This leads to another point. In several of the most celebrated commentaries written by higher commanders on the nature of generalship, the statement is made rather carelessly that to be capable of great military leadership a man must be something of an actor. If that were unqualifiedly true, then it would be a desirable technique likewise in any junior officer that he too should learn how to wear a false face, and play a part which cloaks his real self. The hollowness of the idea is proved by the lives of such men as Robert E. Lee, W. T. Sherman, George C. Marshall, Omar N. Bradley, Carl A. Spaatz, William H. Simpson, Chester A. Nimitz, and W. S. Sims. As commanders, they were all as natural as children, though some had great natural reserve, and others were warmer and more outgiving. They expressed themselves straightforwardly rather than by artful striving for effect. There was no studied attempt to appear only in a certain light. To use the common word for it, their people did not regard them as "characters." This naturalness had much to do with their hold on other men.
Such a result will always come. He who concentrates on the object at hand has little need to worry about the impression he is making on others. Even though they detect the chinks in the armor, they will know that the armor will hold.
On the other hand, a sense of the dramatic values, coupled with the intelligence to play upon them skillfully, is an invaluable quality in any military leader. Though there was nothing of the "actor" in Grant, he understood the value of pointing things up. To put a bold or inspiring emphasis where it belongs is not stagecraft, but an integral part of the military fine art of communications. System which is only system is injurious to the mind and spirit of any normal person. One can play a superior part well, and maintain prestige and dignity, without being under the compulsion to think, speak and act in a monotone. In fact, when any military commander becomes over-inhibited along these lines because of the illusion that this is the way to build a reputation for strength, he but doubles the necessity that his subordinates will act at all times like human beings rather than robots.
Coupled with self-control, recollection and thoughtfulness will carry a man far. Men will warm toward a leader when they come to believe that all the energy he stores up by living somewhat within himself is at their service. But when they feel that this is not the case, and that his reserve is simply the outward sign of a spiritual miserliness and concentration on purely personal goals, no amount of restraint will ever win their favor. This is as true of him who commands a whole service as of the leader of a picket squad.
To speak of the importance of a sense of humor would be unavailing if it were not that what cramps so many men isn't that they are by nature humorless but that they are hesitant to exercise what humor they possess. Within the military profession, it is as unwise as to let the muscles go soft and to spare the mind the strain of original thinking. Great humor has always been in the military tradition. The need of it is nowhere more delicately expressed than in Kipling's lines:
My son was killed while laughing at some jest,
I would I knew
What it was, and it might serve me in a time
When jests are few.
Marcus Aurelius, Rome's soldier philosopher, spoke of his love for the man who "could be humorous in an agreeable way." No reader of Grant's Memoirs (one of the few truly great autobiographies ever written by a soldier) could fail to be impressed by his light touch. A delicate sense of the incongruous seems to have pervaded him; he is at his whimsical best when he sees himself in a ridiculous light. Lord Kitchener, one of the grimmest warriors ever to serve the British Empire, warmed to the man who made him the butt of a practical joke. There is the unforgettable picture of Admiral Beatty at Jutland. The Indefatigable has disappeared beneath the waves. The Queen Mary had exploded. The Lion was in flames. Then word came that the Princess Royal was blown up. Said Beatty to his Flag Captain "Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our ... ships today. Turn two points nearer the enemy." Admiral Nimitz, surveying the terrible landscape of the Kwajalein battlefield for the first time, said gravely to his Staff: "It's the worst devastation I've ever seen except for that last Texas picnic in Honolulu." There is a characteristic anecdote of General Patton. He had just been worsted by higher headquarters in an argument over strategy. So he sat talking to his own Staff about it, his dog curled up beside him. Suddenly he said to the animal: "The trouble with you, too, Willy, is that you don't understand the big picture." General Eisenhower, probably more than any other American commander, had the art of winning with his humor. He would have qualified under Sydney Smith's definition: "The meaning of an extraordinary man is that he is eight men in one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined."
There is hardly a soldier, marine, or bluejacket who has been long in battle but can tell some tale of an experience under fire when the pressure became almost unbearable, and then was suddenly relieved because somebody made a wisecrack or pulled something that was good for a laugh. At Bastogne the American headquarters was being shelled out of its position in the Belgian Barracks. The Commanding General called in his Chief Signal Officer and asked when it would be convenient to move. Said Lt. Col. Sid Davis, "Right now, while I've got one line left and you can still give the order." When the garrison was surrounded, and higher headquarters requested a description of the situation, the young G-3 of the operation, Col. H. W. O. Kinnard, radioed: "Think of a doughnut: we're the hole."
Who hasn't heard of the top kick who got his men forward by yelling: "Come on you ——! Do you want to live forever?" Both the Army and the Marine Corps claim him for their own, and it is possible that he was twins.
If the American fighting man did not have an instinctive feeling for the moral value of that kind of thing, the story would be long since buried, for it is as ancient as the other tale which ends: "That was no lady; that was my wife."