A close friend has this to say of him: "You should meet him at a dinner party and listen to his stories. You should stand with him before his tent in the field, in the sunshine--he loves the sunshine and the wide out-of-doors--and hear him tell stories of his campaigning at his best. You should meet this big man with the heart of a little child, this man who by befriending his enemies has made them his companions, this man who stands up erect and faces the horrors of disaster with a smile and prays in his heart for the sufferers." Another friend says: "There is something about Pershing that reminds one of Lincoln. It may be his ready wit and never failing good humor or perhaps his big sympathetic heart. In the army the similarity is frequently pointed out." An officer who served under him in the Punitive Expedition into Mexico and was thrown into close relations with him writes: "I have had the pleasure of knowing many of our great men, but Pershing is the biggest of them all. He combines the rugged simplicity of Lincoln with the dogged perseverance of Grant; the strategic mystical ability of Stonewall Jackson and the debonair personality of McClellan. In one quality, that of intuition, he may be inferior possibly to Roosevelt, but in cold logic and in supreme knowledge of human nature and of soldier nature I have never met his equal." The colonel of his regiment when Pershing was a lieutenant in the 10th Cavalry said of him: "I have been in many fights but on my word he is the bravest and coolest man under fire I ever saw." In 1903, Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, in President McKinley's cabinet, cabled him: "The thanks of the War Department for the able and effective accomplishment of a difficult and important task." A simpler, but no less effective estimate of his character, although it was given in a way to puzzle him and perhaps also was a source of embarrassment was the act of the Sultan of Oato who officially made young Major Pershing the "father" of his eighteen-year-old boy. This was the highest tribute the ruler of the tribe could pay, to give his own son to the American officer. And this was done, too, when by his training and religion the Mohammedan chieftain looked down upon even if he did not despise a Christian. Georges Clemenceau, whose words have been previously quoted, has this to say concerning the directness and simplicity of the American General: "General Pershing has given us in three phrases devoid of artificiality, an impression of exceptionally virile force. It was no rhetoric, but pure simplicity of the soldier who is here to act and who fears to promise more than he will perform. No bad sign this, for those of us who have grown weary of pompous words when we must pay dearly for each failure of performance."