One of the most damaging and persistent falsifications about General Clay was that he was callous about casualties. One might even expect such from a commander who witnessed many battles. Clausewitz said that an officer becomes indifferent to all suffering around him after thirty minutes. To the contrary, Clay spoke with me evening after evening about the tragedy of the losses. He felt deeply for his soldiers, and perhaps even for the enemy, for the injuries and loss of life, and he felt for the grieving in the homes of those soldiers whose families would learn of their fate, for the heartache of those parents whose sons would simply disappear forever in the chaos of battle.
He said once that the only reason he regretted leaving artillery to become an infantry commander was that the infantry reaps most of the combat agony. It is flatly untrue, as reported by Time, that the general ever said, “Death in war is incidental to victory.”
In fact, as odd as it sounds for a man in his profession, General Clay was revolted by the sight of blood. Whether it was an atrocious battlefield injury or the drawing of his own blood during an examination by his physician, he always lost several shades of color at the sight of it.
Another rumor, this one grotesque, was that the general suffered a deathwish, that he pursued with single-minded dedication a glorious demise. This slander was a complete inversion of the simple truth that Clay was fearless. Maurice de Saxe wrote, “The first of all qualities is courage.” General Clay went beyond this, with the indifference to danger of a man who disbelieved his own mortality.
Clay scoffed at the Great War’s chateau generals, and at Napoleon and Caesar, noted for their aversion to exposure in battle. Rather, he revered Washington, who rode within thirty yards of the British line at the Battle of Princeton, and Seigneur de Bayard (whom history has labeled le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, the knight without fear or blame), who had three horses killed under him at the Battle of Garigliano in 1503. When I once offered that a hero is a coward who got cornered, Clay’s scowl would have felled a lesser man.
Perhaps the general’s bravest moment was his flight at dawn of S-Day in Captain Norman’s plane, which I’ll describe later. But the act of daring for which Clay was best known among his troops was his evening at the 7th Engineering Battalion’s bivouac near Dover, ten days before S-Day. A rumor had swept the 5th Infantry Division, assigned to defend England’s southeast corner, that the German SS had planted an assassin at one of the division’s units, the 7th Engineers. The supposed assassin spoke perfect American English, had been sent to the United States to join the army, and had been ordered to lay in wait, looking for the first chance to murder the AEF’s commander, a suicide mission.
It was an absurd, laughable story but it refused to go away, despite the best efforts of 5th’s General Carson and the 7th Engineering Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Johnson. Neither Axis Sally nor Lord Haw Haw discussed the assassin on their radio programs, which confirmed the rumor as fact for many of the soldiers. The tale was creating tension in the ranks.
So General Clay flew to Dover. He ordered all officers and men of the 7th, about 650 of them, to line up outside a tent. Inside, Clay sat with his back to a table. He told me to place my .45 pistol on the table, then leave. One by one, the men of the 7th Engineers were ordered to enter the tent. There, alone with the general, each soldier was given the opportunity to murder him. Three hours later, after the last of the men left the tent, General Clay emerged to thunderous applause.
On the flight back to headquarters, Clay said, “There better not have been bullets in that pistol, Jack.”
Another odd theory that has gained some currency of late is that the soldiers’ devotion to General Clay was largely due to his appearance. This disparages the general, because it is a backhanded way of saying that nothing else Clay did could possibly have generated this adoration. Clay approached being handsome, with his red-gray hair, even teeth, and pronounced cheekbones. His eyes could be glacial or warmly avuncular, often switching instantly from one to the other, depending on the news he was receiving. With his Irishman’s red complexion, his face looked as if all the capillaries were trying to surface. He had a powerful physique, with a strong, corded neck and sloped shoulders. The Pall Malls had colored his teeth, and he once told me he would have tried Broadway if his nose hadn’t resembled Wallace Beery’s, with freckles on it to boot. Clay did nothing to trade on his appearance.
One commentator has even gone so far as to say that General Clay’s rapid rise in rank and his soldiers’ willingness to follow him depended solely on his appealing appearance and that history shows homely men do not become generals. Malarkey. Prince Eugene of Savoy, with his pockmarked face, short stature, and slouching manner, and Frederick, who was stooped and sway-backed, were worshipped by their soldiers. No, to understand the soldiers’ love of General Clay, look to his actions as a commander. Even today, after all that has passed, after all the controversy regarding his conduct in the battle for England, AEF veterans still honor the man.
I defend the general, but he did have his peculiarities. I’ll list a few here.
I rarely saw him angry, but he would later fume to me when an American at the dinner table ate with an upside-down fork. He called it an elitist affectation. If an Englishman did it, he’d later say, “What can you expect?”
He ate rice at least once a day and would go to extraordinary lengths to procure it, once sending Captain Norman in his plane to Glasgow. His commanders knew of this predilection and would have their kitchens prepare elaborate rice dishes: Risotto alla Milanese, jambalaya, pilaf, and others. For months, I ate what the general ate. I’ll never eat rice again in any form.
Clay had, to my mind, an inordinate affection for cats. He occasionally lobbied Churchill to repeal the wartime law forbidding feeding them fresh milk. The prime minister would blame his intransigent parliament and deftly change the subject.
The general loathed hunting and found the British practice of running a fox to ground with a dog pack particularly abhorrent. Despite enjoying fish at a meal, he was not a fisherman, and I once asked him why not. He replied, “I let someone else kill my fish.”
Also—and this I found truly peculiar—rather than swat at flies buzzing in his caravan, he would trap them with a glass and a piece of paper, then release them out the door.
He disliked French toast, French dressing, French perfume, French cuffs, and the French themselves, “though they’re hellish fighters, if you give them some rifles and are tolerant enough to train them.” Charles DeGaulle wore on Clay like a hair shirt. Clay had picked up President Roosevelt’s habit of calling DeGaulle “Joan of Arc.”
He had other peeves.
Bagpipes set him off: “They sound too much like my last root canal.”
Know-it-alls upset him: “I don’t like them interrupting me.”
Use the term “kill two birds with one stone,” and your request would be denied, whatever it was.
The general’s quick mind and memory are legendary. He never forgot a face or a name. I saw him recognize a fellow, an artillery sergeant, he drank one beer with in Paris twenty-four years before and had not seen before or since. Another time, when he ran into one of his soldiers from the Great War, an army lifer he had not seen in all the intervening years, Clay asked out of the blue, “And how’s your wife Emily?” The general claimed to know by name every unit commander above a company, meaning he knew every lieutenant colonel and up in the AEF. I believed him.
I once saw him do the Observer crossword puzzle in eleven minutes. Putting the newspaper down, he said, “I could’ve done it faster, but there were a dozen of those pissant British words we Americans kicked out of our language centuries ago.”