Sometime during these years he invented his sturdy nickname, Slam, an acronym made up of his own initials with another family name folded in to supply the vowel. He spent the years between wars as a newspaperman, first in El Paso and later on the Detroit News, working as a reporter and reading about war. “He said: ‘Let us drink to it in water.’”Ī footnote to this incident says that Marshall “was commissioned from the ranks and at age seventeen was the youngest commissioned officer in the AEF. “He said: ‘Young man, have you anything to drink?’ infantry ever fired their weapons at the enemy in combat. Marshall claimed that no more than one-fifth of U.S. A brigade commander from the 89th Division, Col. It was the day that I had never expected to see. on 11 November as a lieutenant of infantry in a foxhole not far from Stenay. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne, and Ypres-Lys campaigns, and writes: “I finished the war 11:11 A.M. In his autobiography, Bringing Up the Rear, he speaks of participating in the Soissons, St. Marshall left high school in 1917 to enlist in the army. It was, he said, his first sight of a shooting death he was fifteen years old. Marshall claimed to remember both men laughing uproariously. The general walked in and bet a friend that he could shoot a comb off a waitress’s head the bullet struck her in the forehead, and she fell dead, her skull split open. In his memoirs Marshall said he once went across from El Paso into Juárez and ordered a hamburger and a beer in the Black Cat, a casino owned by Villa. It was also a window on the early days of the Mexican Revolution across the river Pancho Villa was in control of the state of Chihuahua and spent a fair amount of time in Ciudad Juárez. ![]() El Paso was in those days a tough border town, with a sprawling red-light district and gunfights in the streets. His father was a bricklayer and lay preacher, and the family moved repeatedly, ending up in El Paso, Texas, in 1914. Samuel Lyman Marshall was born with the century in the village of Catskill, New York. The admiration Marshall’s discovery inspired is caught in the words of John Keegan, the dean of the school of military history that is deeply indebted to the tradition that Marshall dominates: Marshall “was touched by genius,” Keegan wrote, a man who had brilliantly democratized the study of war. Marshall, in the eyes of his many admirers, had shifted the history of war on its axis, turning it away from the annals of generalship toward the discovery of what men actully did and thought and felt on a battlefield. While a fair number of people had always had an impressionistic sense of the phenomenon, Marshall had replaced anecdotal evidence with hard numbers. His writing on the refusal to fire-what Marshall called the ratio of fire-was the keystone of his achievement. ![]() Marshall is famous as a man who penetrated a great and terrible mystery.
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