Two Soldiers

"You are getting rattled, Colonel McCormick."

The Chicago Sun led its editorial page with this laconic editorial one day last week. It was a soft answer to the dirtiest punch the Tribune's incredible Bertie McCormick had yet thrown in his bitter feud with the Sim's fairdealing Marshall Field. The Tribune, gloating over Ralph Ingersoll's "shamed" enlistment in the Army (TIME, Aug. 3), had blathered:

"The publicity given to Ingersoll as a draft dodger has detracted attention from Marshall Field as a slacker. Field is of age to volunteer. . . . The term to fit him and all hysterical effeminates is coward."

The Sun, under strict orders from gentlemanly Owner Field never to refer to his own or Colonel McCormick's war record, refrained from replying in kind. But Chicagoans, appalled at Colonel McCormick's loud bad manners, were eager last week to recite the bare facts:

Field, now 48, enlisted as a private in the ist Illinois Cavalry in 1917, was transferred to the 12 2nd Field Artillery, 33rd Division, rose through the ranks to a captaincy by war's end. In France, he got into the hottest part of the fighting in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. The Tribune itself praised his war record when he came home in 1919, declared he had "won the love" of his regiment. The Chicago News's famed front line correspondent, Robert J. Casey, who was a fellow officer with Field in the 122nd, describes him as "a hell of a good soldier."

He remembers Field, haggard from lack of sleep and several days under fire, standing on a Monsard road one day. coolly talking to infantrymen while shells fell all around.

McCormick, now 62, joined the Illinois National Guard before the U.S. entered World War I. A friend asked IIlinois's Governor, the late Edward Dunne, for a commission for him. Dunne, who had often been roasted by the Tribune, roared: "I'll give that bastard McCormick nothing unless he runs an editorial completely repudiating everything the Tribune has said about me." The Tribune did. McCormick was commissioned a major.

Called to service on the Mexican border, he leased a hacienda, entertained generals at parties. He went to France in 1917 as a member of General Pershing's headquarters staff. Later, he was for a while lieutenant colonel of Marshall Field's outfit, the 122nd Artillery, then colonel of the 61st Artillery. Before the end of the war he was sent back to the U.S. as commandant of Fort Sheridan, near Chicago.

High point in the colonel's military career was a Distinguished Service Medal awarded him in 1923 (during the Harding administration), not for combat service but for "rare leadership . . . unusual executive ability . . . close supervision of training, discipline and command. . . ."

As a military expert Colonel McCormick had already inspired a classic cartoon character ("Colonel McCormic," in Colonel Frank Knox's Chicago Daily News--TIME, March 16). Last week he added nothing to his reputation in thus attacking the honor of an old comrade-in-arms.

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