When, in September 1897, he arrived at the imposing and austere-looking campus in Lexington, Virginia, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, sixteen-year-old cadet George Catlett Marshall Jr. (reporting three days late after having contracted typhoid fever) was in awe. “I will never forget,” he said years later, “walking down the long approach avenue to the barracks and hearing the bugle sound the assembly and seeing the adjutant and the sergeant major strut out to form the line on which the battalion would form. They were wonderful figures to me.”
Discipline at VMI was as strict or stricter than it was at West Point. Hazing of the freshmen cadets (known as “rats”) was severe as upperclassmen “braced” their young charges, shouting harshly in their faces. They were compelled to haul buckets of water from an outside tap up stairs to the upperclassmen’s quarters. Inspections of rooms and personages were rigorous and demerits distributed freely for any offense; these would be marched off on the parade grounds—one per hour—before the cadet was allowed freedom on Saturday afternoons to go into the town of Lexington. During the first few weeks of the hazing, which were the worst, Marshall suffered an injury that might well have been very serious, if not fatal. On the parade ground he was forced to squat over an unsheathed bayonet sticking out of the ground as a foolish and irresponsible endurance test. Probably weakened by the typhoid, he slipped, lacerating his buttock on the weapon. The wound caused him to miss formation for several days, but it would have been far more dangerous by a matter of an inch or so.
Marshall came in for special hazing because of his Pennsylvania Yankee accent. VMI remained a strong Southern institution, the Civil War barely thirty years past. In Marshall’s first year, the final building to be restored after Northern general David Hunter burned VMI nearly to the ground in 1864 was Jackson Memorial Hall, named after the legendary Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who had been brought there for burial following the Battle of Chancellorsville. Each year in May the names of the cadets who had been slain during the Battle of New Market were read aloud at formation. Moreover, the walls of barracks that had not been completely destroyed bore the blemishes of Hunter’s cannonballs during the 1864 incident. Older residents, and not a few VMI cadets, felt themselves well up at the frequent playing of “Dixie.”
Next door in Lexington was Washington and Lee College, of which Robert E. Lee had been president. Following his death in 1870, his body was entombed in what had been renamed Lee Chapel. Marshall was surprised, and on occasion shocked, that the South seemed utterly unrepentant following the war. In those days, the school often presented speakers at morning assembly such as the former Rebel general Jubal A. Early who, Marshall later noted, gave a speech defending the Confederacy “that seemed almost treasonous!”
If Marshall found the hazing annoying he at least took it passively. “I think I was more philosophical about this sort of thing than a great many boys,” he said long afterward. “It was part of the business and the only thing was to accept it as best you could.” Fortunately for Marshall, he lucked into a roommate his first year named Leonard Nicholson, scion of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Nicholson became his closest friend and remained with him until graduation. He was a man of great charm and good humor, as well as generosity when Marshall needed it most. (George’s allowance from home was $5 a month, and Nicholson more than once made up the shortfalls.) Even so, with such little money, Marshall avoided dances and other social functions during his first two years at VMI. He remained a marginal student, somewhere in the middle of his class, but in military studies and on the drill field his performance was such that at the final formation in the spring of 1898 it was announced that he would be first corporal the following term.
About that same time the United States declared war on Spain. The issue was Cuba, where a civil war had been raging for nearly three years because of the despotic behavior of its new Spanish governor Valeriano Weyler. There had long been talk in the United States of annexing Cuba from Spain; southerners had their eye on it for half a century before the American Civil War. In February 1898 the battleship Maine, stationed in the Havana harbor to protect U.S. interests, exploded and sank killing 260 of her 374-man crew. The American press nearly became unhinged—especially the so-called yellow journalism newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. They blamed Spain for the incident, saying the ship had been deliberately blown up by a Spanish mine.§ When the United States called for Spain’s immediate removal and self-government for the Cuban Isles, Spain of course refused. In April 1898 both houses of the U.S. Congress declared war on Spain.
Within a week Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron had destroyed the entire Spanish fleet in the Philippines, and the United States claimed that huge piece of island territory. The VMI corps of cadets voted to a man to sign a document offering its services to the U.S. Army.
Shortly after subduing the Spanish officials and military forces in Manila, the United States attempted to establish an administration for the islands until some kind of Philippine government could be organized.ǁ But soon a serious insurrection broke out that taxed the United States’ resources and willpower over this problem-child territory eight thousand miles from its shores.a
By the end of his sophomore year at VMI, Marshall had not only put on weight that enhanced his looks but also improved his grades, bringing himself to the mid-third of his class. He decided to major in civil engineering. At the final formation that spring his name was announced as the first in the new promotion to first sergeants for the upcoming school term. Back in Uniontown, he was stirred by the triumphant return of the local National Guard company that had been fighting the Spanish in Cuba and the insurrectos in the Philippines. He later remembered that this martial spectacle galvanized his “choice of profession.”
