PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (6 page)

After returning to the United States, he and Beatrice quickly packed for their move to Fort Riley. In some ways, Kansas would be a sharp comedown after the heady elegance of the capital, but Patton, who was to be a student at the Mounted Service School as well as an instructor in fencing, was given a majestic title the army created especially for him: Master of the Sword. The title was unique in the U.S. Army, and it was certain to draw attention to the young officer who held it. That, of course, was most excellent, but even more appealing to Patton was its romantic ring, suggesting an anachronistic nobility that savored of the age of chivalry. It was a long glance backward from a world on the cusp of a war in which neither swords nor chivalry would find a place. But Patton most certainly would.

CHAPTER 3

ON SEPTEMBER 23, 1913, PATTON REPORTED to the Mounted Service School, Fort Riley, Kansas, to enroll as a student and, simultaneously, as Master of the Sword, to teach his brother cavalrymen the art and science of the saber. Although Patton would emerge early in World War II as a great trainer of men, he did not enjoy teaching swordsmanship to officers who, for the most part, were senior to him and more or less obviously resented instruction from a brash second lieutenant in what they may well have deemed an outmoded skill. He also felt guilty for having torn Beatrice away from the glamour of Fort Myer in exchange for the dusty, dry, dull Midwest of Fort Riley. Although the quarters assigned to him and his family were hardly squalid, they were dreary enough. “You certainly have given up a lot on my account,” he admitted to Beatrice.
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If Patton was discouraged, he never let his feelings interfere with his work. He studied hard, he taught diligently, and when the Cavalry Board asked him to compose a manual of regulations for the M—1913 sword he himself had designed, he plunged into the work. (Dyslexia notwithstanding, Patton proved to be a skilled writer.) Patton smelled gunpowder in the air in April 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson ordered the occupation of the Mexican port city of Veracruz. To reestablish a friendly democracy in Mexico, Wilson wanted to force out of office General Victo-riano Huerta, who had assumed the presidency after the assassination of Francisco Madero the year before. Wilson was pondering military intervention when the detention of a small group of American sailors at Tampico forced his hand. On April 21, with the approval of Congress, Wilson sent a small amphibious party to seize control of the port of Veracruz in order to prevent the landing there of arms and other equipment being transported to Huerta aboard a German ship. After the landing party met stiff resistance, Wilson ordered a larger occupation of the city. Patton prayed for a full-scale war. To his father, on April 19, 1914, he wrote, “If the war is to be short there will be no chance for a man of my rank to make any reputation . . . But should the war last a long time ... a man with a reputation for personal ability ought to get a good volunteer or malatia [militia] command.”
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Alas, General Huerta resigned the presidency on July 15, and although the Veracruz occupation continued until November 23, Patton’s hopes for a war, short or long, quickly faded. Yet no sooner had these prospects dimmed than all Europe obliged the young second lieutenant by beginning the slaughter of the Great War after Gavrilo Princeps, a consumptive Bosn-ian-Serb teenager, shot to death the archduke of Austria-Hungary and his wife as they drove through the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Like most other Americans, Patton was not quite sure what this obscure European dispute had to do with the United States, but the war quickly exploded, engulfing the European continent. Surely, Patton thought, America would have to get into it sooner or later. And better sooner than later. On November 11, 1914, his twenty-ninth birthday, Patton wrote his papa: “I certainly am aging. ... I fixed twenty-seven as the age when I should be a brigadier and now I am twenty-nine and not a first Lieutenant.” His hair was even thinning. For Beatrice, however, he cast this fact in the rosiest light he could manage: “When I get less hair than I now have I will look like a German duelist.”
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Master of the Sword or no, the twenty-nine-year-old second lieutenant was deeply frustrated by the dearth of opportunities for glory. For now, to anyone who would listen, he vented his rage against President Woodrow Wilson, who was determined to keep America out of war, even after American lives had been lost when a U-boat torpedoed the British liner
Lusitania.

