The General and the Jaguar (24 page)

Pershing returned to West Point in 1897 for a teaching stint. A hardened soldier by now who had weathered Montana blizzards
and New Mexico droughts, he seemed a cheerless martinet to the ebullient young cadets and they dubbed him “Nigger Jack,” because
of his assignment with the Tenth. Later the name was modified to “Black Jack” and remained with him for the rest of his life.
When the Spanish-American War broke out, in 1898, he was sent to Cuba and earned the admiration of his commander, who stated,
“Pershing is the coolest man under fire I ever saw.” From there, he was dispatched to the Philippines to help pacify the Moros,
Muslim tribesmen who had been fighting the Spaniards for three hundred years. To prepare for his assignment, Pershing learned
several native dialects and actually took the time to study the Koran.

He returned from overseas with a greatly enhanced military reputation and was assigned to the army’s general staff. At a social
function, Theodore Roosevelt introduced him to the powerful Wyoming senator Francis E. Warren, chairman of the Military Affairs
Committee, but it was the senator’s daughter, Helen Frances, just twenty-five and young enough to be his own child, who attracted
him. The following evening they went dancing and a year later they were married in a huge wedding that included Roosevelt
among the guests.

Roosevelt promoted him in 1906 to brigadier general, bypassing 862 more senior officers. The promotion was met with howls
of indignation and charges that his family connections—not his ability—were responsible for the huge career leap. To the critics,
Roosevelt tartly responded: “To promote him because he married a senator’s daughter would be an infamy; to refuse him promotion
for the same reason would be an equal infamy.”

In 1913, he returned from another tour in the Philippines and was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. By that time
he had four children: Helen, eight; Anne, seven; Mary Margaret, six; and a five-year-old son named Warren. With the occupation
in Veracruz, conditions along the Mexican border were growing increasingly unstable and he was soon ordered to Fort Bliss
in El Paso. When Pershing realized that the posting would be for an indefinite period, he made plans to have his family join
him. On August 27, 1915, a week before they were to depart, he got a telephone call at headquarters:

“Telegram for you, sir,” said the orderly.

“Yes?” responded the general.

“Shall I? Shall I read it to you, sir?” the orderly stammered.

“Yes,” responded Pershing.

The young man halted again.

“Go ahead,” Pershing muttered impatiently.

The stammering, frightened voice began speaking of a fire that had broken out in the Pershings’ flimsy wooden home back in
San Francisco. A relative who was staying with the family was awakened by heat and rushed to her door to alert Mrs. Pershing
but was driven back into her room by the inferno. She and her maid and two children jumped to safety, but Helen and her three
daughters suffocated to death from the smoke. Five-year-old Warren was found unconscious on the floor of his bedroom by Pershing’s
aged African-American servant, identified in newspaper accounts only as “Johnson,” who led a rescue party into the burning
house. The boy was the only member of the family to survive.

“Is that all? Is that everything?” Pershing asked when the orderly was finished.

“Yes sir.”

Then the waters of grief and sorrow closed over him. Pershing buried his wife and three daughters in the plots belonging to
the Warren family in Cheyenne, Wyoming. As the funeral procession passed, citizens bowed their heads and businesses throughout
the state closed. “From that time on his countenance took on a certain grimness, and more than ever his attitude bespoke a
‘no nonsense’ philosophy,” writes historian Bruce Johnson. “A lean, tanned, hard man, Pershing was not close to his troops;
he was no father figure to them. But they respected his fairness, his ability, his total lack of hypocrisy.”

Pershing returned to Fort Bliss, accompanied by his sister, May, who volunteered to help take care of his son. For weeks,
he wandered through the rooms and porches of the rambling house, wondering how he would go on living. Time, he told a friend,
had not dimmed the pain at all.

In the spring of 1916, when his grief had abated somewhat, he began dating Anne “Nita” Patton, twenty-nine, the sister of
George Patton, then a brash, young lieutenant with the Eighth Cavalry, which was also stationed at Fort Bliss. Nita was tall
and blond like her brother, but with a matronly padding to her hips and a lovely, expressive mouth. Though Pershing was fifteen
years older, Nita nevertheless found him exceedingly attractive, drawn in part by the tragic air that now surrounded him.

