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Here in battle he was still a passionate teacher. On his only visit to the front last week he taught a lesson which may seem small, but which helped make one man a better soldier. One of the first orders General Patton issued when he took his Tunisian command was that all officers must wear helmets and leggings at all times. In the heat of battle, a messenger ran up to a lieutenant at an observation post just forward of a position General Patton had-taken. The lieutenant, looking very pleased and perhaps expecting a compliment, asked: "What is the message?" The runner said: "The General said for you to put your leggings on."
General Patton's infantry were Americans and they were freshmen. It was a safe bet that he and this battle would make them wiser, and that soon perhaps his meticulousness would make them veterans, capable of beating veterans.
The Distant Truths. For all these men, as for George Patton, Tunisia was far from most things they had known. It was bleak, Arab, deadly. General Patton in his headquarters did not have as much time to savor remote memories as most privates did. The last letter he wrote his wife consisted of only two sentences: "We moved from no contact to 89 prisoners. It was a nice fight."
And yet the remote things, which in their sum total are George Patton, may well have been in his mind as he paced headquarters and watched immediate success slipping northward on his map and away from him.
There was West Point, where he had spent five years instead of four, because of certain curricular difficulties which took more than blood and guts to surmount.
There was the disappointment at not becoming the first general officer in his class —an honor that Delos C. Emmons walked away with. There were the epic poems that never got published. The general hopes that they will be published posthumously.
His body had always been magnificent and versatile. In the Olympic Games of 1912, he won third place in the modern pentathlon—the five sports, horseback riding, cross-country running, swimming, fencing, shooting. He had loved polo, squash, tennis, skeet shoots, bird shooting, game fishing, fox hunting. Always he had done these things, if not superbly, at least with a flair. His rule for taking ribbons at horse shows: "If it's a civilian horse show, turn up in dress uniform, decorations and all; if it's a military show, wear civilian habit."
He had always done things the hard way, and the spectacular. When he was ordered to Hawaii, he bought a 40-foot sailboat, boned up on navigation, and sailed out. He still has a sailboat tied up against future leisure—the When and If, it is called.
If You Win. Tunisia was a far cry from his books, from his well-loved and partly memorized Kipling, Service and Burns, from his military volumes, his books on Allenby—but Tunisia was not so far from his assimilation of them all. It was ironically close to some of his published essays—his Why Men Fight, and his Secret of Victory.