After several hours, the parade and its accompanying exultation passed by and a great hush settled over the banks of spectators lining the famous places and boulevards and avenues. It now became the turn of the French people to mourn their loved ones. In single file they came all afternoon, and into the night, walking silently though the triumphal arch—the war-worn, heartbroken, mesdames and mademoiselles misty-eyed beneath their black veils, and the mères and pères, the enfants and frères and soeurs of the dead, each clutching a single white flower, often grown in their own gardens or window boxes, to place on the white casket, until by the end of the day there had risen a great sad heap of these fleurs blanches, like a big snowbank or a dune, covering where the casket lay.
GENERAL PERSHING, with Colonel Marshall now his aide, then embarked to England for the massive victory celebration, where Winston Churchill, now secretary of state for war, greeted them at London’s Victoria Station.
For the rest of the week the American contingent was feted to luncheons and dinners with more counts, dukes, duchesses, etc., than inhabit a Shakespeare play. Marshall met the king and queen and sat next to princes and princesses of all nations during the ongoing festivities. He attended garden parties, balls, formal dinners, cotillions, and drunkouts with various celebrants, whose ranks included Lady Curzon, the prince of Wales, Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and the governor of Jerusalem.
Mrs. Astor’s sister, the American socialite Nora Langhorne, was among those who caught Marshall’s attention. “She was in a great gale and was very amusing,” according to a notation in his diary. “She had on a black velvet cap, like students in the Latin Quarter wear, and was trying to pass herself off as one of that class.”2
A formal dance that was given the night before the great victory parade seemed more in the nature of a melee. Marshall, for example, “had the pleasure of stepping on the foot of the King of Portugal, who was sitting on the sidelines” and who “looked quite furious,” but no apologies were forthcoming as Marshall whirled right past. Meanwhile, according to Marshall’s diary, General Pershing stepped on the foot of Princess Victoria “and left a black spot on her slipper,” which she told a lady-in-waiting she intended to keep “as a souvenir.”3 These affairs, Marshall noted, often lasted until two or three o’clock in the morning, convivially fueled by whiskey and champagne. At one point in the proceedings, Marshall found an open window and lay down on the floor “to take a nap” but was awakened by other revelers and sent back into the fray.
AT THE VICTORY PARADE ITSELF there was more consternation when it turned out that General Andre Brewster, the AEF’s inspector general, was unable to manage the horse provided him by the British army. Marshall earlier had picked out a “nice, quiet-looking” horse for himself, but being an accomplished rider he offered to swap with the general and soon found himself aboard an animal that was “both fractious and vicious.”
The crowd along the route of march was dense and enthusiastic, which, said Marshall, “did not add to the peace of mind of my animal [and] for eight miles I had the ride of my life.” The horse, it seemed, “tried to kick everything in reach,” and actually may have struck a small girl in the face. It refused to go straight, instead “going sideways,” and every time Marshall would try to straighten it out it would buck and rear. This delighted the crowd, and they cheered even more wildly, which made the beast frantic.
When they reached Admiralty Arch, packed with spectators, Marshall was petrified that his horse “would have killed a few if I had allowed him to go sideways.” Instead, when Marshall tried to straighten him out, the horse not only reared but reared so high that he toppled over backward. Marshall managed to jump off and roll out of the way and, as the horse was struggling to rise, he scrambled back aboard, having fractured a bone in his hand.
“As it was,” Marshall said, “I entered the Arch on a horse, and came out of it on a horse—and did not even lose my place in the lineup. But,” he added, “I lost my temper for the rest of the ride.”4
After Marshall passed the Royal Pavilion where the king and queen were reviewing the parade he at last was able to rid himself of the disagreeable creature (“with a curse!” he said) and join others of Pershing’s staff in stands where they watched the rest of the procession.
A national holiday had been declared and the festivities in England continued unabated as mobs of citizens thronged the streets dancing, singing, and drinking tankerloads of beer and ale. Though the people scarcely understood it at the time, this would mark the beginning of a social upheaval in Britain, which, like France, had lost nearly .4 percent of its population in the war.
But of the millions who had survived the fighting or had otherwise contributed to the war effort, many would not be content to return to the stern, prewar class-driven society from which they had been hurled into the trenches. This was just as true for the millions of British servants, plowmen, miners, hod carriers, and other menial workers who gleefully broke out in a novel popular song:
What shall we be …
When we aren’t what we are?5
On August 19 Pershing and Marshall returned to France and embarked on a poignant tour of the battlefields of the war, in particular those upon which American blood had been shed.
After visiting Verdun, Pershing’s party traveled to the Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne battlefields. Pershing wanted to see the massive new cemetery at Romagne where twenty-two thousand Americans were buried, and he lingered for some time in the vast graveyard. He walked up and down the seemingly endless rows of white crosses, somber and preoccupied as a man who has sent that many men to their deaths must be, even if he was convinced the cause was just. The commanding general of the American Expeditionary Forces must also have been contemplating his relationship with George Patton’s sister, Nita. We have nothing in the historical record on Pershing’s feelings during this period, but we can speculate that following the great outpouring after the victory he found himself much in demand by practically every eligible woman in Europe and America. That must have been on his mind.
