Perhaps ambition kept him going. Up to the day when the declaration of war against Germany gave fresh impetus to his military aspirations, he had toyed with the notion of resigning from the service and taking up the law or business, so that he might really amount to something in the world.
A letter from Major General Bell, under whom he had served in the Philippines, gave his ambition a sharp spur. The rumor was already abroad in army circles that if the President decided to send an expeditionary force to Europe, out of the five commissioned major generals, it was Pershing who would be picked to command it. In spite of his being Pershing’s senior in rank, his old friend Bell was asking for an assignment under him in France.
Pershing had hardly read Bell’s letter before a wire came in from Senator Warren. Their mutual bereavement had tightened the bond between the two men, and Pershing knew that his fatherinlaw, who was still chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, would do anything possible to further his career. The wire asked how well Pershing spoke French. It was followed by an explanatory letter. Secretary Baker had invited the senator to drop in to his office the other morning and asked him, in an elaborately offhand way, if he happened to know whether Pershing spoke French. The senator, to gain time to find the right answer, said he wasn’t sure but he was sure his wife would know. He’d ask her and report back.
Even before Pershing could wire the senator that he’d studied the language in France for several months ten years before, a coded message from General Hugh Scott, Chief of Staff in Washington, was placed on his desk, ordering him to pick regiments to form a regular army division for service in France.
A few days later he was in Washington standing rigid in his khaki uniform with its stiff choker collar before Secretary Baker’s desk in the War Department. “I was surprised,” Pershing wrote, “to find him much younger and considerably smaller than I expected. He looked actually diminutive as he sat behind his desk, doubled up in a rather large office chair.”
When the little man started to speak the impression was different. In a few short sentences Baker told Pershing he had given the subject of a commander in chief in France careful thought and had chosen him upon his record. “I left Mr. Baker’s office with a distinctly favorable impression of the man …”
Immediately the general settled into a small room in the War Department to assemble a headquarters detachment to take to France. To head his staff, in spite of his conviction that only West Pointers could make really good officers, he chose Major James L. Harbord, who had risen from private to first lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry at a time when promotions from the ranks were hard to come by. He combed the army bureaus for talented young men. According to civilians called in later to activate the moribund services of the War Department, he carried off every army officer with brains in Washington City.
He knew he owed a debt of gratitude to Colonel Roosevelt. To sooth T.R.’s hurt feelings he promised to find posts in France for his three sons who were rearing to go overseas. He held at arm’s length a mass of applications for service from all sorts and conditions of men.
Before the month was over Pershing discovered that he was expected to command, not merely the 1st Division, but the entire expedition to France. The question of general officers immediately arose. Hugh Scott and Tasker Bliss admitted they were too old for service in the field. His friend Bell, he decided reluctantly, was not in good enough health. Leonard Wood he did not want for reasons too numerous to mention. As the only ranking regular army general with the troops abroad Pershing would be in a position to run his own show.
One afternoon Secretary Baker took him to the White House to call on President Wilson. The President was so preoccupied with a discussion of the shipping situation he hardly seemed to notice Pershing at first. Then he gave him a sharp gray glance through his noseglasses and his pale lips smiled. “General,” he said, “we are giving you some very difficult tasks these days.”
Pershing answered stiffly that difficult tasks were what West Pointers were trained to expect. It was disappointing, he noted afterwards, that the President didn’t outline his policy in relation to the demands for manpower for their own armies that the French and British missions in Washington were already making. Talk lagged. The general was instructed to convey the President’s best wishes to the heads of state in England and France. The time had come for him to take his leave. He rose and made another set speech: he appreciated the honor and realized the responsibilities entailed. He would do his best.
“General,” the President, who was always a little ill at ease with militarymen, answered with equal formality, “you were chosen entirely upon your record and I have every confidence that you will succeed; you shall have my full support.”
The President was as good as his word. When Secretary Baker sent Pershing his formal orders, the general found himself designated “to command all the land forces of the United States operating in continental Europe and in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including any part of the Marine Corps which may be detached for service there with the army … You will establish, after consultation with the French War Office, all necessary bases, lines of communication, depots etc., and make all the incidental arrangements essential to active participation at the front …”
The fifth paragraph assumed particular importance in the minds of Pershing and his staff: “In military operations against the Imperial German Government, you are directed to cooperate with the forces of the other countries employed against that enemy; but in so doing the underlying idea must be kept in view that the forces of the United States are a separate and distinct component of the combined forces, the identity of which must be preserved.”
That was Newton D. Baker’s answer to the campaign the British and French missions under Balfour and Joffre were conducting to have American levies drafted as replacements into their own war machines. When the general appeared in the Secretary’s office to say goodby, Baker, so Baker remembered later, said he would give him only two orders, one to go to France and the other to come home; but that in the meantime his authority in France would be supreme. “If you make good, the people will forgive almost any mistake. If you do not make good, they will probably hang us both on the first lamppost they can find.”
At noon on May 29, a rainy blustery day, General Pershing and fiftynine officers, sixtyseven enlisted men and thirtysix field clerks, accompanied by five civilian interpreters and two newspaper correspondents, embarked on a ferryboat from Governor’s Island and headed through the Narrows into Gravesend Bay. There, after tossing around for some hours in a choppy sea, they were picked up by the White Star liner Baltic.
Although submarines and death by drowning were on every man’s mind, the trip was uneventful. The officers attended French classes, and were lectured on the problems of maintaining an army in France by various British authorities on board. Their medical men vaccinated them and shot them full of injections against typhoid and paratyphoid A and B. On the tenth day the Baltic zigzagged into the Mersey.
Pershing’s plan had been to slip through England and to set up his headquarters in France as secretly as possible, but a fulldress military welcome awaited the little detachment when the Baltic warped into the Liverpool dock. There was a British admiral, a lieutenant general, a delegation from the Imperial General Staff, the Lord Mayor of Liverpool and the Royal Welsh Fusileers with its band drawn up at attention to meet them, complete with the regimental mascot, a stately old white billygoat. In the background was a swarm of newspapermen and photographers. British propaganda was evidently blowing up the arrival of American troops for all it was worth. Stiff as ramrods, with polished puttees and uniforms pressed to the nines, the American officers marched down the gangplank to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”