Army & Navy – HEROES: Old Soldier

(See Cover)

On the walks and lawns of Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital the war-wounded push themselves around in wheel chairs or hobble among the reddening leaves. In the afternoon they see a spare old, straight-backed figure in dark civilian clothes who walks slowly to the drive and hoists himself into a limousine. Even the newest convalescent recognizes him. The face is chipped away by age, the eyes dim. But it is the face on monuments, and the bearing is still West Point. That’s Black Jack Pershing, mister.

It is the week of the Great Armistice that lost the world a great war. Twenty-five years ago the ambulances were rolling along the hard-surfaced driveways of Walter Reed Hospital, bringing the men out of the foreign valleys—from St. Mihiel, the Meuse, the Somme. Today the ambulances roll again, bringing young men from other valleys—from Nicosia, Salerno, Kiska, Guadalcanal.

Twenty-Five Years. In his austere room at the hospital John Joseph Pershing, 83, General of the Armies, shuffles around in pajamas, reads newspapers, a few books, receives old soldier friends. The nation has honored him, but the nation has not yet discharged its debt in full.

To a democratic U.S. he has willed an honorable military tradition, though the nation has not always understood it.

In 1917-18, when the A.E.F. was threatened with dissolution, he kept it intact and built it up into an American Army.

He had left that Army the sound precepts on which to build a General Staff system, a nucleus of Pershing-trained officers like its Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. The General of the Armies could read with satisfaction now the unfolding history of the greatest army the U.S. had ever had. And he could reflect on the past. There was damn little else an old man could do. But in his 83 years his eyes had more than once seen the glory of U.S. arms.

Glory, Glory. . . . The winds of a violent “peace” rattled the cornfields of Linn

County, Mo., in 1865. Little Jack Pershing was five. People were singing Julia Ward Howe’s new Battle Hymn of the Republic and Pershing watched the ragged soldiers come back from Appomattox. His father was sometimes farmer, sometimes section foreman who raised his children on hard chores and Pilgrim’s Progress.

Pershing was the eldest of nine and he split rails like his hero Abe Lincoln. He also taught school and studied law until he heard about West Point. Simply because he had the chance to get a free education, he took up the career for which he was born. John J. Pershing became a soldier.

He was older than his classmates-22 as a plebe—a cold, impersonal, plodding, thoroughgoing young man. He stood 30th in a class of 77. In his last year he was president of his class and cadet captain, too.

Cavalryman. Pershing was graduated in ’86. The hoofbeats of the cavalry were in his ears. He galloped across South Dakota over the graves of the Sioux. He taught military science at the University of Nebraska and studied law, got a degree, thought of quitting the service.

In ’98, he went to Cuba with the Negro loth Cavalry. Lieut. Pershing was 38. He was almost 40 when he was sent to the Philippines and won his captaincy. He was a tough man and a hard disciplinarian, though he had a sentimental affection for his calling. He wrote to his classmates: “Drink deep thoughts of love and affection for us all!” In 1905 he married the daughter of the Hon. Francis E. Warren, Senator from Wyoming.

General. T.R. had his eye on him. T.R. wanted to promote him for the hard, impersonal way he had handled the Moro tribesmen in Mindanao. Over the heads of 862 officers, including 257 captains, 364 majors, no colonels, T.R. made John J. Pershing a brigadier.

The brigadier general had a face like a sharp ax and a back like a broomstick. He was all that the Academy taught its cadets an officer should be. He had three daughters and one son. In 1915, a live coal fell from a basket-grate in a dining room in the Presidio at San Francisco, set fire to the waxed floors. Pershing’s wife and three daughters, Helen, Anne, Mary, were burned to death. All that was left to Brigadier General Pershing was his six-year-old son.

Washington ordered him to bring back Pancho Villa, who had dared to cross the U.S. border on a raid. Pershing tracked the rascal Villa down. But Washington changed its mind. Washington told Pershing to let the rascal go and Pershing obeyed, tightlipped.

