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WHY AN OBSCURE CAPTAIN WAS MADE A BRIGADIER-GENERAL OVER THE HEADS OF EIGHT HUNDRED SENIORS-A FIGHTING MAN WITH A RECORD FOR VICTORIES OF PEACE

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BY

ROWLAND THOMAS

LONG with the news that Captain John J. Pershing of the General Staff has been appointed a Brigadier-General, U. S. A., comes a request from the editor of the WORLD'S WORK that I outline briefly any reasons I may know for the remarkable promotion of so comparatively young and unknown an officer over the heads of many hundreds of his seniors.

The request brings up the picture of one of those tawdry cafés of Manila and of a fit sixfooter of a man who sat across the luncheontable-brown with the triple tan of field service in the tropics, lean and hard with the exertions and deprivations of a year's campaigning and renews the wonder I felt then whether his reserve will ever give his country people a chance to know him. He was fresh from Moroland then, and as he spoke grudgingly of his adventures there-the most uncommon experience, perhaps, which had come to any officer of his age-I found myself thrilling with excitement. "I've got to tell people about this!" I said at last. He was silent for a moment, and then he spoke half-laughingly, but very firmly: "Of course I can't stop your writing yarns about the Moro campaign," he said, "only don't you try to work in any hero stuff about me."

Still mindful of that warning, I must try to draw here, without any of the glamor which "hero stuff" might give, a hasty sketch of a man whose life-motto might have been Efficiency. There lies one reason for his promotion, that for twenty years he has done just as it should be done what work has come to him, without carelessness or impatience or mistake, without any selfish grasping after opportunity and without any weak failure to make the most of every opportunity that came. His work has been of many different kinds, and altogether it has tested him on every side.

At the outset he gained what seems to many the highest honor West Point grants, for he

graduated in 1886 as Senior Cadet Captain, a rank which should stamp its bearer as nearest of his class to the ideal of a soldier. Neither "grind" nor military athlete can hope for it, for it betokens alike scholarly excellence and soldierly distinction, a sound and well-trained mind in a body expert in the management of arms and horses, and best of all it betokens the self-control which warrants the responsibility of command.

Already a marked man, then, in a modest way, young Lieutenant Pershing left the Academy to enter a still more rigid trainingschool, for he was assigned to the old Sixth Cavalry and had his part in the campaigns which destroyed the power of Geronimo and his Apaches and opened the Southwest to its belated civilization. At once he began to gain those "Recommendations" which mean more among soldiers than any symbols of rank or wealth or influence. In August, '87, scarce a year from school, he is complimented by General Miles for "marching his troop, with pack-train, over rough country, one hundred and forty miles in forty-six hours, bringing in every man and animal in good condition." Such compliments were rare in a land where Miles and Chaffee and that lovable demon Lawton were afield, and every male was a horseman.

In '89 he rescues a party of horse-thieves and cowboys who were besieged by hostile Zuñis, without firing a shot, and is "highly recommended for discretion" by General Carr. Discretion is not a common quality in a youngster with a body as tough and powerful as that of the horse he rides, and a keen liking for a bit of rough-and-tumble work. And so the catalogue runs, till in the Cree campaign of June, '96, he gained "especial recommendation for judgment and discretion," and his Western training was done.

There had been ten years of it, and they have stamped him to the end of his days as a man

of the Southwest. Few of us can realize what ten years in the Department of Arizona meant to one who could take advantage of them the bull-dog chases after a foe with the eyes and ears and cunning of the wild creatures, the clashes with the turbulent whites of miningtown and grading-camp and round-up and drive, and, hardest test of all, the long periods of inactivity at some little fort set amid the aching silence of the desert, with the deadly close companionship of other men. To-day in person Pershing is an embodiment of those plainsmen we thank our authors for giving us to dream of, the tall silent men, deep-chested from the liquid crystal of the air they breathe, slim-waisted and graceful from life in the saddle, with frank eyes that unpryingly look one through and through. With gentle voices, chary of mere words, laughing but seldom, they seem subdued by the vast still distances, and yet the slow, quiet smile, more of the eye than of the lips, and the quaint, incisive turns of speech, show that they have noted and appreciated the oddity of life.

From all that Lieutenant Pershing was called back to the bustle and color of West Point, and was serving as tactical officer there when the Spanish War came in '98. At his own request he rejoined his regiment, the Tenth Cavalry, one of those "nigger regiments" which fight so very much like a white man's regiment, and thus reached Cuba. His own colonel furnishes all needful comment on his conduct there: "I have been in many fights and was all through the Civil War, but on my word he is the bravest and coolest man under fire I ever saw in my life."

