CHAPTER XVII
What Others Think of Him
In quoting a few words from the opinions others have expressed concerning the American Commander doubtless some of them may seem to be a trifle too laudatory. It is not to be forgotten that the words of those who perhaps did not fully share the sentiments have not been recorded. If such opinions exist, their record has not been brought to the attention of the writer. As a rule, Americans have no comparative degree in their estimates of men. They like a man or they do not like him. He is either a success or a failure, good or bad, wise or foolish. Between the two extremes there is little standing room, and into one category or the other they cast nearly everyone. If General Pershing has not escaped this condition, his consolation doubtless is that he is merely sharing the common lot of his fellow-citizens.
A close friend has this to say of him: "You should meet him at a dinner party and listen to his stories. You should stand with him before his tent in the field, in the sunshine—he loves the sunshine and the wide out-of-doors—and hear him tell stories of his campaigning at his best. You should meet this big man with the heart of a little child, this man who by befriending his enemies has made them his companions, this man who stands up erect and faces the horrors of disaster with a smile and prays in his heart for the sufferers."
Another friend says: "There is something about Pershing that reminds one of Lincoln. It may be his ready wit and never failing good humor or perhaps his big sympathetic heart. In the army the similarity is frequently pointed out."
An officer who served under him in the Punitive Expedition into Mexico and was thrown into close relations with him writes: "I have had the pleasure of knowing many of our great men, but Pershing is the biggest of them all. He combines the rugged simplicity of Lincoln with the dogged perseverance of Grant; the strategic mystical ability of Stonewall Jackson and the debonair personality of McClellan. In one quality, that of intuition, he may be inferior possibly to Roosevelt, but in cold logic and in supreme knowledge of human nature and of soldier nature I have never met his equal."
The colonel of his regiment when Pershing was a lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry said of him: "I have been in many fights but on my word he is the bravest and coolest man under fire I ever saw."
In 1903, Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, in President McKinley's cabinet, cabled him: "The thanks of the War Department for the able and effective accomplishment of a difficult and important task."