By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.
At the precise hour that Beatrice prepared for bed at their home in the United States, George perched on a rock that was tucked among an outcropping of ancient boulders high above the coastline of some godforsaken, derelict area of Mussolini’s Sicily. If there was ever a lost civilization or the Dark Ages revisited, this was it. It was understandable why it was Italy's Achilles Heel.
It was the time of day when everyday if
circumstances allowed it that he stopped to conjure his wife in his mind’s eye,
the twilight hour—just before dark, when figures stood out starkly against their
landscape for one last curtain call—just before they smoldered and vanished,
sucked into their distinct placements on the planet. It was no easy task being
the wife of a dedicated military man—it was a lonely and difficult and
thankless life sentence for her, and he knew it. He pulled his helmet from his
head, held it in his lap, and ran his hands across his damp pate. July in Sicily
in that year of our Lord of 1943 was an anteroom of Hades, and U.S. Army
Lieutenant General George Smith Patton, Jr. hated everything about it: the
squalid, filthy peasants; the ruined towns; the tight hairpin roads; the
impassible mountains; the dust; the bugs.
His pistols in their holsters were heavy
and hot against his hips. He yearned for the end of the day when he would
unbuckle the belt and lay the guns on the little table next to his bed in the schoolhouse
he had procured for his Seventh Army headquarters. He slipped the Colt .45 revolver out of its holster on his
right hip. Its ivory grip was smooth in his palm, but its silver plating was in
need of buffing. The .357 Magnum on his left hip could also use some attention.
He knew his fellow officers ridiculed his flashy, swashbuckling image. But he
didn’t care what they thought about it. He believed it inspired his troops. And
besides, he liked standing out from the crowd.
Placing
the revolver back in its holster, George sank back on his elbows. It was reliably
quiet at this hour. Even the enemy needed this daily respite from the fighting,
this time to gobble down their rations, to drop their grungy trousers and take
a leak or crap, to spread the cheeks of their crusty a-holes to the air. He
allowed himself only a moment of reprieve and then sat back up, his spine
straight and taut as a statue, his senses alert for enemy movement. He studied
the beach far below. It was jam-packed with hundreds of Allied ships that from
his distant perch looked like the collection of his boyhood toys. The armada
stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. It brought to his mind
the many years of battles between the Roman and the Carthaginian fleets, and the
decisive conquest that finally gave Rome control of the Mediterranean, one or
two centuries before the birth of Christ. In a former life, he very well might
have been a Roman sailor on one of those ships, or more likely, a commander.
The thing
he missed most about his home was his library, its shelves stuffed full of his
books, most of them on military history. What would Julius Caesar or Napoleon
do now if they were in George’s boots? The difference was that they were
supreme commanders. Their hands were not tied by superiors less experienced,
and yes, less capable than themselves. On the other hand, George had a
clear-cut advantage those commanders in earlier times lacked. He had a mobile,
mechanized army, a fast-moving armored tank and half-track army that laid waste
of anything in its path. George knew that if fate favored him, he would earn
the reputation as the World War II military commander the Nazis most feared.
But he was also the “bad boy” of his Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
crew, and because of that dichotomy, he was often a breath away from glory or from
dishonor. He hoped his legacy would be honor. He hoped his would be an
honorable death. He also knew that death stalked him like a bloodhound.
“It is rather
interesting how you get used to death. I have had to go to
inspect the troops in which case you run a very good chance—or I should say a reasonable chance—of being bombed or shot
at from the air, and shelled or shot at from the ground. I had the same
experience every day in which for the first half-hour the palms of my hands
sweat and I feel depressed. Then, if one hits near you, it seems to break the
spell and you don't notice them anymore. Going back in the evening over the
same ground and at a time when the shelling and bombing are usually heavier, you
become so used to it you never think about it,”[1]
George stated in a letter to a friend written during the course of the war.
George pulled to his feet and headed back to
headquarters, only a few paces away. The shelling was about to begin anew on
this oppressive summer evening of 1943, somewhere in half-dead Sicily. This is a good place for vampires, he
thought to himself as he stomped his thigh-high boots on the hard-packed ground
to shed them of their stubborn layer of dust.
Note: The above essay is a work of fiction based on well-known characterizations of Patton. The setting in which Greene places him depicts the area in which he first landed in Sicily during Operation Husky, but his interlude at the rock and all that transpired there are products of her imagination. The excerpt from the letter Patton wrote to a friend on the theme of death is authentic. It was Greene’s inspiration for her essay.
Image: Lieutenant General George Smith Patton, Jr. – North, Africa, 1942/43
Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase in eBook and soft cover at Amazon.com and other booksellers.
[1]Letter to Frederick Ayers (5 May 1943),
published in The Patton Papers 1940-1945 (1996) edited by
Martin Blumenson, p. 243
