The Illusion of Victory (25 page)

Not too surprisingly, Charles Dawes became Pershing’s lifeline to hope and sanity. The canny Nebraskan and his agents whizzed around war-battered Europe buying food, lumber, clothing, and firewood, as well as weapons and ammunition. Pershing made his friend a brigadier general so that Dawes could deal as an equal with officers from the Allied armies and tolerated his incredibly unmilitary style with a good humor that amazed the AEF staff. Dawes’s collar was perpetually unbuttoned, his uniform a mess; he frequently saluted with a large cigar in his mouth.
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There was another bond between Pershing and this dynamic man, who bought 10 million tons of supplies before the war ended. In 1912, Dawes had lost his only son, Rufus, in a swimming accident. One day when he and Pershing were riding through Paris, they experienced a kind of tele-
pathic fusion. Dawes was thinking of “my lost boy.” He realized Pershing was thinking of his lost wife and daughters. Tears streamed down both their faces.“Even this war can’t keep it out of my mind,” Pershing said.
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For the first 21/2 months after he arrived, Pershing worked in Paris, in a private building on the Rue de Constantine. As many as five staff officers were crammed into one of the small rooms. They and their general worked ten hour days, but,
oo-la-la!
the nights were something else. The Americans swiftly discovered why the cynical French called a staff job in Paris
la guerre de luxe.
The staff was swamped with invitations to dinner parties from the well-to-do members of the American community. At the top of the glamour list was heiress Louise Cromwell Brooks, who had shed a lackluster husband and was enjoying liberation, Parisian style. She saw herself as Pershing’s Madame Pompadour and regularly hurled her beautiful body at him.

To Louise’s chagrin—and the occasional distress of Pershing’s staff—the general chose a woman who was completely outside the circle of glamour and wealth that descended on him. Micheline Resco was a petite, blonde twenty-three-year-old French-Rumanian artist who met Pershing at a reception in the Hôtel Crillon on the day he arrived in Paris. She had boldly announced she wanted to paint his portrait, and he agreed to sit for her.

Micheline spoke almost no English. Pershing’s French remained primitive. But love flowered between them before the summer of 1917 faded into a troubled fall. A glimpse of an explanation is her story of the general’s struggle to get her to stop calling him “Pair-shang.” After innumerable tries, she gave up and called him “General Darling.”

In September, Pershing moved his headquarters to Chaumont, a town sixty miles from Paris. But he continued to visit Micheline’s apartment on the Rue Descombes at night, riding in front with his chauffeur, the windshield signs with the four stars and the U.S. flag laid flat on the dashboard. There, on her phonograph, they listened to her favorite music: Wagner’s
Lohengrin
and the march of the heroes intoValhalla. Ironically, no one in the United States could play such quintessentially German music without fear of being reported to the American Protective League or some other vigilante group.
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For many Americans with husbands and sons in the new American army, General Wood’s warning about pneumonia soon took on lethal meaning.
One of these was the family of Representative Augustus Peabody Gardner, Henry Cabot Lodge’s son-in-law. The senator was very fond of “Gus,” as everyone called this ebullient, outspoken man. He had a knack for extracting campaign cash from what he called “the unemployed plutocrats” of the Bay State. Lodge once told a friend that Gardner had “wrung something like ten thousand dollars” from members of the elite Somerset Club,“who never gave a dime to any public object before.”
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Gardner was not above spoofing the rituals of Congress in letters to his young daughter Constance, whom he called Took. In 1903, he told her how he spent his time:“Old Pip [her name for him] plays squash, and rides with Grandpa and walks with the President [TR] and that is all the fun that old Pip has. The rest of the time he runs errands for his constituents. This is a long word, and it means all the people who tell Pip how much they helped him get elected.