It was 1917. A white-faced man stood before Congress and cried: “Vessels . . . have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board. … The world must be made safe for democracy.” Woodrow Wilson called on Congress to declare war.

Commander In Chief. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker was a dependable man. Mr. Wilson told him to closet himself for a few days and recommend the officer who should take command of the American Expeditionary Forces. Mr. Baker actually knew few generals, except by name, but he had the records. The man he chose was John J. Pershing, whom he had never seen.

On June 13, 1917, Pershing landed in France. The Allies were bled white by three years of viselike war. They were low in morale and committed to holding trenches, but their spirits rose when Pershing and the A.E.F. arrived. The leaders of the British and French were eager to absorb this fresh new blood into their own thin blood streams.

But Pershing had other ideas. The American forces must fight as a unit, he said, and set his jaw. They could train better under their own men; they would not become infected with the Allies’ pessimism. A victorious American Army would give the nation prestige at the peace table, he thought. The U.S. must keep its own military tradition; there would be other wars. Foch, Clemenceau, Lloyd George bickered and bargained, Wilson and Baker backed their man up. Pershing won his point. The American forces trained and fought as a unit.

Pershing also stood for his own tactics: an American Army must be made ready to fight a war of movement, and the hell with this hole-in-the-ground kind of thing. He was a sound tactician and had studied his books; he stood up to British and French veterans who had forgotten their early lessons. French commanders incredulously watched U.S. soldiers spread chicken wire over barbed-wire entanglements and storm the trenches of the Boche. “You Americans have longer legs and bigger feet,” said a French general, shaking his head.

There was one other great problem which beset the Commander in Chief. He himself had had no training in General Staff work. With a nucleus of trained officer graduates from Fort Leavenworth staff school, he established a General Staff school in Langres, France, and turned out men trained in supply and administration—537 of them.

“Black Jack.” The A.E.F. grew up. Pershing was methodical. He made a fetish of writing things down in his clear, clipped style—with no metaphors, pseudo or otherwise. He made the A.E.F. drill. He insisted that infantrymen be taught to shoot, though the French clucked. The French depended on hand grenades. He was more than ever the spit-&-polish disciplinarian. To his officers “Black Jack” (the nickname he picked up when he was with the Negro loth) was God. To the enlisted men he was both God and devil. Some remembered him striding across a muddy field of France with his face hard and his uniform immaculate. Others remembered him as “that sonuvabitch [who] roared past our column in his big staff car, spattering every one of us with mud and water from head to foot.” He traced the successive phases of the first Battle of the Marne by the graves of the dead and thought of the “dreadful toll in human life.” But he was a stern man and believed in the attack.

Armistice. In September 1918, Colonel George C. Marshall, Chief of Operations for the First Army, finished the planning. On the 12th the First Army attacked along the salient at St. Mihiel. By the end of October the whole Meuse-Argonne front was aflame. In the gumbo mud of France 117,000 men of the First Army were dead or wounded. The German army was in retreat. On Oct. 30 Pershing wrote: “We should . . . continue the offensive until we compel [Germany’s] unconditional surrender.”

On Nov. 11, 1918, he rode through the bedlam of the Place de la Concorde, staring with frigid disapproval at the hysterical, joy-drunk mobs, who threatened to engulf him. His heart and his tongue alike were prophetically bitter: the war, though mercifully over, had not been won. Into sullen, unmolested Germany marched a U.S. Army of Occupation. Pershing saw a future that wishful, gentler men could not see.

What Price Glory? The U.S. was determined that it should not happen again. The fast-dwindling group of those who believed in preparedness wanted a National Defense Act to establish and keep the framework of an army, so that the next time the U.S. would be ready. Pershing was still busy in France; he sent Colonel John McAuley Palmer to give advice, and Palmer framed an act setting up stronger National Guard units, ROTCs, CMTCs and a Regular Army of 280,000 men. Pershing came home to testify before Congress. He wanted a democratic Army. This was a democratic Army. The bill was passed. But it was an emasculated version.

