8 
:lSM^O"& V^'A'fM 
bepttmber 27, 1917 
General Pershing : The Man and His Work 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
DURING a recent sojourn in France I heard, in the 
course of a single day, two very illuminative coni- 
niejits on the officers of the newly arrived American 
Expeditionary Force. The lirst was by a young 
French Staff Ofhccr w hom I met while on a visit to the 
Champagne front. 
" We like your officers immensely," he said, " they are so 
quick-witted and so energetic, and yet so easy to get along 
with. But do you know they have been of a great surprise 
to us in that they are not in the least ' American ' ; they are 
always asking us what wc think of things, not telling us what 
///(•>' think." 
" But isn't that just as it should be," I said, " consider- 
ing that you have had three years of experience of modern 
warfare and they haven't had any at all ? 
" Of course it's as it should be," he replied ; " but — well, 
.to be frank, it isn't quite what we expected. You Americans 
have such a manner of working out ways of your own to do 
things that-^well, naturally, we rather expected to hear 
more ipf how you were going to do it." 
Returning to Paris that afternoon, I dined in the evening 
with an American friend who was in France on a special 
diplomatic mission, and it was while discussing the com- 
plicated task of the Staff of the American Expeditionary 
Force in l-"rance that he said : 
" It isn't only a military liaison with the Allied armies that 
h;is to be eft'ected, but jbJso a sort of a social liaison with the 
Allied peoples — the French and the English. This being 
so, we may count ourselves fortunate that the job is up 
to our old Regular Army Officers. Our little Regulai" Army 
■ — with the Navy, of course — was, up to the time of our entry 
into the war, about the only really national thing we had. 
Just about everything else was coloured with sectionalism, 
provincialism ; and for that reason I have always held that 
our Regul.ir Army Officers were not necessarily the most 
typical, but certainly the most characteristically ' American ' 
citizens of the country. And this is especially true of those 
officers who saw service in the Philippines, for their 
■Americanism has been strengthened by a ' national per- 
spective ' that can only be acquired by a considerable resi- 
dence outside one's country, by ' standing off '-so to speak, 
and viewing it objectively." 
" General Pershing," he concluded, " is one of the most 
— indeed, jx-rhaps Ihc most — ' American ' American I know : 
and, because in the first year of his work over here, he is 
' establishing contact ' in so many senses besides the military, 
1 cannot conceive of a man whom it would be more desirable 
that our Allies should judge us by, or through whom they 
should learn of the spirit we bring to our task and of the 
spirit in which we hope to carry it through. " 
Because the average European's idea of the American is 
of a sort of a cross between a Cook's tourist and a patent 
medicine salesman, one can hardly blame him for having had 
some misgivings how things would go when he had this 
bumptious hybrid beside him as an Ally. As the remarks of 
the young French Officer I h^ive quoted would indicate, 
there has been " a great surprise " that in the place of this 
popularly conceived American, there has appeared a modest 
but apparently competent individual, who shows an astonish- 
ing readiness to defer to the experience of others, and an equally 
astonishing reluctance to try to make others defer to his. 
\\ hat is hapix'ning is that England and France are just be- 
ginning to make the acquaintance of a, to them, new type of 
American, a type which, one may venture to hope, will 
become sufficiently familiar to them in the months to come 
to give it at least a sporting chance of supplanting the 
'■ Cook's -touris*: patent- medicine -salesman " type in the 
popular imagination. 
With, my diplomatic friend I have quoted, I, who am 
myself an .Viiierican, feel that America is indeed fortunate 
that our Regular Army Officer, of whom (ieneral Pershing 
is so distinguished, yet so thoroughly representative, should 
be the principal medium through which our first forerunning 
"national liaison" with oiu" European Allies is eft'ected. 
* ♦ * * * 
I have heard and read many descriptions and characterisa- 
tions of Major General John J. Pershing, but I think none 
that ever impressed me as being quite so succinctly com- 
prehensive in indicating the traits that make' the man's re- 
cord what it is as the words of a Moro chief of the island of 
Jolo, who had met the then Military Governor of Mindanao 
both on the battlefield and at the council table. Defeat on 
the one side had won his respect, justice on the other his 
gratitude, and at the moment I encountered him he had 
come to the office of the acting Governor of Jolo to' give in- 
formation regarding a threatened rising among the Moros. 