From the excitement of Santiago he came back to Washington, and for twelve months. solved "difficult and vexatious problems" at a desk, as head of the division of Customs and Insular Affairs. Then, in September, 1899, he was assigned to duty in the Philippines, again at his own request. He became AdjutantGeneral, executive officer, of the department of Mindanao and Jolo, where for two years he could study the "Moro problem."

I have sketched this crude outline that you might see what were the influences which had shaped him and what manner of man he had become when that gray old soldier, General Chaffee, suddenly found himself in need of a proven young soldier. Of a superbly powerful and healthy body, of a clear and well-disciplined mind, of a personal courage so unconscious

that it seems almost commonplace, and above all, cool, discreet, and efficient, he was thoroughly ready when the greatest responsibility of his life so far came to him in June of 1901 and he was sent out single-handed to cope with that oldest of the "Moro problems" which Spain had always shirked.

It was no question of the opium-drunken, bewildered Lord of the Pearl Islands, the Sultan of Sulu, nor of the half-subdued sea-Moros whose comic opera ways of living and dying so tickled the lively fancy of Mr. Ade. If you will turn to a map of Mindanao you will find, near the western coast of the main body of the great island, a lake marked Lanao or Malanao. It lies in a beautiful, elevated, half-open, tropical country of wooded hills and grassy lowland marshes, and about its shore lives a horde of men like those who once swept the world from Burma to France in a cut-throat frenzy of religious zeal, men as out of place in connection with any American polity to-day as a herd of mastodons would be on Broadway. There may be thirty, there may be a hundred thousand of them; they do not like to be counted. In their way they are industrious and frugal folk, a set of murderous farmers who love a fight more than any Mac or O' ever did, and do not mind dying to get it. Each of their rancherias, their farmsteads, is an impregnable little fortified community, with a working body of slaves, and a garrison of experts in sudden death, and a petty war-lord, who is called a Datto and who wields unquestioned the power of life and death on his scant acres. Clashes between Dattos are incessant, but like good Mohammedans all are brothers in the holy work of killing infidels.

After a few half-hearted attempts at conquest, Spain left these men to farm and kill about their unmapped hills, content if they did not come down too often to the coast and raid the towns and bear away a train of Christian slaves. But toward the end of the last century, something happened to Spain, and rumor spread glad tidings among the Malanaos. A race of white men ten feet tall, whose hoofs were cloven, had come to garrison the coast towns, and promised glorious fighting. Raids became more frequent, one clash followed another, sentries were assassinated, arms and horses stolen, and from their forts among the hills the Dattos sent down haughty challenges in answer to complaints. "You know where to find us," was their substance.

So in the spring of 1901 came an expedition and the fight at Bayan, a brilliant, tactical, white-elephant of a victory, for it opened the way to nothing but further fighting. The Moros counted the defeat cheap price for the knowledge that the new ten-foot whites were killable and died fighting. Before us was almost the certainty of an unending little war, inglorious and vexatious, while in the background was the spectre of a possibility no one cared to face-a religious war which would end only in the grim campaign of extermination, for in Moroland women bear men-children, and boys grow into men, and a good son avenges his father and his father's faith. That was the delicate task before the Government, to prove to these fire-eating tribesmen that we were their good, hard-fisted, loving, raging friends, ready to break their heads to win their hearts. It had become a matter of the personal equation, and for the strenuous conciliator was chosen John J. Pershing, the patient, tactful, farsighted, self-contained fighting-man of whom the newspapers had never heard.

I choose those adjectives deliberately, willing prey for the many who would be glad to convict me of fulsome praise of one who seems to them already spoiled, a favorite of Fortune (spelled Roosevelt), unless a few tiny pictures of the work he did show him to possess those qualities. Establishing camp with his little force a battalion of infantry, a squadron of cavalry, and a section of guns-well up toward the lake from Cottabatto, Pershing opened negotiations with the hostile chieftains and endured their challenges, their insults, even their petty attacks on his sentries, till patience lost its virtue. Then, very quietly, he warned the hot-headed leader of them all, the Sultan of Bacolod, that if he caused any further trouble Bacolod would be destroved. The Sultan, secure in his fortress-with walls of earth and living bamboo forty feet thick, roofed with more earth and bamboo, surrounded by a moat thirty feet wide and forty deep, bomb proof and charge proof-laughed at the warning and broke the camel's back. In two days the fort was a memory, and a company of Pershing's infantry, Anglo-Saxon boys with civilized shrinking from cold steel, perhaps a year before farm-hands and mechanics and Bowery loafers, had received on their bayonets the charge of a hundred maddened Malays who had sworn to die, and had shivered it to quivering atoms-and the casualty list was two slightly wounded men.