The pacifists—and the whole U.S. was rapidly turning pacifist, or at least antiwar—emasculated it. They wanted no Army. They thought that war could be stopped. Their propaganda appealed to a war-sick nation. That propaganda was still going strong in 1940. “World Peace-ways Inc.” spread its poster ads through the U.S. press: pictures of a maimed veteran captioned “Hello, Sucker,” of a chemist bending over a fiendish brew

(“If He’s Lucky a Million Men Will Die!”), of an infant on a meatblock (“Nice Fresh Babies—79¢ a Pound”). The pacifist group killed compulsory military training out of the Defense Act of 1920; the regular Army was later cut to 125,000; Stallings’ What Price Glory? had a long run. Everyone vowed again and again that it must not happen again.

Pershing was mentioned for the Presidency, but turned his stiff back. He was much admired by widows and young women. He received honorary degrees from 18 universities and the decorations of 13 nations and three States.

In 1919 Pershing was made General of the Armies of the U.S. by Act of Congress. In 1924, when he was 64, he was placed reverently on a shelf.

The Price of Peace. In 1938 the old warrior fell into a sudden coma, ill with rheumatism, arthritis, uremic poisoning. He was 78. The newspapers trotted out their ready-made obits. But two months later he showed up at his son’s wedding. In 1939 he made his last pilgrimage to France.

In 1940, on a warm afternoon in May, John J. Pershing stepped out of a limousine at the White House and clumped across the porch leaning on his cane. France had been invaded. Photographers raised their cameras but the old man wrathfully lifted his cane.

No cameras clicked until Black Jack put his cane aside and drew himself to attention—grey Homburg untilted, old eyes straight, grey mustache clipped, chin drawn in, black suit pressed to razor edges, black shoes gleaming. Then he wheeled and marched inside to talk with the President. A newsman said softly: “Here we go again.”

It was Dec. 7, 1-941. That afternoon Pershing went driving in Rock Creek Park. For 23 years his country had done its best to forget that it had a military tradition. It had reduced its Army to impotency, had neglected its training. Twenty-three years before, his nation had refused to heed his warning: “The complete victory can only be obtained by continuing the war until we force unconditional surrender.” Now it was Pearl Harbor and the day of reckoning.

Old Man. That evening the General of the Armies returned to Walter Reed Hospital. He read the newspapers. Every two or three weeks he was pleased to receive the great Marshall; occasionally he received calls from old friends; from son Warren, a captain of Engineers.

Marshall could talk freely and respectfully with his old chief, and the old man, who had seen greatness in the youngsters in 1917, had no suggestions to make. But he was angry when he was neglected. He was piqued when Ike Eisenhower went off to Europe without taking leave of him. He glared and snapped: “I don’t even know the man.” Every day he rose at 8, draped a bathrobe over his pajamas and watched his breakfast roll in—grapefruit, cereal, soft-boiled egg, toast, coffee. There were few things an old man could enjoy, but he damn well did like and insist on grapefruit, and for lunch a chop and spinach. He liked spinach. No cigars. Gave up cigars 35 years ago on the advice of his doctor. A touch of whiskey now and then.

He read the 50 or 60 factual volumes in the plain bookcase and drove in Rock’ Creek Park. He threatened to move to a hotel. Major General Shelley Marietta, head of Walter Reed, talked him out of it. He refused to pose for a picture, even at the request of the War Department. To hell with the War Department. He was living out an old warrior’s life.

The Room. In the State Department building is an office with a door marked in gold letters. “General of the Armies.” A beribboned colonel sits inside the door. General Pershing’s own room is beyond. The room is blue-carpeted; on its walls hang four portraits of America’s dead and buried Generals: Washington, Grant, Sherman. Sheridan. There is a fireplace, but there is no fire in it. There is a large desk but no one sits there. The long mirror hanging over the cold fireplace reflects no living presence. The office of the General of the Armies is empty.