Their train took Marshall and Pershing next to the Champagne, Château-Thierry, and Marne battlefields, and the following day by car they visited Soissons and the spot where the Germans had positioned their monster 240mm “Paris guns”—enormous Krupp factory railroad cannons with 110-foot barrels, which they used to bombard the city from eighty miles away. Marshall and Pershing went then to Lens in the British sector, a scene of utter destruction and desolation. Marshall later wrote, “To see a city, a great manufacturing center as large as San Francisco, completely leveled to the ground, gives one a better conception of the horrors of war than anything else.”6
A train carried them north to the killing fields of Belgian Flanders and the battles around Ypres, another pulverized city, where markers for nearly 300,000 British soldiers testified to the hideous intensity of the war in that sector during the four years it lasted.†
After returning to Paris for a week, Pershing and Marshall set out for a whirlwind tour of the Italian battlefields, which turned out to be as much a goodwill tour as anything else. By train they visited Turin, Genoa, Venice, and Rome, greeted everywhere by formal ceremonies, luncheons, dinners, complete with brass bands, or orchestras if the occasion rose to it, declarations of national fealty, cheek kissing, and so forth. At Rome they met the king and someone took Pershing around to explain the ruins to him, while Marshall, as it was mid-August, begged off in favor of a bath.
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1919, Marshall and Pershing boarded the SS Leviathan (formerly the German liner Vaterland, seized by the United States at the beginning of the war) and arrived in New York City five days later to yet another tumultuous reception. Pershing and his staff, Marshall of course included, led the way to a gigantic ticker-tape victory parade up Broadway and eventually through the triumphal arch at Washington Square. After the obligatory rounds of banquets, receptions, and eternal speeches, the general’s party attended similar congratulatory demonstrations at Phi
ladelphia and Washington, D.C., before it all settled down again to the regular army routine. Marshall, like most colonels, lost his rank after the war and was demoted to captain, a rank of unhappy prospects when the army was reduced from more than four million men to a permanent 297,800, set by an act of Congress. Young officers had to wait for older officers to retire before getting promoted themselves.
Marshall and Lily rented an apartment in the Adams Morgan section of the District of Columbia, across the street from Rock Creek Park with its many riding trails. Her frailty prevented childbirth, but the couple struck up a friendship with a precocious eight-year-old neighbor, Rose Page, who visited their apartment and often ate meals there. The Marshalls became her godparents when she was confirmed and the friendship lasted a lifetime.
Meanwhile, Pershing, who still commanded the AEF, which was, in effect, the U.S. Army, got into a kind of permanent row with the army’s chief of staff. General Peyton C. March assumed that Pershing was his inferior; after commanding four million men Pershing thought no such thing, and the two men quarreled so bitterly that Marshall was often forced to play referee.
One bone of contention was the question of what size and shape the postwar army would assume, and it became a feverish political football in the years immediately following the war. Liberals, labor unions, and even big business favored a small peacetime army, for both economic and humanitarian reasons. They contended that the size of the German army before the war had led to that nation’s militarism, while others argued that the immense costs of the war would prohibit the United States from maintaining a large permanent army. Pershing was of this mind as well, and he had approved a plan under which a smaller army would still be strong enough to handle lesser conflicts such as the Philippine insurrection, but also more than competent to train and organize a huge army of citizen soldiers if the occasion ever were to arise. At present, that possibility seemed so remote that people had begun routinely calling the late world conflict “the war to end all wars.”
Pershing’s stubbornness, his sternness, and his intransigence might have intimidated a lesser officer but Marshall was in fact just as stubborn, and often just as stern. In later years he recalled an incident in which Pershing, after he had replaced General March as army chief of staff, proposed a change in a military procedure that March had initiated. When he sent the proposal to Marshall for comment, Marshall’s endorsement said that Pershing was “entirely wrong,” and soon enough he was summoned to the general’s office.
“I don’t take to this at all. I don’t agree with you,” Pershing scowled.
“Well now, General, I have done a poor job on this,” Marshall said. “Let me have the paper again.”
So he rewrote his endorsement to tell Pershing in a whole different way that he was still wrong, and again Marshall received a summons to the general’s office where Pershing slapped his hand on his desk and cried, “No by God! We will do it this way!”
“Now General,” Marshall told his boss, “just because you hate the guts of General March, you’re setting yourself up—and General Harbord, who hates him too—to do something you know damn well is wrong.”
At this, Pershing returned the paper, grumbling indignantly, “Well, have it your way.” And that, Marshall said, “was the end of the affair.”7
Marshall was in the forefront of the practical world of army chiefs of staff, and he became indispensable to Pershing as he met frequently with President Warren G. Harding and his cabinet members, congressmen and senators of all parties, and foreign dignitaries. He wrote Pershing’s speeches and sometimes even gave them for him. During the general’s frequent absences and trips abroad, Marshall functioned almost entirely in his stead, acquiring in the process practically every nuance of the chief of staff.