“Pip made a speech today in Congress; but no one listened. After he got through all the people who had been asleep or out of the hall shook hands with Pip and told him how much they enjoyed it.”
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Gardner had been a captain in the Spanish-American War and had remained in the army reserve. As early as 1914, he led the fight for preparedness in the House of Representatives, earning almost as much enmity from Woodrow Wilson as his father-in-law received for his caustic speeches on the same subject in the Senate. When the war began, the War Department summoned the fifty-two-year-old Gardner to active duty. Senator Lodge considered it an act of “petty spite.” But the congressman, who admitted he had been “clamoring” for U.S. participation in the war, could hardly refuse the call if he hoped to stay in politics. He concealed a weak heart by avoiding a physical examination.
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By October 1917, Gardner was in Camp Wheeler, Georgia, where he was soon writing letters that resembled Leonard Wood’s. His division was supposed to have 26,000 men, but when the War Department started transferring regiments every which way, it dwindled to 9,500.“There has been a great deal of pneumonia in camp and everyone has had a cold. The weather has been very cold and many of the soldiers have insufficient equipment,” he told his wife.

He also wrote a confidential letter to Joe Tumulty, Wilson’s secretary. Another jovial type, Tumulty liked Gardner in spite of their political differences. He had urged him to write if there were things he wanted to say “out of channels.” Gardner told Tumulty 10,000 drafted men had just arrived at Camp Wheeler. An appalling 7,000 lacked overcoats and were wearing cotton outer garments and underclothes. None of them had any experience in sleeping out of doors in tents. Many of them came from farms and had never had measles. This disease ran rampant, making the recruits prime targets for pneumonia. Soon 1,500 men were crammed into a camp hospital designed for five hundred. The handful of nurses was overwhelmed. Mournfully, Gardner added in a postscript: “Anyone who supposes this part of Georgia to be warm is very much mistaken.”
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Like Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, Gus Gardner wanted to see action. He took a demotion from staff colonel to major in an infantry regiment a few weeks before the division was to go overseas. On December 28, 1917, he told his daughter Constance, the “Took” of earlier letters, that he preferred to command men rather than a basketful of papers. He threw in a teasing reference to her new status as a mother. She had just given birth to her second child.“Think of you with a brace of Kids! Why you ridiculous person! You are not old enough to be married, even.”
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That was the last letter Major Gus Gardner wrote. A few days later, he was in Camp Wheeler’s hospital, gasping for breath. On January 14, 1918, he died of pneumonia. His death undoubtedly added another layer to the screen of bitterness and anger through which Henry Cabot Lodge viewed President Woodrow Wilson.

In October, General Pershing visited the First Division. Strung out across twenty miles of Lorraine, sleeping in barns and attics, while being trained in trench warfare by French veterans, the men were still a very mixed bag of soldiers. After watching them stage a mock attack on a supposed enemy trench, Pershing asked for comments. Neither the commanding general, Major General William J. Siebert, nor his staff officers had anything intelligent to say. Pershing exploded and began excoriating everyone in sight. He was already furious with the division for their terrible performance on July 4 in Paris. They had not done much better in a review he had recently arranged for the pompous President of France, Raymond Poincaré.

Out of the ranks stepped an earnest young regular army captain named George C. Marshall, who was acting as the division’s chief of staff. He caught Pershing’s arm as he stalked away. “General Pershing,” he said. “There’s something to be said here and I think I should say it.”

