"When I was a cadet at West Point," said General Sibert, "I used to console myself with the thought that Napoleon was winning battles when he was thirty. Now, I find that my mind dwells more on the fact that Hindenburg is seventy."
Robert H. Bullard is probably the most picturesque figure in the American army. He has a reputation as a fighter and a daredevil and he is still one of the best polo players and broadsword experts in the American army. They say that when a second lieutenant swore at him one day in the heat of a game he made no complaint but laid for the young man later on and sent him sprawling off his horse in a wild scrimmage. He will fight broadsword duels with anybody regardless of rank if his opponent promises to be a man who can test his mettle. And yet it was a bit surprising that when the command of one of the crack divisions in France was open, General Pershing chose Bullard for the command because Major General Robert H. Bullard is perhaps the worst dressed major general in the American army. A poilu in one of the provincial cities mistook him for an American enlisted man and talked to him with great freedom for more than half an hour before an excited French officer rushed up and told him that the man with whom he was talking so familiarly was an American general.
"Oh, that's all right," said Bullard, "I wanted to hear what he had to say. Come around to my headquarters sometime and tell me some more."
On another occasion I saw an American captain suffer acutely because Bullard appeared at a public Franco-American function with two days' growth of beard. "What kind of an aide can he have," moaned the captain. "I was on his staff for two years and I never let him come out like that. I always had him fixed up when there was anything important on."
Tall, spare, hawk-featured and straight, Bullard represents a type of officer who has a large part to play in the American army. It is around such men that tradition grows and tradition is the marrow of an army. It was Bullard, too, who gave the best expression to the hope and purpose of the American army which I heard in France. He had said that what the American army must always maintain as its most important asset was the offensive spirit and when we asked him just what that was he lapsed into a story which was always his favorite device for exposition.
"There was once a Spanish farmer," said General Bullard, "who lived in a small house in the country with his pious wife. One day he came rushing out of the house with a valise in his hand and his good wife stopped him and asked, 'Where are you going?' 'I'm going to Seville,' said the farmer bustling right past her. 'You mean God willing,' suggested his pious wife. 'No,' replied the farmer, 'I just mean that I'm going.'
"The Lord was angered by this impiety and He promptly changed the farmer into a frog. His wife could tell that it was her husband all right because he was bigger than any of the other frogs and more noisy. She went to the edge of the pond every day and prayed that her husband might be forgiven. And one morning—it was the first day of the second year—the big frog suddenly began to swell and get bigger and bigger until he wasn't a frog any more, but a man. And he hopped out of the pond and stood on the bank beside his wife. Without stopping to kiss her or thank her or anything he ran straight into the house and came out with a valise in his hand.
"'Where are you going?' his wife asked in terror.
"'To Seville,' he said.
"She wrung her hands. 'You mean God willing,' she cried.