\V hen I told him that I had recently seen General Pershing in 
Zamboanga, he nodded his head vigorously, showed his 
betel-nut stained teeth in an affectionate grin and re- 
marked, " Pershin' he lick you, but he no lie to you." That 
was all he said, but I have recently read magazine articles 
(of more pages than that old bare-footed chief used words) 
which failed to reveal so well what were the mainsprings of 
General Pershing's success at tasks which had proved too much 
for other men. He never made a promise w liich he could not 
and woul^ not keep, and if fair dealing did not accomi)lish 
the desired result he effected it by fair righting. Truth and a 
good licking go farther with the primitive savage than with 
his civilised brother, and the outstanding success that has 
crowned American effort to rule the high-spirited non-Christian 
races of the Southern Philippines is traceable largely to the 
rare judgment with which the one supplemented the other 
during the Pershing regime 
Up to the time of his entry into the Philippine field, where 
his most distinguished work to date has been accomplislied, 
Pershing's career had not a great deal to dift'erentiate it from 
any ether American Regular Army Officer of similar rank. 
He graduated from West Point in 1886, and almost immediately 
rode with the 10th Cavalry in Crook's campaign against 
the Apaches in Arizona and Mexico, a somewhat similar 
operation to the one against Villa in which he was destined 
to have the chief command thirty years later. In 1890 he 
took part in the campaign against " Sitting Bull," in the " Bad 
]-ands " of Dakota, doing notable work at the head of a band 
of loyal Sioux Scouts. 
The next eight years were " routine," but in 1898 there 
began for Pershing a period of military activity which has had 
but the briefest breaks down to the present. He fought 
and gained mention for bravery at San Juan and El Caney in 
the operations culminating in" the fall of Santiago de Cuba, 
and after the Philippines were ceded by Spain to the United 
States, he was sent with his regiment to take part in the infin- 
itely difficult series of campaigns for their final pacification. 
It was the sheer brilliancy of his work against tlie fanatical 
Moros of the big southern island of Mindanao which w;as res- 
ponsible several years later for his unparalleled promotion, 
over the heads of 862 officers who normally would have had 
precedence of him — from Captain to Brigadier-General. 
The. truth was that there was work waiting for Pershing, but 
before taking it up it was imperative that he be elevated 
to a higher rank, because departmental red-tape made it 
impossible for President Roosevelt to promote him to Major 
or Colonel, he, with characteristic disregard of precedent, 
made him a General. 
The work which awaited Pershing was to complete the 
pacification of Mindanao and to initiate a suitable form of 
government for that turbulent island, a task at which the 
several distinguished Generals who preceded him had had 
but indifferent success. How the miracle was wrought is too 
long a story to tell here. Fair-dealing and fair-tighting, 
as I have said, went hand in hand, and no penalty went 
uninflictcd, no promised reward unfulfilled. 
Concurrently with the military campaign a comprehensive 
programme for improving the health and economic welfare 
of the pacified population was carried on. Roads were built, 
agriculture! stations established, and schools— both elementary 
and for simple industrial training- started. The deadly 
foe of one day became the peaceful coconut-planter or basket- 
weaver of the next. General Pershing's great task was prac- 
tically completed by the time he was recalled to America 
shortly before the outbreak of the present war. 
The task set General Pershing in sending h'un into Mexico 
after the elusive Pancho Villa last year might well be compared 
to sendmgaman into a cage of hyenas with orders to bring out 
one of them without interfering with the others. That 
Pershing succeeded in doing this without bringing America 
mto actual war with Carranza (and thus playing the German 
game) is by many, rated as the most superlatively finessed 
achievement of its kind in American military history, one 
which made his choice to conmiand the American Expedi- 
tionary Force in France inevitable. 
* * * * * 
If one thing more than another impressed me in the all-too- 
bnef chat 1 had with General Pershing in Paris a fortnight 
ago, it was the grim earnestness with which he is putting- his 
shoulder to his latest and greatest task ; that, and an almost 
reverent admiration for the armies that had stood* the first 
shock, thi.- men who had blazed the way before him. 