It was that victory by prearrangement which the Japanese used so effectively-later. After due warning Pershing destroyed another stronghold in the same mechanical, unimpassioned way, and then the deadly precision of his fighting and the simple faith with which he carried out his promises of destruction, had their effect, and it was time for tact. Another fort was doomed; on three sides of it lay the lanky riflemen and the guns ready to smother the fire of the defenders; on the fourth was the lake where canoes had gathered for what is to Moros the grandest of sports. In the centre of the rude square lay the squat brown fort with the arrogant red flag above it, and to one side was the chosen company whose duty it was to fling bridges of bamboo across the moat and beat in the gates and put the bayonets to work. Everything waited for a command which was not given, and night came, and in the morning the fort was empty. "They've skun out across the lake!" cried a correspondent, and at the disappointment in his voice Pershing's eyes lightened ever so little. "Hm," he said thoughtfully, "I wondered if they wouldn't run away if they had time to think of it.”

So ended the fighting and with it died the spectre of religious war. That campaign was something to be proud of, but to me the months which followed reveal more of Pershing, and of the uprightness and simplicity of character which are the real secret of his strength. First came that strange triumphal march around the lake, of the first white men who had circled it in three hundred years of occupation. It might have been heroic in another setting, or it might have taken on the strut of mockheroics, but with him it was merely a matter of business. Everywhere those primitive warriors, as sheerly brave and proud as any men alive, came out unafraid, and unshamed that they had had enough, and welcomed the white man whom they recognized as their master, and he greeted them all with a matterof-fact shake of a big brown hand and simple "Howdy. Let's be friends."

And of the many parts it has been given him to play none is pleasanter to remember than his rendition of the rôle of Solomon, sitting at his tent door of a morning in the Orient to hear the wishes of his people. Two lords of two villages approach, armed to the teeth and eyeing each other's throats. The plaintiff makes his accusation, the defendant his explanation, the judge speaks a few words of

shrewdest Yankee sense, and the enemies go their ways in amity. And this was done day after day without compulsion, almost against the will of Captain Pershing, who shrank from such responsibility. "I'm no lawyer," said he. But bravery, truthfulness, justice, and faithfulness are the cardinal virtues for those simple folk, and because they felt they found them in Pershing they loved him, to use a good old simple word in its rightful sense.

The manifestations of their trust were sometimes pathetically amusing. One fine morning the bachelor captain awoke to find himself father of a splendid eighteen-year-old boy. The original father of the lad, the Sultan of Oato, had paid to this mere Christian the highest tribute of respect and affection a Moro knows, and given him his heir.

Stranger things happened. In February of 1903 the Captain was invited to Bayan, the scene of the first fight, to confer with the supposedly half-hostile Datto of that rancheria. He was received by half-a-dozen Dattos, who proceeded with due religious ceremony to make him one of themselves, an hereditary ruler with royal rank and the power of life and death -so that he is to-day, I fancy, the only Mo

hammedan war-lord who bears the golden stars of the United States on collar and saddlecloth. Immediately after the ceremony an incident occurred which showed the new Datto's practical turn of mind. An American flag was hoisted over the Moro fort and Datto Pershing, wishing to salute it, could find no ammunition for the purpose save live shrapnel. They burst with thrilling pyrotechnic effect, and served to deepen still more the respect in which he was held.

Such is a hint of his work from the day when the Moros of Lanao faced him as an interesting enemy to the day they bade him good-bye and called him, literally, their "Father." From it you may see a little of the way in which he has done what work has come to him. The knowledge of details which he has always shown, the clear sight of the end in view, the resourcefulness in ways and means, the determination and clean-cut efficiency, and above all the honesty and forgetfulness of self which animate him, convince his friends that he will be equal to any further work that comes, and may to you, perhaps, be some explanation of his winning now the coveted "Stars" of a Brigadier.

MRS.

RUSSELL

SAGE AND
INTERESTS

HER

AN INTIMATE STUDY OF THE WOMAN-THE CHARITIES WHICH HAVE BEEN DEAR TO HER FOR MANY YEARS AND WHICH WILL PROBABLY SHARE IN HER FUTURE BENEFACTIONS

BY

ARTHUR HUNTINGTON GLEASON

USSELL SAGE and Mrs. Sage were a devoted, childless couple.

