(See Cover)
The General was restless. George Smith Patton Jr., who had long ago boasted that nothing would please him so much as to get in a tank and joust, medievally and to the death, with a single tank commanded by Erwin Rommel, was now confined to a single room behind the lines by his lord and master, battle.
The room was on the second floor of headquarters. The General paced it, went out on the balcony, peered up and down the street, went back in, sat down, crossed his legs, uncrossed them, rubbed his big hands over his face, yawned (he had been up since 5:30), stood up, paced again.
"It's a problem to know what to do," he said. "I want to get in it, but if I go up there, I'll lose touch. Temperamentally, I'd make a damn good corporal."
Here his high-pitched voice was not "the voice you can hear all over North Africa." His bright blue eyes were not now the eyes of "that disciplinary sonofabitch." Here his two pistols were in their holsters to stay, his bloodthirsty boasts lay doggo in his throat.
He was no longer a man approaching battle. Now he was a man running a battle, the very battle he had wanted for years—against Rommel. Now he must forsake his reputation for impetuousness, and be careful; this was a battle that would not tolerate error. And now, to admit the bitter truth, the battle was not going very well.
On the Map. The General suddenly stopped his random pacing and walked over to the topographical map on the wall. There, on the curious, pudgy, hatted, east-facing profile that is Tunisia, he could at a glance see the complexion of his own battle and of the whole campaign.
In Tunisia men of Germany, Italy, the U.S., the British and French Empires were fighting. They were there not for the sake of Tunisia; no one on that terrain was defending his doorstep—not directly. But Tunisia is a threshold of Europe. Every Italian and every German on the battle fields of Tunisia knew that each day he could prolong the defense of Tunisia was postponing by one more day the Allied invasion of Europe. And for the Allies, for men like Lieut. General Patton, there was urgency to destroy this stubborn Tunisian delaying force in time to make 1943 the decisive, if not final, year of the war.
The job was moving on. A great step toward its completion had been made the week before, when Montgomery's Eighth Army had forced its way deep into Tunisia and virtually shut Rommel in. On his map General Patton could see where the Eighth Army, having succeeded again, was resting again. The masterful forced march around Rommel's right flank (see p. 27) had shaken Rommel out of the Mareth Line — but had not destroyed him.
Rommel had pulled away almost intact, leaving behind a few Italianate droppings (the Eighth Army claimed only 8,000 prisoners, almost all Italian). The Axis armor had moved swiftly northward through the Gabes bottleneck, had settled down for at least a temporary stand at the Wadi el Akarit, a gulch about 16 miles north of Gabes (see map).
To the north, Anderson's First Army was inching forward toward the Bizerte-Tunis area in dreadful weather. Sedjenane was captured and the strategic hills from which Colonel General Jurgin von Arnim had launched his February offensive were almost in British hands.