George Patton, thirty, had mixed feelings about the relationship; already a superb horseman and expert marksman, Patton was
determined to advance through the army on his own merits. At the moment, however, his advancement seemed stymied by the fact
that his regiment had not been called up for the expedition. Knowing how much Pershing valued physical fitness, Patton blamed
it on his colonel, who was overweight. (“There should be a law killing fat colonels on sight,” Patton fumed in a letter to
his father. “It is hell to be so near a fine fight and not get in it.”) Determined to go anyway, Patton contacted Pershing’s
adjutant general, Major John Hines, and his aide, Martin C. Shallenberger, and finally the “Old Man” himself.

“Everyone wants to go; why should I favor you?” Pershing asked.

“Because I want to go more than anyone else.”

“That will do,” said Pershing, dismissing him.

Patton lobbied Pershing again that evening, pointing out that he was “good with correspondents.” Although the general remained
noncommittal, Patton returned to his quarters and packed his bedroll and saddle. At five o’clock on the morning of March 13,
Pershing called.

“Lieutenant Patton, how long will it take you to get ready?”

Patton replied that he was already packed.

“I’ll be goddamned. You are appointed aide.”

Pershing cautioned that the assignment was only temporary; once James Collins, his regular aide and longtime confidant, returned
from leave, Patton would have to go back to his own regiment. But Patton was determined to make the assignment permanent,
and in the months to come would look after countless details associated with the expedition and become one of the general’s
regular hunting partners and riding companions in Mexico.

Patton’s assignment began that very day. In his shiny new “machine,” he picked up the general and his entourage and ferried
them to the train station. Patton said good-bye to his wife, Beatrice, a beautiful and wealthy New Englander, and Pershing
spent a few minutes alone with Nita. Then they boarded a train for Columbus, arriving at ten thirty on the evening of March
13. Patton unloaded Pershing’s luggage and waited at the station until five o’clock the following morning for their horses.

Although only five days had elapsed since the raid, the little town had already undergone a stunning transformation. The depot
was crowded with milling troops and the high, anxious cries of mules and horses being unloaded from boxcars. A pall of dust
hung over the village as gray army wagons rattled over the dirt streets. The town fathers began to complain of the “Speed
Maniacs” who careened through Columbus’s dirt streets. “One sometimes feels he carries his life in his hands on the simple
journey to get the mail,” complained G. E. Parks, the newspaper editor, whose wife, Susie, had so bravely tried to get word
to the outside world during the raid.

Brown pup tents were staked out on the parade grounds, where the daytime temperatures could exceed 112 degrees. The soldiers
stuffed their bed sacks with straw, used the sun-heated water in their canteens for shaving, and showered whenever thunderstorms
raked the desert. North of the railroad tracks, civilians also pitched tents, which were surprisingly commodious and often
furnished with Mexican rugs, Coleman lanterns, and chintz-covered crates.

Moving-picture men and reporters hungry for scoops stalked through the town and camp. Their news-gathering efforts would be
greatly hampered by the military in the first days and weeks of the expedition. One of Funston’s first orders to Pershing
was to seize the telegraph office in Columbus, guard the telephone wires leading out of town, and closely watch all automobiles
headed for telegraph stations in other communities. “The man who gets a scoop is an arch criminal,” Major W. R. Sample warned.
With a virtual blackout on news, reporters had little to do but exchange rumors and monitor the frantic activity.

G
ENERAL
F
UNSTON
had been disappointed to learn that he would not lead the hunt for Villa, but always the good soldier, he had plunged into
the massive preparations for the Punitive Expedition. The area of Chihuahua in which they would be hunting Villa was approximately
one hundred miles wide and five hundred miles long. It was bordered on the west by the Sierra Madre and on the east by the
National Railroad of Mexico. The terrain was extremely rugged, devoid of roads, and consisted mostly of alkali deserts and
soaring mountains. Since much of the area was unmapped, the expedition’s military leaders would have to rely on an assortment
of native scouts, cowboys, adventurers, and revolutionaries to guide them. Water would be difficult to find and food for animals
and men would prove almost nonexistent. “The desert is support for some wild ducks and geese but mainly for lizards, horned
toads, tarantulas, scorpions and rattlesnakes—the repulsive outcasts of the animal world,” wrote Colonel H. A. Toulmin in
a 1935 military account of the expedition. In order to avoid antagonizing the Mexican people, the soldiers would not be allowed
to occupy any villages and towns and the Carranza government would soon make it clear that it had no intention of allowing
the United States to use Mexican railroads to transport supplies to the troops, a move that would greatly complicate military
planning.

