaxing books to read (“my husband [goes] through a pile of books with the avidity of a swarm of locusts . . .”). Once he was in bed, she answered his phone calls all through the night. Usually the calls came from enthusiastic civilians who could hardly wait to tell the General about their brand-new scheme for destroying enemy tanks, etc. But once, at 3 a.m., when Mrs. Marshall had patiently insisted that she be allowed to take the message, the voice at the other end snapped indignantly: “Yes, I’ll give you the message. This is the Times-Herald, and when the General wakes up you can tell him the War Department is on fire” (it was, but just a small blaze).

One of the closest of General Marshall’s friends was the late Field Marshal Sir John Dill, chief of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. One day the two war leaders changed into civvies and took a busman’s holiday, visiting Gettysburg. After listening to the guide’s account of the battle, the two “civilians” politely asked him to let them go on alone. He replied icily: “Certainly, if you men are not interested in military affairs.”

Author Marshall keeps the customary treasured scrapbook in which she pastes letters from the General’s admirers the world over. Sample letter:

Dear Boss:

We are just in from Fort Dix, New Jersey, on our way to Fort Bragg, N.C. The service was good but the coffee (?) was cold. Will Confederate uniforms be issued after we pass Washington? Also will Confederate money be honored at the Post Exchange?

Love and kisses,
‘The Boys’