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Hed grown up on the classics: stories of Hannibal and Alexander and Caesar; he knew of his five great-uncles and his grandfather all of whom had fought and were wounded or killed in the Civil War; hed heard Kipling himself tell of the thin red lines of British infantry; and, most importantly, he had learned of cavalry tactics from listening to John Singleton Mosby the Confederacys Gray ghost talk of his exploits.
It is no wonder that George Patton became the man he did timeless, as comfortable battling in tanks against Erwin Rommel as he would have been charging against U.S. Grant and that he became perhaps the last great cavalry commander the world will ever see.
Flamboyant, bold prophetic and prayerful, Patton was the fighting-mans General, who shore and smoked cigars and hated the enemy as much as he loved his own men. In one campaign, he estimated that his Third Army moved farther, faster and engaged more of the enemy than any other army in American History. Obviously, he instilled in his men his own energy, his own fire.
He was called the pure warrior. Directed by God himself more than by pure politics, he fought his own battles like a Caesar or Alexander. All of his life he would be driven by the fear that he would be unable to fulfill his destiny yet was buoyed by the belief that a just God would not permit this to happen; that it was His will that George S. Patton be the commander in the last big battle of the last big war.
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