THE CLOSE OF THE WAR ALSO BROUGHT a bittersweet end to the romance between General Pershing and George Patton’s sister Nita. In the spring of 1919 she had arrived in London to visit her sister-in-law Kay Merrill when Pershing wrote, asking to postpone their engagement announcement because “the feeling was gone.” Not only that, but he had failed to include her on the guest list for the great victory gala in Paris on July 3. Brokenhearted and humiliated, Nita replied by returning the engagement ring.
Although he had counseled his sister not to come to France during the war, Patton now made entreaties to her to go to Paris for a “dignified reunion,” but it was no good. Pershing was, in the words of Beatrice, “wined and dined and flattered and praised by the great and the near great and some of the most beautiful women in Europe who were not above falling at his feet to gain something for their heart’s interests.” Nita, she continued, “with her blond Viking good looks … and good sense … removed herself with all flags flying.”
Neither Nita nor Pershing would marry, and several years later after turning down another suitor Nita wrote her aunt Nannie, “I am fated to be free. Unless I could mate with a master, I’d better steer clear of the shoals.” In the estimation of her niece she “spent the rest of her life taking care of everyone.”8
Beatrice had an even darker observation about Pershing after he had become chief of staff and a regular at their dinner table; she told her daughter Bee that “the General Pershing you children know is not the Black Jack Pershing” their aunt Nita had fallen in love with. “Lots of men die in wars but some of them with very strong bodies go on living long after the person inside of them is dead,” Beatrice said. “They are dead because they have used themselves all up in the war. That’s one of the most terrible things about war.”9
On September 16, 1919, following the great victory hullabaloo in New York City, Patton had joined behind Pershing and Marshall in the Pershing “Triumph” parade in Washington. “I am to command the tanks,” he wrote his mother, seriously doubting whether any of the American-made machines would finish the parade “as the engine usually [conks] out after about five miles.” Peace, however, was Purgatory for George Patton, if not Hell itself. He was thoroughly a warrior—or a racehorse, as his friend and brother-in-law Fred Ayer likened him, a stallion penned in a small corral always kicking at the rails to get out. He was not without his humor and charm during this period, but Patton could also be rude, bitter, and cruel as events went against him and he watched his beloved tank corps and, in time, the very army he loved crumble before his eyes.
Like George Marshall, Patton lost his wartime rank and reverted to captain, but within seventeen months he had climbed back up the ladder to major. His first assignment was at Fort Meade, Maryland, which had become home to the U.S. Army Tank Corps.
For the first several months, Patton spent the majority of his time in Washington, on the board of a committee, preparing a series of reports on the future role of the tank. Its role in war was well studied and of increasing importance; its role in peace was not so certain, especially considering how dramatically the country’s mood had changed in the 1920s. Tanks were expensive to build and expensive to keep up, but the nation had turned the page from militaristic to isolationist, as George Marshall, too, had found. The U.S. Army was quietly being relegated to the backwaters of America’s attention.
Beatrice brought the family to Fort Meade, even though it was only sixty miles from their home in a fashionable section of Washington. For the Patton children, the fact that “daddy was home” soon became “far below our expectations,” according to Ruth Ellen, then six.
“Everything I did was wrong,” she said.
Much later Ruth Ellen put it in perspective. “I realize now that he was in considerable pain at the time … having a hangover from the war, which is a very real thing.” She spoke of the “shrinking command of a handful of men and the narrowing horizons of peacetime duty”—and then the “tender trap” of home and family. “It is a let-down,” she wrote, adding, “I guess things didn’t come up to Georgie’s [her father’s] expectations either.”10
Patton bought a very expensive Pierce-Arrow automobile because, he said, “I can afford it, and the
war’s over.” When his efficiency report arrived from France it rated him “one of the strongest officers in the Army,” and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. He told his father he believed it was only the second time an officer had been awarded both the Distinguished Service Cross and the DSM—the other being MacArthur—but he was wrong. He gave all the credit and honors for the award to the officers and men of his tank corps. “They won the medal and fortune pinned it on him.”11
In fall 1920 Patton returned to the cavalry branch of service—not only because he believed that on the battlefield of the future the tank would ultimately supplant the horse for reconnaissance and mobile shock value, but also because of his love for horses. At a time when even his colonel-ranked peers had to exercise frugality, Patton acquired a gorgeous string of polo ponies and became, in time, one of the finest polo players in the army. It was a highly skilled sport that required great confidence, foresight, and reaction. It was also very dangerous; broken bones and gashes from polo mallets were regular occurrences and death was not uncommon. For Patton it was a poor substitute for war, but it filled a void in him that almost obsessively craved perilous activity.
In time Patton came around to relaxing with the family. He bought a dog for the children, a white bull terrier that they named Tank, and soon he began to enthrall the youngsters—Ruth Ellen and Bee—by regaling them with elaborate fables made out of whole cloth from the medieval history he knew so well. Fabulous raconteur that he was, Patton’s tales were filled with gallant knights, beautiful ladies, and horrible fiends “with no detail left to the imagination,” Ruth Ellen wrote much later. “As the stuff of history is often cruel and bawdy and bloody and unfair, that’s the way [he] told it,” she said.12
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