That summer he served as a rodman on a surveying crew, and when classes resumed in the fall he went out for the VMI football team. He became a standout left tackle and made the first squad, immortalizing himself with a fifty-yard touchdown run in a victory over next-door rival Washington and Lee.6 It was a seminal year for George Catlett Marshall Jr. for two reasons: he was named first captain, VMI’s highest military honor, and he fell in love.
She was Elizabeth Carter Coles, known as Lily, who lived with her mother in her grandfather’s house, which was almost adjacent to the entrance—or “limit gates”—of VMI. Marshall was drawn by her piano playing, which wafted out of an open window as he passed by one evening. He stopped and listened, remembering years later that she was “the finest amateur pianist I have ever heard.” The next evening Marshall returned with several classmates; the night after that he was invited inside.
If it wasn’t love at first sight it was something close to it: two or three weeks later they were “steadies,” and they were engaged for the last year and a half Marshall was in school. She was a beauty of some renown, and also four years older than Marshall, who, though he was but nineteen years old at the time, cut a fine tall handsome figure in his first captain’s uniform. Lily came from fine old Virginia stock; one of her Pendleton ancestors was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia. Another had harbored Thomas Jefferson from the British on his plantation during the Revolution.
Unfortunately Lily’s social activities were strictly limited by a bad constitution. She was unable to exert herself, even to dance.b But they found time together riding in her carriage, a stanhope trap, or sitting in her parlor. Even though it was thoroughly un–first captaincy behavior on his part, Marshall frequently went AWOL to see her late at night, sneaking off campus after lights-out—a practice known as “running the block.” “It was a dismissal offense,” Marshall recalled, “but I was very much in love and willing to take the chance.”
He came out fifth in his class in civil engineering, later remembering that by that time “ambition had set in.” At graduation, he was initiated into the Kappa Alpha fraternity, as VMI cadets are not allowed to join fraternities while in sc
hool. Then, armed with a college degree, he set out to find a way to get a commission in the U.S. Army, and to select a date to marry Elizabeth Carter Coles.
MARSHALL’S QUEST FOR A LIEUTENANT’S commission in the army was an exercise in persistence and tenacity, traits that had been nurtured at VMI, along with self-control, discipline, honesty, and leadership—the ability to control men. His parents at first resisted the notion of a military career for their son. The army in those days was not held in very high regard, notwithstanding the celebrated victory over Spain. Pay was low for junior officers, promotions slow, and the duty was often onerous. Since the nation’s inception, Americans have opposed having a large standing army. Instead they have opted for a small professional army whose ranks could quickly be swelled by volunteers (or in some cases the draft) in times of crisis. Therefore there were few openings for junior officers’ positions, most of them going to graduates of West Point.
In time, Marshall’s father came around and his mother also reluctantly accepted the idea of an army officer for a son. The elder Marshall, with his tenacious personality, then began to assemble a series of political contacts, beginning with General Shipp at VMI and leading all the way up to Elihu Root, the secretary of war, and ultimately to President William McKinley himself, a Republican. Thus on an April day in 1901, young George Marshall found himself in the waiting room next to President McKinley’s office on the second floor of the White House “without an appointment of any kind,” having been told by “an old colored man” (the head usher) that he would never get in.
After watching more than a dozen people enter the president’s office, Marshall saw his chance. When a man and his young daughter arrived and the usher escorted them in to see McKinley, Marshall “attached [him-] self to the tail of this procession and gained the President’s office,” adding that “the old colored man frowned at me on his way out but I stood pat.”
Marshall stated his case as succinctly as possible while the president listened politely and then he took his leave. Marshall later credited this presidential encounter with his being invited to take the army’s entrance examination for officers, which his principal biographer Forrest Pogue disputes. Whatever the case, he passed the exam and, on January 4, 1902, when he had just turned twenty-one, orders were issued commissioning George C. Marshall as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army with a date of rank from February 2, 1901. His orders further stated that in five days he was to report to Fort Myer, Virginia, and thence to Columbus barracks, Ohio. There he was to assume command of a detachment of recruits and take them by train to San Francisco, where they would board a ship for the Philippines. But, first, he had to get married.
The day after passing his exam, Marshall arrived in Lexington where the wedding was to be held in the bride’s home. The ceremony was performed by an Episcopal priest before Marshall’s parents, brother and sister, and his best friend from boyhood, Andy Thompson, with whom he had raised the fighting chickens back in Uniontown. Lily, dressed in white, was attended by her mother and sister and a number of friends from Lexington. It was reported that as the wedding guests mingled and chatted she turned to the tall, handsome newly commissioned second lieutenant and said, “Come on, George, let’s get married.”7
They boarded the train to Washington the following day to spend a week’s honeymoon at the fashionable new Willard Hotel a few blocks from the White House, which was followed by the sorrow of parting for his two-year tour of duty across eight thousand miles of ocean. On April 12, 1902, Marshall embarked on the troop transport Kilpatrick, bound for Manila.
