To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [335]
From his earliest days at VMI, and then at West Point, he had nurtured the fantasy of leading a cavalry charge, that part of the army that drove the fight, that energized the foot soldiers to follow. Throughout all his training, he held tightly to the dream of being the first man across the field, the horse surging forward beneath him, being the first man to see the terror in the face of the enemy. The fantasy had been tempered by the reality of what this new war did to horses. Like so many of the infantrymen before him, the sight of the horses had been his first great shock on the battlefield, more so than the wounded men, the stretcher bearers, and ambulances. The men could be treated, healed, cared for, but no one doctored the horses, and so, if the artillery shell or the Maxim bullets didn’t destroy the horse, they were left to die in slow writhing agony. The cavalryman’s dream was wiped away, slowly replaced by the marvelous beauty of the tank. The big machines were not invulnerable, could be destroyed by the lucky shot from some distant artilleryman. Their clumsiness was a constant challenge, the risk of tumbling over into some unexpected chasm, bogged down into a trench that was far wider than the driver expected. They could be disabled as well by their own flaws, the engines notoriously unreliable, or, as at St. Mihiel, halted by the lack of gasoline. But when the engine ran smoothly, and the ground was firm, it was as though every horse in the world was driving across the great battlefield, invulnerable, impervious to the bullets and the deadly storm of shrapnel, a glorious, unstoppable wave. In each tank, there was one commander; every sergeant became his own general. But Patton knew there would always be the man in charge, sitting high up on the turret, leading the charge, the only place on earth where George Patton wanted to be.
After the fight at St. Mihiel, he had expected the dressing-down he received from Rockenbach. Rockenbach was not only his superior officer, but was a man who operated by the rules. Patton appreciated the necessity of the rule book, had even written his own detailed training instructions to be used at the Tank School. As an instructor, and now, as a brigade commander, Patton had built a reputation for harsh and inflexible discipline. But the rules of behavior he imposed on his subordinates were authored more by Patton himself, and it seemed perfectly logical to him that the men under his command should follow his instructions and perform their duty exactly as he would. Patton’s difficulties came when the rules were handed down to him from above, someone like Rockenbach, an administrator who had his own notions of how Patton should behave.
DAWN—SEPTEMBER 26, 1918
He told himself he would obey Rockenbach.
His command outpost was code named “Bonehead,” was little more than a protective dugout, a short trench close to the small village of Les Côtes de Forimont. For much of the night, he had hunkered down low, finding some dry place away from the misery of the weather, surrounded by other officers and a dozen runners, the men who would handle the flow of communications that Rockenbach would require him to send far behind the line. But the night would not be a long one. The shelling had begun at two-thirty, a heavy thunder that punched through the darkness, wrapping the men in silence. He had wanted to watch, enjoyed the grand display of light, flashes on both horizons, the white and gold streaks that ripped through the darkness. But the weather was still bad, and by the time the shelling had stopped, the heavy mist had given way to a steady light rain, made invisible by dense fog.
The radio had barked at five-thirty, but Patton knew the order already, knew that in front of him, alongside the banks of the Aire River, two divisions, the Twenty-eighth and the Thirty-fifth were in motion, nearly fifty thousand infantrymen rising up from their low places, beginning the great march northward. His tanks would move with them, spread