I can not repeat our conversation, because it was confidential. I will simply say that General Pershing proved the reasonableness of his mind by greatly extending our facilities on that trip, and turning our prim little party into an experience wholly worth while from the reporter’s point of view. Later I shall go into details about that trip up the line. This chapter is concerned with General Pershing. In the plain bare room, which is the commander’s private headquarters, and in which the great campaigns which our men will fight are being planned, General Pershing appears even more dynamic and forceful than in his luxurious Parisian home. I have seen generals who wore their uniforms as if they were business clothes, but not so General Pershing. If he wore business clothes he would contrive to make them look like a uniform. His uniform is the most immaculate, the most correct, the most military thing in the way of garments that I have ever beheld. His boots look as though he never wore the same pair a second time. Yet there is nothing stiff or rigid in his appearance. He puts his clothes on a perfect masculine figure, that is all. He holds himself like an absolutely fit and athletic man. General Pershing exalts health. He takes daily cold baths, one of his young aides told me, and often in the dead of winter runs and exercises in the open air clad only in a thin bathrobe. To bring every man in the army up to his physical standard is the commander’s expressed ambition. To make them supremely healthy, efficient fighting men, and to return them to their mothers morally as well as physically sound, is General Pershing’s conception of his responsibility as head of the American army. It is always interesting to know how we appear in the eyes of strangers, and an article published in a well-known French magazine shows the strong appeal that General Pershing has made to the imagination of our allies. According to the French writer, there are two men in the American commander-in-chief, one of them Anglo-Saxon, the other a Frenchman. In 1749 the ancestors of General Pershing emigrated from Alsace to America, and Alsace in the eyes of all Frenchmen is and always will be France. If by rare favor you are received by General Pershing in his Paris home you meet the Anglo-Saxon, says the reporter. There his coldness is positively British. “Tall, slender as a sublieutenant, well set up in his khaki brown uniform, four stars on the shoulders and on the collar the golden eagle of his supreme rank. General Pershing receives you in a manner courteous but glacial. He is entirely the official, conscious of his great responsibilities, and determined to keep silence concerning official matters. His blue eyes are clear and cold, even hard. Above his strong jaw, indicative of implacable energy, his lips, saber-straight, wear no smile.