Patton’s mood was brightened on February 28, 1915, when Beatrice gave birth to a second daughter, Ruth Ellen. But his graduation from the Mounted Service School in June meant that he would return to his regiment, which, he learned, was about to be deployed to the Philippines. Ever since 1898, when the United States acquired the Philippine Islands from Spain as part of the spoils of the Spanish-American War, a tour of duty here was virtually de rigueur for all young army officers. Patton was apprehensive because he knew that, more often than not, the Philippines failed to be a rite of passage and became, in fact, a dead end to an officer’s career. Always ready to pull whatever strings he could find, Patton secured 11 days of leave to travel to Washington, where he prevailed on influential friends to get him an alternative assignment. They managed to arrange a transfer to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican border. To be sure, it was no garden spot and certainly less comfortable than a posting in Manila, but new troubles were brewing between Mexico and the United States, and Patton sensed the possibility of real action at this post.

Mexico was in turmoil. Numerous would-be leaders vied for power, including the brutal Victoriano Huerta and the more moderate Venustiano Carranza. In these struggles, partisans of one leader or the other sometimes crossed the border into the United States to replenish their war chests with cash and goods “liberated” from towns in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Army border garrisons were expected to police the region and prevent or turn back such incursions. Patton’s hope was that the police action would soon break into open warfare.

In a matter of months, it would, more or less. But for now, Patton could find no one at Fort Bliss to tell him what he was expected to do.

Eventually, he was informed that there really was nothing for him to do until his regiment arrived. In the meantime, it was suggested that he study for the examination that would qualify him for advancement from second to first lieutenant. He asked for extra time to prepare, and since no one had anything to better occupy him, he was granted the extension. Patton used this time not only to study but, quite shamelessly, to butter up the president of the promotion board by helping him train his polo ponies. Learning that his former Fort Sheridan commander, Captain— now Major—Francis Marshall, was at Fort Bliss on an official visit and was the guest of a promotion board member, Patton wasted no time in calling on Marshall and his host, confident that “Maj. M will blow my horn.”
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No doubt Marshall did, for Patton took the examination and was quickly qualified for promotion. The actual promotion would come on May 23, 1916.

Shortly after he passed his exam, Patton’s regiment, the 8th Cavalry, arrived at Fort Bliss. Patton was sent with his troop to Sierra Blanca, a rudimentary Texas border town of perhaps 20 houses plus 1 saloon. It was a town out of a dime novel, populated by cowboys and patrolled by a rugged snowy-haired marshal named Dave Allison, who quickly befriended the young officer. Beyond the few rude streets of the town lay a landscape of desolation, through which Patton led mounted border patrols and, from the saddle, at the trot, hunted jackrabbits. “I like this sort of work,” he wrote with satisfaction, “a lot.”
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Something more exciting than jackrabbits loomed on the horizon on Thanksgiving Eve. While in Sierra Blanca with Troop A of the 8th Cavalry, Patton received a telegram from Fort Bliss warning of an impending raid on the town by some 200 Mexican revolutionary bandits. With all the senior officers out on patrol, Patton was in command. He wrote to his father that he did not believe the “rumor” of a raid, but, in any case, he set about planning how to repel an attack, assigned battle stations to each of the 100 men with him, and ordered everyone to sleep beside their weapons. “I wish they would come. I . . . could give them a nice welcome,” he wrote.
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As Patton had predicted, however, nothing happened.

On Thanksgiving Day, he was ordered to advance against a knot of eighty Mexicans who were reported to have set up camp on the American side of the Rio Grande. He decided to launch a classic attack, with drawn sabers and at dawn, the time of day at which an enemy is most vulnerable. There was little time to relish the prospect of the attack, however. Before Patton led his men out, the troop captain and first lieutenant returned from patrol and ordered the men to leave their sabers in camp. Swordless, the Master of the Sword led the patrol in a tedious 11-hour ride along the Rio Grande, found no Mexicans, then returned to Sierra Blanca. He was soon ordered to return to Fort Bliss, to which Beatrice and the children came for what she planned as a two-month stay. At first appalled by conditions there and terrified by a brutally dusty windstorm, she actually asked her husband to resign his commission. Patton’s earliest biographer, Ladislas Farago, described Beatrice as a woman “at her best when the chips were down,”
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and she proved that now, quickly pulling herself together. Indeed, as she began to explore El Paso, she concluded that it was not so bad after all. She resolved to move herself and her two babies permanently into the less-than-sumptuous on-post housing.

