Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 218, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1917 — AN ORDERLY JOB [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

AN ORDERLY JOB

Miss Hannah Fatterson of Pittsburgh, well-known itiffraglst, Is -the efficiency expert of the woman's section of the council of national defense. When she came to Washington her coworkers were laboring under misfit conditions In an unsuitable building. Miss Patterson In two days had laid out a plan covering the entire work of the committee and quarters were found which exactly fitted the commitneeds. She la executive secretary pro tern for the organization now. She is a civic worker and a suffrage campaigner.

Now, in order to show 1 that there isr no thought on the part of the writer that he has appraised these men too lightly, he says this: “There are two big jobs with two big men to fill them. The dashing Pershing and the methodical Sibert make a team that will be hard to beat when their machine once starts.” American military officers from Pershing down to the last second lieutenant realize that this" is a war of method, a methodical war in other words, and that it is also largely an engineering war. The picture that one gets of Pershing from the cabled article is just such as one carries in his mind of Custer on the plains, his yellow hair streaming in the wind, a Colt revolver in his left hand, a dazzling saber in his right hand, charging hendlong, regardless of bullets, into the heart of a Sioux horde.

Tn a war arnjy men say that this djyse*dgjilHtanabtry does not win, and ncbodyknows ft better than Pershing. If the war department had believed that Pershing was “quick on the trigger” in the sense In which that expression usually Is employed, he would not have been sent to France. The campaign which John J. Pershing led against the enemy in the Lake Lanae district in the Philippines was a methodical campaign. It was conducted on strict military lines, and there was no “forcing them along at top speed.” It was this campaign which promoted Pershing from a captaincy to a brigadier generalship. He will not sacrifice American lives In France by a recklessness which is foreign to his nature, and absolutely foreign to modern methods of fighting. Now as for William L. Sibert, I have said what I have about Pershing from a study of his career and from a hundred or more expressions of opinion which, concerning him, have comtf to me from army men who know him well personally.

In the recently printed, and I think misleading, although unintentionally so, description of Sibert’s characteristics as a man and a soldier, he is described ns deliberate and methodical, giving close attention to the tiny things and in fact having a purely and mathematically methodical mind. Bluntly speaking, it makes Sibert ft student rather than a soldier. Now for the truth of this thing. When William L. Sibert was a junior officer of engineers serving In the Philippines he did both engineering and fighting work so well That it called forth the praise of the general commanding, Theodore Schwan. The record of it is in the war department today. General Schwaii said that this engineer insisted on having a place on the firing line at all times. -It was William L. Sibert who stood alongside of Reilly’s battery, the Reilly who afterwards was killed at Peking, at the front of a battlefield in the Philippines, and there stood like a rock" against the. furious close-range fire of the enemy. It was Sibert who under fire on this same battlefield, knelt beside the gallant Maj. Woddbridge Geary, who fell at the first fire and died within a few moments. The methodical Sibert is as quick on the trigger as any man ought to be. He is a fighter of the first rank. Ido not think that contradiction will coma from the war departrneht If I should put into words something which I long have suspected. It Is my belief that a certain military report, a fighting program report which in effect declared that there was no such thing as the impossible where a real military end Is to be gained, a report which It Is said was made by Sibert caused this find junior brigadier general to be Jumped over 1 the heads of eleven men to a major generalship and then sent tp France in command o 4 the first division.