“Sir, we use them to lift bread slices from the platter, so we won’t touch the other slices with our hands.”
“Excellent,” the cadet-general boomed. “That’s the spirit.”
There was hearty laughter from the audience.
The mock general next paused in front of Wilson Clay, who also had a fork in his pocket. The general then asked, “Cadet Clay, I’ve also noticed that each of you has a string hanging from your fly. Tell me why.”
“Sir, we use them to pull our things out in the latrine, so we won’t touch ourselves with our hands.”
Gasps from the audience.
“Excellent,” barked the mock general. “There’s initiative for you.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “But tell me, Cadet Clay, how do you get your thing back in?”
Clay answered, “I don’t know about the others, sir, but I use my fork.”
Pandemonium swept the hall. Some cadets laughed so hard they fell off their chairs. General Robinson—the real one—indignantly marched out of the room. Clay was in his doghouse for the remainder of his stint at the academy.
Another story was told to me by Lieutenant General Alex Hargrave, commander of AEF’s I Corps. Clay had been a sickly youth who missed a year of high school because of persistent pneumonia. His father blamed the boy for the disease. When Wilson recovered, he vowed to build himself up, and did so with an unremitting dedication to exercise and physical challenge. He layered muscle on himself by lifting barbells and tossing a medicine bag. He went out for football his junior year at Davenport High and was cut straight away. But in his senior year he made the team as a running back. Then he made the academy team.
Clay set no records, but in an era before platooning he played every minute of every game for three years. In his last game, he broke his wrist in the third quarter, but played until the contest ended. Hargrave recalled Clay’s obsessive drive during the games and his pushing his teammates. He also remembers Clay telling him once that he hated football.
“To tell you the truth,” Hargrave said, “football wasn’t much fun for us other players because Wilson was in the game.”
Clay used the same techniques courting Margaret. “He lay siege on me like I was a medieval fort,” she laughingly told my wife. “I agreed to his marriage proposal as an act of surrender.”
Margaret Banning may have been the first woman Clay ever showed an interest in. She claims it was because they were negative images of each other. While Wilson at nineteen was blustery, abrupt, opinionated, and a bit stumbling, Margaret was poised, subtle, and charming. They did have one thing in common, willfulness. Wilson wore his on his collar, but Margaret hid hers under layers of social skills.
She was the daughter of a wealthy founder of the St. Paul and Spokane Railway Company, which was later bought out by the Great Northern. She and Clay met at a social held at the Spokane River Club when the cadet was home on Christmas leave in 1911. His was the third name on her dance card, and after their dance, he refused to release her hand, telling others on her card that their turns had been canceled. “He was the only fellow in the dance hall in uniform,” Margaret said, “so the other boys thought he could order them away.”
On the following day, Wilson arrived at the Banning home in a horse-drawn buggy, unannounced and uninvited. When the butler inquired of his mission, Clay replied he was taking Margaret on a picnic. Six inches of snow covered the ground. Perplexed, then amused, Margaret let herself be shown into the buggy, where she found a pile of blankets and a wicker basket of food. They drove down the hill to sit on the river bank, wrapped in blankets “to eat the coldest meal of my life.”
Clay left the next day for West Point, but barraged Margaret with letters, which became increasingly presumptuous. She happily returned them. “He seemed so dashing, and I didn’t mind a little harmless flirtation in our letters. What could he do? He was three thousand miles away.”
She underestimated him. By the time he returned to Spokane that summer, it was understood he would ask her to marry him the first moment they were alone. “I became engaged to a man I had never kissed,” Margaret told my wife.
Apparently Margaret Clay made the descent from an heiress to the wife of a junior army officer without difficulty. But all her life, wherever they were posted, from Fort Bragg to Washington, D.C., she returned alone to Spokane for six weeks every summer, once again to indulge herself in the family’s fortune.
To my knowledge, he never dallied with other women, at least until he met Lady Anne Percival, and I’ll relay my spotty knowledge of that relationship shortly. The acid test probably came during the Great War, and I’ve heard the story from several of his friends from those days, including General Jones. During R&R in Paris, fellow officers of the 4th Artillery chipped in a total of three dollars to hire a prostitute to make a surprise visit to Clay’s hotel room. Clay apparently paid her another three dollars to sit chastely in a chair for thirty minutes, then tell his friends he was the best ever.
The artillery officers learned the truth when they offered the hooker yet another three dollars to provide details. I asked General Clay about the story. He shook his head, but volunteered pleasantly, “The palm of my right hand still shines from those days.”
I’ll share a few more glimpses of General Clay. Nothing endears soldiers to their commander more than stories about how the officer will take care of them, come hell or high water. A favorite among AEF troops was how during the bitterly cold January of 1918 Clay raided the priceless, antiquarian library of a French chateau. He ordered pages torn from thousands of books so the paper could pad the lining of his men’s uniform coats.
On another occasion, after a miserably cold day of dragging howitzers across the French countryside, his troops faced a long night bivouacked in a freezing pasture. Against orders not to disrupt the civilian population when at all possible, Clay led his men into the cozy confines of a nunnery near Soissons, herding the startled sisters of the Holy Trinity into the kitchen while his exhausted men sacked out in their cells.
But best remembered stories involve Wilson Clay’s restless drive and his ferocity as a commander. Hargrave laughingly told me how Clay stared at his watch during a one-hour truce called to remove the wounded from no-man’s land at Château-Thierry. Clay mouthed the passing seconds, then ordered a salvo launched the instant the hour was over.
Another time, German infantrymen breached the American line and began swarming toward Clay’s battery. Clay either did not receive or ignored the order to abandon his guns and retreat. Rather, he ordered the muzzles lowered to fire grapeshot pointblank into the advancing German lines, round after round, until the barrels were glowing. This next can’t be verified, and may have been embellished over the years, but I heard that during the heaviest incoming, with the Kaiser’s infantry visible through the smoke, one of Clay’s gun bunnies threatened to bolt. Clay held a .45 to the soldier’s temple and asked how far he’d like to go. The soldier hastily picked up the tongue of the shell sled and went back to work. Moments later the German drive stalled.
These snippets of General Clay’s life were traded back and forth among his soldiers. They were rolled over and savored, discounted and expanded. American soldiers might catch only a glimpse of their commander as he sped by in his jeep, might not ever hear his voice. But these yarns completed their sketch of him and made him larger than life.
Now, about Lady Anne Percival. I am loathe to bring her up, but some commentators have seized on her relationship with General Clay, suggesting she drastically impeded his judgment during the battle, that she became a “field wife” to the general, to use the Red Army term. I need to tread lightly here, because appearances were less than reality. At least, I think so. Let me lay out some of the evidence.