R

And in wiping her husband's name clear, as Mrs. Sage will do, she will be merely revealing the man as he actually was.

It is absurd to believe that a man hating charity, opposing all his life a wife who was out of sympathy with him in her wish to help the world, would by his will enable her to carry out a policy alien to his thoughts. He built up a great fortune, because his genius lay that way. But at the same time he had an impersonal, life-long desire to aid woman.

Because he believed in his wife more strongly than in anything else, he wished that women should prosper.

The world is looking for startling benefactions from Mrs. Sage, in new and untried directions. Three hundred letters a day are telling her how to spend $60,000,000-begging her to raise mortgages, to send girls to singing schools, to aid "causes," to endow libraries as if the charity problem were to her a fresh field. As a matter of fact, she has been studying it hard and closely for thirty years. What she has done in benefactions she will

continue to do, only with the horizon line somewhat pushed back. The future, therefore, is not going to witness a picturesque and spectacular overflow of sentimental good-will.

The great interests close to Mrs. Sage's heart have been: The Emma Willard Seminary for Young Women; the Woman's Hospital; woman suffrage; the Young Women's Christian Association, the Young Men's Christian Association and its various branches, particularly its work for soldiers and sailors; the Woman's Exchange; and the New York University. The lesser, but still dear interests: anti-narcotic and anti-drink legislation to the extent that tobacco and drink affect the status and comfort of women; the Pascal Institute for training girls to become dressmakers; and trade schools for girls.

Women and education-there is the key. This woman, who is perhaps the wealthiest woman in the world, was born in Syracuse, N. Y., in 1828, the daughter of Joseph and Margaret (Jermain) Slocum. The panic of 1837 straitened the circumstances of the Slocum family. After her father's partial financial failure she remained at home, aiding in the housework. Later, she started for Mount Holyoke, but on the way fell ill at Troy, where she was made comfortable in her uncle's home. He insisted that she go to the Troy Female Seminary.

On August 4, 1846, she entered Troy Seminary, and graduated the next year. Then she returned to her Syracuse home, and soon decided on teaching. One of her Troy teachers, Miss Harriett Dillaye, shared with Miss Mary L. Bonney the headship of the Chestnut Street Seminary of Philadelphia, which has since become known as the Ogontz School. There she taught grammar, mathematics, geography, and French for two years, until her health gave way.

She became the second wife of Russell Sage in 1869. Since then her time has been wholly occupied with her home duties, her executive duties, and her personal benefactions. She has been officially connected with the Woman's Hospital (for thirty years), the Woman's Christian Association, the Woman's Exchange, and various boards of home and foreign missions for women. Since 1891 she has been president of the Emma Willard Association. She was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Emma Willard School (the successor and perpetuation of Troy Semin

ary) in 1894. Four of the seventeen trustees may be women. Mrs. Sage was the first woman to serve on the Board.

In 1904 she received the degree of Master of Letters from the New York University. She has made many public speeches of presentation and welcome, and has written. various magazine and newspaper articles. She has successfully managed her city home (for the last two years at No. 632 Fifth Avenue), her country home at Lawrence, Long Island, and a little home-a "retreat" almostat Sag Harbor, Long Island. And that management of the three homes was achieved without change of servants. At least the women that read this will know by this that Mrs. Sage is a personality.

And now, having given the dry skeleton of her biography, it is time to see what manner of woman she is the woman whom Archbishop Corrigan once characterized as “ad-mirably great."

She has always made me think of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, as described by Frank Stockton. Those two sound, sensible women were wrecked at sea and cast adrift. The novel and rather alarming environment did not trouble them. They remembered their New England broom methods, which they forthwith used on the oars and paddled to shore in safety. Now that is the spectacle Mrs. Sage makes in chaotic New York, among the light-headed and unbalanced women of wealth. She is a Puritan and a schoolteacher -a steadfast New Englander by inheritance and desire. And never for a moment does she lose her balance or her sense of humor.

Objecting to men smoking in the presence of women, she went to the Mayflower dinner (the Mayflower Association being one that she has notably furthered), protested against the smoking, and withdrew in entire good humor when her protest was overruled. Her unblurred view-point, the unbroken consistency of a simple faith and practice, is delightful in a flighty and erratic society.

She has been as earnest and humorous, living at the centre of $60,000,000, as when she taught school in Philadelphia. Not in any sense a public woman, emphatically a home woman, she has been forced into prominence.

Always the exponent of common sense, her expenditures are sensible, her views on life are sensible, and, greatest triumph of all, her

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