l stories of his campaigning at his best.
You should meet this big man with the heart of a little child, this man
who by befriending his enemies has made them his companions, this man
who stands up erect and faces the horrors of disaster with a smile and
prays in his heart for the sufferers."

Another friend says: "There is something about Pershing that reminds one
of Lincoln. It may be his ready wit and never failing good humor or
perhaps his big sympathetic heart. In the army the similarity is
frequently pointed out."

An officer who served under him in the Punitive Expedition into Mexico
and was thrown into close relations with him writes: "I have had the
pleasure of knowing many of our great men, but Pershing is the biggest
of them all. He combines the rugged simplicity of Lincoln with the
dogged perseverance of Grant; the strategic mystical ability of
Stonewall Jackson and the debonair personality of McClellan. In one
quality, that of intuition, he may be inferior possibly to Roosevelt,
but in cold logic and in supreme knowledge of human nature and of
soldier nature I have never met his equal."

The colonel of his regiment when Pershing was a lieutenant in the 10th
Cavalry said of him: "I have been in many fights but on my word he is
the bravest and coolest man under fire I ever saw."

In 1903, Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, in President McKinley's
cabinet, cabled him: "The thanks of the War Department for the able and
effective accomplishment of a difficult and important task."

A simpler, but no less effective estimate of his character, although it
was given in a way to puzzle him and perhaps also was a source of
embarrassment was the act of the Sultan of Oato who officially made
young Major Pershing the "father" of his eighteen-year-old boy. This was
the highest tribute the ruler of the tribe could pay, to give his own
son to the American officer. And this was done, too, when by his
training and religion the Mohammedan chieftain looked down upon even if
he did not despise a Christian.

Georges Clemenceau, whose words have been previously quoted, has this to
say concerning the directness and simplicity of the American General:
"General Pershing has given us in three phrases devoid of artificiality,
an impression of exceptionally virile force. It was no rhetoric, but
pure simplicity of the soldier who is here to act and who fears to
promise more than he will perform. No bad sign this, for those of us w