In the Meuse-Argonne battle his corps had the wicked front on the left against the Argonne Forest and the valley of the Aire; and again he did well, leaving no doubt that he had energy as well as capacity, or that he deserved the three stars of a lieutenant-general which General Pershing now placed on his shoulders. Later, in the drive of November 1st, his maneuvering of our corps and divisions, in that swift movement in pursuit and in the crossing of the Meuse which gave us the heights on the other bank, seemed without a tactical fault in its conception and execution, and it warranted the use of the word brilliant in thinking of Liggett, who in the closing days of the war had the opportunity to show the cumulative results of his study of his maps from the days when he began sawing wood in Neufchâteau. He was a modest, sound soldier, an able tactician, and a delightful, simple gentleman, who did his country honor in France both as soldier and as man. His place at the head of the First Corps was taken by Major-General Joseph T. Dickman.
Both he and Major-General Robert Lee Bullard, who received command of the Second Army, then holding our line won in the Saint-Mihiel operation, were broad-minded men of the world who would have made their mark in any profession. Physically you could make two Bullards out of one Liggett. My most distinct picture of him was of his slight figure in his big fur coat in the midst of winter rains and sleet, while his small head, with his close-fitting overseas cap, only made the coat appear the larger. In his command of the 1st in the Toul sector and in our first offensive at Cantigny, he had set his mark on our pioneer division. The French liked him, and he could speak their language with the attractive Southern accent of his boyhood days. He took the French liaison officers into his family and set them to work, and they became so fond of his family that one of them was overheard telling French staff officers what a lot they had to learn from the Americans. If Bullard could not eat three square meals a day, it did not interfere with his belligerent spirit. His brain was just as good a fighting brain as if he had eaten beefsteak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However bad his neuritis in the winter days, his blue eyes were always twinkling, and when he came into his mess and the officers rose, his smiling request that they dismiss the formality was all in keeping with the atmosphere of that division command.
His dry, pungent wit was not affected when the doctor put him on a diet of an egg and a bit of toast. It always came back to the fact that war was fighting. We had much to learn from the French, from the British, from all veterans, and you could not be too brave or too skillful. If you made up your mind to lick the other fellow, you were going to lick him. When his neuritis was very bad at one time, he told General Pershing that he did not want to stand in the way of a successor. General Pershing replied that he would not forget the reminder; and remarked to someone else: "Bullard's division is doing well. The neuritis hasn't gone to his head." His body seemed to be made of elastic steel wire that always had the spring for any occasion, and the more fighting he had the better his health became. In the Argonne battle his neuritis entirely disappeared.
He never seemed very busy. In the midst of battle you would find him appearing at seeming leisure; and his attitude always was: "What a fine, able lot of men I have around me! They do all the work for me." Thus he developed brigadiers out of his colonels.
When he corrected subordinates, it was with a simple phrase that cut through the fog of discussion. One day, before an operation, one of his colonels who was a little wrought up on the subject told him of a number of young officers in his regiment who might be brave, but who were not up to the mark of leadership. "You think it over coolly and make me a list of those you are sure about," said Bullard. "It's a matter for your judgment. Perhaps these officers will do better in some service that is not combatant, or perhaps they need a little lesson which will make them all right in some other regiment. Make me the list, and I'll have everyone on it relieved right away"—and you may be sure that the colonel made the list with care.
The Third Corps had been tried out in the Marne salient. In the Meuse-Argonne battle it had seized the bank of the Meuse to protect our right flank, and against superior raking artillery fire from the heights of the whale-back and across the river, on the slopes and in the woods of the Meuse trough, gained the Cunel-Brieulles road with an indomitable skill, which proved his contention that, however heavy the odds, if you make up your mind to lick the other fellow you will.
In the instances of Liggett and Bullard, both general officers before the war, high rank had shown its worthiness of higher rank in the swift merciless test of war's opportunities, while the other two officers who received telephone messages from the Commander-in-Chief had both been majors when we entered the war. I had first met Charles P. Summerall as a lieutenant in Riley's battery on the march to the relief of Peking. When I next met him, he had the artillery brigade of the 1st Division. He was given the command of the 1st when Bullard was given a corps. The way in which he sent the veteran division through toward Soissons in the Marne counter-offensive was a precedent for the way in which he sent it as a wedge over the Aire wall, which won him command of the Fifth Corps.
In the last days of the war no one of Pershing's generals was more talked about in the A. E. F. than he. His was a personality of the kind which was bound to make talk. No one ever denied that he was a fighter and that he knew his profession. He could make men follow him, and make men fear him. They called him a "hell-devil of a driver," but won victories under him. If he had started as a private in the French Revolution, and had not been killed too early in his career, I think that he would have had one of the marshal's batons which Napoleon said every private carried in his knapsack. If no general expected more of his soldiers than Summerall, no general expected more of himself. Sturdily built, of average height, he was tireless. He could go about the front all day, and work at headquarters all night; or go about the front all night, and work at headquarters all the next day. When officers and men were numb from fatigue, he gave an example of endurance as a reason for his further demands on their strength. "If you win, your mistakes do not count," he told a group of officers one day. "If you lose, they do. If you win, your men have their reward for their wounds and suffering, and those who have fallen have not died in vain. If you fail, your men feel that all their effort has been wasted. Do not fail. Go through!"