The Story of General Pershing

by Everett T. Tomlinson

Thereupon President Roosevelt in his direct way determined to wait no longer for changes in the laws. Promptly he nominated Pershing to be Brigadier General; the nomination was confirmed and the long deferred recognition was now manifest.

He had labored in somewhat obscure fields. He had assisted in subduing insurrections, had supervised many local improvements in the territory within which he was working. He had assisted in winning victories and had warded off attacks by hostile Moros. There had, however, been nothing spectacular in his work. His reliability, good sense, bravery and administrative ability, however, were now better known and he was in every way prepared for the more important problems which now confronted him.

The President by his action had raised or "jumped" the new general eight hundred and sixty-two orders. Worthy as the honor was and worthily bestowed, for a time there were protests from disappointed seekers after office. Some cried "politics," but as a rule these objections came in loudest tones from those who by devious ways had sought certain "pulls" for their own elevation. Personal ambitions and personal jealousies, perhaps, also entered to a degree and aided not a little in delaying the legislation which President Roosevelt desired.

Doubtless this condition deeply hurt General Pershing, but there was no complaining on his part. It was his to show that he was not unworthy of his new honor. Years before he had been taught by his father that to be worthy of promotion was more than the promotion itself. And now he was soon to return to the Philippines to show in the jungle and on the field, in council and administration, that the action of the President had not been the result of idle or thoughtless impulse.

Not long before this time, on January 26, 1905, General Pershing was married. There is a current story, for the truthfulness of which the writer cannot vouch, that when the nomination of Major Pershing for promotion was placed before the Senate, there was made at the same time a just and true statement of the distinguished services he had rendered his country in his career in the Philippines. In the visitors' gallery with friends, intently listening to the proceedings, was Miss Frances Warren, daughter of United States Senator Warren of Wyoming. As she listened to the words spoken concerning the American officer in the Philippines it is said she remarked, "What a wonderful record. I should like to see the man who made it." Not long afterward she did see him though the meeting was entirely unexpected. Doubtless the man impressed her more than had his praises to which she had listened in the halls of Congress, for on January 26, 1905, she became Mrs. John Joseph Pershing.

The general, who for years had been compelled to live a somewhat lonely life, whose activities had kept him far from friends and his own people, was now to have the help and comfort of the strong and beautiful daughter of Senator Warren. Never effusive nor one to refer to his personal or private affairs, his friends nevertheless have told of the deep love of the General for his wife and family—a tragic setting for the terrible tragedy which later in a moment disrupted his home and deprived him forever of his wife and three little daughters.

Directly after the wedding and before the general and his bride could carry out the plans of a trip they were expecting to make to Japan, he was abruptly ordered to join the forces of General Kuroki, as has been said, as the representative of the Army of the United States in the war between Japan and Russia. Like the good soldier that he was there was no complaining, no expression of his personal disappointment; he at once obeyed.

For a time General Pershing's work in the Philippines, to which he soon returned, was not unlike that in which he formerly had been engaged.

The raids of the Moros on the coast towns were checked by Pershing's brilliant victory at Bayan. But the tribe though defeated in this battle were by no means conquered. They were obdurate and their long experience with the Spaniards made them confident of their ability to hold off the new invading force.

Six hundred hot-headed Moros were ready to defend their fortress—the first of forty similar ones,—in the crater of an extinct volcano. The most hot-headed of all was the leader, the Sultan of Bacolod. Walls of earth and bamboo, forty feet in thickness, had been added to the natural defenses. A moat forty feet wide and thirty feet deep surrounded the position. The defenders believed it was proof against every possible attack.