The initial cavalry regiments tapped for service included the men of George Custer’s fabled Seventh, the Buffalo Soldiers
of the Tenth, the horse soldiers of the Eleventh, and the troopers of the Thirteenth. Accompanying these mounted regiments
would be the Sixth and Sixteenth infantries and two batteries of the Sixth Field Artillery. The heavy artillery hardly seemed
worth the trouble: “To transport one gun required ten animals, which needed shoeing and forage, plus a dozen men to look after
the mules as well as assemble and fire the gun,” points out military historian Herbert Molloy Mason. Supporting the combat
troops would be a signal corps to establish communication, an ambulance company and field hospital for the wounded, engineers
to build roads and bridges, and two wagon companies to haul supplies. (A wagon company consisted of 36 men, 27 wagons, 112
mules, and 6 horses.)

Army quartermasters from around the country worked frantically to locate supplies and ship them to Columbus. A boxcar of Missouri
mules was requisitioned from Saint Louis. Twenty-seven new trucks were purchased from the White Motor Company in Cleveland
and the T. B. Jeffreys Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Newly broken horses were entrained at Fort Bliss. Strange-looking vehicles
that were actually the military’s first tanks were loaded onto railroad cars. Wagon parts, ordnance, radio sets, medical supplies,
rations, and forage were also hunted down and shipped to Columbus.

Troops were sent from Fort Riley, Kansas; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. At the request of President
Wilson, Congress passed emergency legislation to increase the strength of the regular army from 100,000 to 120,000 men. Nearly
all the additional men would be assigned to guard duty on the border or the expedition itself. Also dispatched to the border
were Captain Benjamin Foulois and the country’s entire air force, which consisted of the First Aero Squadron and its eight
Curtiss JN-3s, or Jennies. Flimsy as negligees and notoriously unreliable, the planes were dismantled and shipped by train.
Captain Foulois posted ten riflemen at the front of the train and scattered more soldiers armed with rifles and pistols throughout
the sleeping cars and the rest of the compartments.

Foulois was another of the larger-than-life officers who seemed to fill the ranks of the Punitive Expedition. He had shown
no particular promise or aptitude for anything beyond a curious interest in birds, and eventually joined his father’s plumbing
business. Fixing toilets might have become his life’s work except for an inner restlessness that led him to enlist in the
army. Like Funston and Pershing, he wound up in the Philippines and took part in numerous battles. Upon returning to the States,
he gravitated to aviation and learned how to fly dirigibles. In an academic paper, he made a number of far-fetched statements
about the future of the new flying machines, including the prediction that the airplane would someday replace the horse in
reconnaissance missions and that it would be possible to transmit words and pictures between people on the ground and men
in the air. The ideas seemed wildly improbable, but they nevertheless attracted the attention of the army’s chief signal officer,
who instructed Foulois to conduct airship and aircraft trials. In 1909, he test-flew a plane with Orville Wright. Foulois
wanted to believe that he had been selected because of his intellectual abilities but realized it was more likely his slender,
five-foot-six-inch frame that had garnered him the coveted seat.

Wright and Foulois managed to stay aloft for about forty minutes. That was good enough for the army and Foulois was ordered
to take the plane to San Antonio and learn to fly it. Whenever he had a problem, he would dash off a letter to Orville Wright,
asking him for advice. Later, he joked that he was the only pilot in history who learned to fly by taking a “correspondence
course.”

Maintaining communication and supply lines that would eventually reach nearly five hundred miles into Mexico’s interior would
present Funston and Pershing with formidable obstacles. But the biggest hurdle would be the hostility of the Mexican people.
Wilson and his cabinet members were under the illusion that they would be welcomed into the country, but the reality proved
to be exactly the opposite. The Columbus raid actually led to an upsurge in Villa’s popularity and the Mexican people were
not about to help the invaders capture or kill a native son.