The captain proceeded to list the division’s myriad problems—everything from missing equipment to newly arrived recruits. Other staff officers averted their eyes, expecting Marshall and his career to be annihilated on the spot. Instead, Pershing listened to him with amazing patience.
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Marshall did not change the AEF commander’s mind about General Siebert, who was soon replaced by a more aggressive general. Pershing cast equally critical eyes on a dozen other major generals whom the War Department sent to France for a quick tour before they returned home to pick up their divisions. Pershing told Washington he had no use for ten of them. They were “too old” or “very fat and inactive” or even “infirm.” But the desk generals in the State, War and Navy Building proceeded to send nine of the ten rejects to France, ignoring his advice.
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Ironically, one of the few who escaped Pershing’s scalpel was the fattest general in the army, Hunter Liggett. Pershing kept him, because Liggett, former head of the Army War College, had a brain. The wisecracking side of Pershing, which remained hidden most of the time behind the mask of the iron general, also probably liked Liggett’s defense of his bulk: There was nothing wrong with fat as long as it was not above the collar.
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On October 21, 1917, four battalions, one from each regiment of the First Division, went into the trenches northeast of Nancy under the supervision of a French division. The sector had seen little action since 1914. The weather proved more menacing than the somnolent Germans. Icy rain deluged the men, who were still wearing summer uniforms. A Washington bureaucrat had recently informed Pershing that they were holding woolen clothing in the United States to keep the draftees warm. The fellow apparently thought France was in the tropic zone.
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The four battalions survived their ten days in the lines with nothing worse than a plethora of bad colds. They even captured a German—an unarmed mail orderly who wandered the wrong way in the dark. The next four battalions had a very different experience. Within hours of their arrival, German shells descended around a strong point occupied by a platoon of Company F of the Sixteenth Regiment. The bombardment was a “box barrage,” designed to cut off an outpost from nearby support—the prelude to a trench raid. The American lieutenant in command wanted to call for a counter barrage, but his supposedly wiser French adviser dis-
agreed—not the last time the French would reveal their condescension toward the “Sammies.”

In minutes, 213 well-armed Germans emerged from the smoke and fog to storm the American trench. They had used bangalore torpedoes to blast their way through the barbed wire protecting it. A wild melee erupted, with the Germans wielding blackjacks, entrenching shovels and other horrendous tools developed by trench warfare veterans. In fifteen minutes, the enemy departed with a dozen prisoners. They left behind five American wounded and three dead—one shot, another with his throat cut, the third with his skull crushed. The Americans killed two and wounded seven attackers. The Bavarian lieutenant who led the raiding party reported,“The enemy was very good at hand to hand fighting.”
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When Pershing heard the news, he wept. Not out of grief for the dead but because this small defeat could not have come at a worse time. It coincided with a deluge of bad news from other battlefronts. On October 23, the insertion of seven German divisions into the hitherto feckless Austrian army had produced a stupendous victory at Caporetto in northern Italy. The Italian army had become a fleeing mob, which a young American ambulance driver named Ernest Hemingway would later describe in scarifying detail in his novel
A Farewell to Arms.
Over 300,000 Italian soldiers surrendered; the Germans captured no less than 3,000 abandoned artillery pieces. The British and French rushed eleven divisions—150,000 men—to Italy to stabilize the situation.

Even worse was the news from northern France. Starting on July 31, Field Marshal Douglas Haig tried to win the war without the Americans. He hurled a half million men at German defenses around the Flanders town of Ypres. For the next three months, ignoring horrendous casualties and rains that turned the battlefield into a sea of mud so deep that wounded men drowned in it, Haig continued his attacks. Not until November 6, when the dead and wounded reached 310,000, did the field marshal desist, having gained only a few meaningless kilometers and a ridge on which sat the ruined village of Passchendaele. British historians named the battle after it, instead of calling the disaster the third battle of Ypres, which reminded them of two previous stalemates in the same blood-soaked place.

The news from Russia provided no relief from this deluge of gloom. The new democracy’s army seemed to have literally vanished. According to one story swirling through France, anyone could predict that the Germans would advance fourteen kilometers closer to Moscow and Petrograd each day. Why? “That was as far as a tired German can walk.”
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Pershing knew the deteriorating military situation would lead to renewed demands to amalgamate the American army into the shaken French and British forces. When the First Division planned a retaliatory trench raid of its own, the desperate AEF commander supervised it personally. Alas, it was a humiliating flop. The infantry and the engineers failed to meet in no-man’s-land, and without the engineers’ bangalore torpedoes, no one could get through the German barbed wire.
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Eventually the First Division pulled off a successful raid, led by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. But these trivial skirmishes only intensified Allied disillusion with Pershing’s nonexistent army. As fall ebbed into winter, a mixed cry, half despair, half anger, began swirling through France:
Where are the Americans?
The new French premier, Georges Clemenceau, locally known as the Tiger, bared his claws and remarked that General Pershing’s chief occupation seemed to be having dinner in Paris.
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