Once the Pattons were settled into their modest house, sister Nita came to visit. Patton introduced her to the senior commander at Fort Bliss, Brigadier General John J. Pershing. Nita Patton was 29, unmarried, unattached, and a figure every bit as imposing as her brother, described by one Pershing biographer as “a tall blonde Amazon.”
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Pershing was a martially handsome 55, having been tragically widowed on August 27, 1915, when fire swept through his family’s quarters at the Presidio in San Francisco, killing his wife and three of their daughters while he was on duty in Texas. There was a mutual attraction between Pershing and Nita, who stayed at Fort Bliss longer than she had planned. So far as Patton was concerned, the prospect of a budding romance between his sister and the commanding general was a source of delightful anticipation.

Doroteo Arango, who later called himself Francisco Villa, but became known to the world as Pancho Villa, was the orphaned son of an impoverished field worker. When one of the owners of the estate on which his family labored raped his sister, Pancho Villa killed the man, then fled to the mountains, where he lived out his teen years as a fugitive. He learned the art of survival, and he also discovered that he was possessed of a certain personal magnetism as well as a natural talent for guerrilla warfare. In 1909, he joined Francisco Madero’s successful uprising against the brutal dictatorship of Porfirio Dfaz. In the process, Villa began to shine too brightly to suit his senior colleagues, and in 1912, he was condemned to death by fellow revolutionary Victoriano Huerta. Madero intervened and sent Villa to prison instead. He escaped, fled to the United States, and, after Madero was assassinated in 1913, returned to Mexico, gathering about himself a band of several thousand, dubbed the Division del Norte. Committing himself and his men to the service of Venustiano Carranza, Villa fought against the dictator Huerta, partaking with Carranza in a glorious victory in June 1914.

Shortly after Villa and Carranza rode into Mexico City as the triumphant leaders of the latest revolution, they came to blows, and Villa fled to the mountains of the north with the revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Why he did what he next did has never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps he resented President Wilson’s support of Carranza, once his comrade, now his rival. Perhaps he merely wanted to demonstrate to his fellow countrymen and the world that he, not Carranza, controlled northern Mexico. Whatever his motive, during January 1916, Villa executed 17 American citizens in the Mexican town of Santa Isabel and, on March 9, crossed the border with about 500 “Villistas” to raid Columbus, New Mexico. There he fought with local residents as well as soldiers of the nearby 13th Cavalry. Ten American civilians and 14 U.S. soldiers were killed in the raid, while casualties among Villa’s forces were significantly higher, at least 100 dead.

In response to the Columbus outrage, President Wilson ordered Pershing to conduct a “Punitive Expedition” into Mexico with the object of capturing or killing Pancho Villa. This
was
exciting, but Patton now worried that Pershing would not include his regiment, the 8 th Cavalry, in the expedition because its colonel was obese and might be judged unfit. To his father, he wrote on March 12, 1916: “There should be a law killing fat colonels on sight.”
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Patton’s fears proved well-founded; Pershing chose to leave the 8 th behind. In a panic at the thought of being excluded from the action, Patton prevailed on his squadron adjutant personally to recommend him as an aide to Pershing. He also appealed to Major John L. Hines, appointed adjutant general of the Punitive Expedition, and he buttonholed one of the general’s regular aides, Lieutenant Martin C. Shallenberger, as well. Then he called on Pershing himself, telling him that he would do anything, no matter how menial, if only he were allowed to join the expedition. Knowing Pershing’s distaste for publicity, Patton suggested he could handle newspaper correspondents, something, he said, he was especially good at. (In fact, at the time, he had never before so much as spoken to the press.) Pershing dismissed Patton without giving him his decision. The next morning, however, Patton received a telephone call from the general.