While the Philippine insurrection would not be declared officially over for another three months, by the time Marshall’s transport arrived the uprising had been largely put down, with its leaders agreeing to take the American loyalty oath. Still, Marshall arrived in the Philippines in the midst of a deadly cholera epidemic and was assigned as a platoon leader with G Company of the 30th Infantry Regiment of the regular army, stationed on the island of Mindoro.c While in transit there, the interisland steamer Isla de Negros, on which he was a passenger, was caught in a terrifying typhoon that nearly wrecked the ship when the captain deserted the bridge for his stateroom and Marshall and another army officer had to take control of the vessel, not only steering it away from dangerous rocks but forcing the engine room crew back to their posts at pistol point.
Safely on land, his company was posted to the town of Calapan, which Marshall found inhabited mainly by women and children. Most of the men were living out in the hills as guerrilla fighters who, he said, “would shoot into the town from time to time.” The regiment was commanded by a colonel who had lost an arm in the Civil War and, Marshall remembered, was composed mostly of former Indian fighters, “about the wildest crowd I’ve ever seen, before or since.”
The sole entertainment in town for the officers was a trio of girls—sisters—one of whom played the harp, and “they played and sang sweetly” in the mornings. Through all his life since, the horror still raised a shiver in Marshall about the cholera attack reaching Calapan. “It broke out in almost a day,” he said, right after he had heard the girls sing. “We had no warning of it there. We thought we were safe. It broke out and the three sisters—I helped bury them all by three o’clock that afternoon.”
The men were immediately confined to quarters. Everything had to be boiled. The fingernails had to be cleaned, Marshall said. The hands and mess kits had to be washed in hot water. “You had to enforce these things very carefully or they would skimp them,” Marshall said. “A very little skimping would cost you your life.” They set up a cholera camp by a spring about two miles outside of town. Marshall went there sometimes as officer of the day. The first time he went up, “I found the soldiers peacefully eating their supper on a pile of coffins. Later there weren’t any coffins. The deaths came too rapidly,” and the victims then had to be buried wrapped only in a sheet and laid in trenches.
Cholera is a bacterial disease with dreadful symptoms. Marshall remembered its victims lying on metal cots, “with their knees almost under their chins and generally shrieking with the agonies of their convulsions. I don’t recall, myself, anybody recovering at that time.”d
By July 4 the epidemic had run its course. Theodore Roosevelt, who had become president after the assassination of President McKinley, officially declared that the insurrection in the Philippines was over. But this was news to large numbers of insurrectos who roamed the mountains, as well as to the hostile Moros, and so the army began sending out patrols to rein in these guerrillas. Marshall was ordered to lead a twenty-six-man detachment to the very southern tip of Mindoro, where he often set up the patrols. In the process he encountered one of the strange primitive tribes that inhabited the Philippines—who frequently greeted unexpected visitors with a flurry of poisoned arrows and blowgun darts. They were Batanganis, a light-skinned race identified with the legend that one woman of the tribe was so beautiful that any white man who saw her once would never return from Mindoro.8
At one point Marshall and his detachment were given the onerous duty of guarding a prison island in Laguna Bay inhabited by “the dregs of the army … the toughest crowd of men I’ve ever seen. You had to count them twice every night.” On one occasion Marshall saw one of these men attack another with a meat cleaver and nearly cut his head off.
But army life is one of contrasts, and he soon found himself posted to the quaint town of Santa Mesa just outside Manila. There he could go to the Army-Navy Club, dine al fresco in the delightful courtyard, and access the club’s riding stables, which was where Marshall developed his lifelong devotion to horseback riding. In the evening there was always a concert on the Luneta where, Marshall said, “everybody in Manila in our social order” would go, paying visits to one another from carriage to carriage while the music played. Frequently there were “insurrection” scares, in which a bugler would blow the clarion call to quarters at all hours of the night on unreliable evidence that a new revolution was at hand
.
IN 1903 MARSHALL RETURNED to the United States and his company was posted to Fort Reno in the remote wilds of the Oklahoma Territory. It was garrison duty and fairly routine: close order drill, inspections, reports, spit-and-polish. At last Lily joined him, ending his enforced bachelorhood of nearly two years. Marshall rather enjoyed the routine, noting that the hunting and fishing on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian reservations were “superb” year-round—quail, ducks, channel catfish in the Canadian River, small game, and deer.
“One morning Mrs. Marshall and I were early for breakfast, and we heard the quail calling in a little sumac grove near us,” he remembered fifty years later. “I went out there and in about thirty minutes I came back for breakfast and I had twelve quail [the legal limit]. Actually I think I had fifteen, but I don’t want to claim that.”
In the summer of 1905 Marshall was ordered to what he called “the hardest service I ever had in the army.” This involved a surveying trip in which he was to map two thousand square miles of the remote south Texas desert between the Rio Grande and the Devil’s River.
First off, he was improperly provisioned. The detachment Marshall led consisted of a wagon, a team of eight mules and a muleskinner, twenty pack mules and a packer, an assistant packer, and a sergeant who was fond of alcohol. As there was no place to resupply in the desert, Marshall would have to husband every morsel of food for both man and beast as they made their way—fifteen or twenty miles a day—over the scorched rocky desert. July was the hardest month, he said, when the thermometer would rise to 130 degrees.