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Every move Patton's units made seemed to fall under enemy observation. Fifteen minutes after one battery shifted its position on the fifth day, it was attacked by dive-bombers. The U.S. troops advanced, but slowly. "A man in a track suit could make only half a mile an hour in those hills," grumbled General Patton.
By the sixth day Patton's men had broken through beyond the highest hills.
As soon as they were through, Rommel threw 32 tanks at them. Volleys from "Long Tom" 155-mm. cannon knocked out three and drove off the rest, but forward motion had been stalled another day.
Rommel was moving north, and now the long awaited junction of the U.S. Corps and the Eighth Army was to be a junction embracing emptiness.
The Nearby Deeds. At one moment during the week George Patton, who is said to be a pretty tough fellow, stood in his room at headquarters and told about the death of 27-year-old Captain Richard Jenson, who had been his aide for three years. "Captain Jenson," he said, "had volunteered to go to the front as an additional officer in our tank force on the Gabes road. When Stukas came over this morning he was standing only a few feet from one of our generals. Both dived into slit trenches. A heavy bomb landed almost at the edge of the one in which Jenson lay. He was killed instantly. . . ."
The general's voice broke. His eyes overflowed. He pulled out a handkerchief. "I'm acting like an old fool," he said.
Richard Jenson was just one of Patton's boys, one he happened to know well. Out across the North African landscape with its forbidding foreign names and cold numbers—Djebel Chemsi, Hill 772—thousands of other American men were fighting and doing American things as they fought.
Corporal Robert Pond kept by his side a fuzzy little mongrel named Ziggie, which he had bought for 500 francs. Sergeant Benson Harvey, who used to be a janitor and phone operator in Nashville, worried out loud about the time when he and his three fighting brothers (a doctor in the Atlantic theater, a Navy C.P.O. in the Pacific, a machinist's mate once of the Wasp') all get home. "They'll all want to tell their lies at the same time," said the sergeant. Private Jacob L. ("Jake the Fake") Seiler reminisced about the days when he was a "mixologist"—i.e., bartender. Private Thomas Stewart planned in the greatest detail a two-week catfishing and cougar-hunting trip down the Nueces River in Texas.
A major shared his rations with seven hungry Italians he had just helped to capture. A colonel stood in a Tunisian valley sniffing at a handful of candytuft and Arabis and crimson poppies and yellow marguerites. . . .
The Nearby Lessons. "So much," said General Patton at his headquarters, "depends on the individual." George Patton was a man with his reputation, which had grown gaudy before the battle, at stake. He was a general with thousands of lives in his hands. And yet he was peculiarly at the mercy of his individual men.
The men were fighting bravely, but they could be no better than their training. If all the men under him last week had been as beautifully trained as the armored division, which he had taught, there might have been a different story in the hills by El Guettar.