Not midst the chanting of the Requiem Hymn,
Nor with the solemn ritual of prayer,
'Neath misty shadows from the oriel glass,
And dreamy perfume of the incensed air
Was he interred.

But in the subtle stillness after fight,
In the half light between night and day,
We dragged his body, all besmeared with mud,
And dropped it clod-like back into the clay.

Yet who shall say that he was not content,
Or missed the priest or drone of chanting choir,
He who had heard all day the Battle hymn
Sung on all sides by thousand throats of fire?

What painted glass can lovelier shadows cast,
Than those the Western skys shall ever shed?
While mingled with its light, Red Battle's Sun
Completes in magic colors O'er our Dead,
The flag for which he died."¹⁹

The corpse in "A Soldier's Burial," written in 1919 and published in The Chicago Sun in 1943, has no national identity or military rank. Patton did write poems eulogizing specific individuals, but here he created his personal model of the unknown soldier whose in memoriam is not fashioned by the tribute of human institutions. Not man, but Nature properly celebrates his deeds which, with their accompanying "Battle Hymn," had a solemnity of their own. Christian images of ritual and color run through and help unify this poem, but they are displaced in the final stanza by the mystical "Red Battle's Sun," the celestial artist whose "magic colors" now become the hero's flag.

In October of 1919 in Washington, D.C., Patton wrote a poetic "remonstrance to the transplanting of our dead," by one, he notes almost proudly, "who was nearly planted." Entitled "Dead Pals," the poem speaks for common soldiers and objects to their disinterment in France for reburial in the United States. The lone voice we hear is that of a soldier addressing his comrade who lies buried beside him. "Dickey," he calls:

. . . we've trained and fit and died
Yes drilled and drunk and bled
And shared our chuck and our bunks in life.
Why part us now we're dead?

The soldiers' sacrifice and the values for which they fought become for Patton tied up in the place where they were killed and the manner in which they died. All of this effects a change of allegiance—familial, even nationalistic ties give way as the souls of the dead soldiers become spiritually enfranchised into the brotherhood of the fallen. The voice from the grave in "Dead Pals" says, therefore, that they won't miss the memorial flags and flowers because:

Our free souls will be far
Holdin' the line in sunny France
Where we died to win the war.²⁰

Patton himself had no desire to be buried at home. Like the soldier in "Dead Pals," he wished to be interred where he was killed: "That's where any soldier would want to be [buried]," he said, "it will remind people there forever of who it was [who] fought to set them free."²¹ Patton died in 1945, not from battle wounds but, ironically, from injuries he sustained in a car accident in post-war Germany. He was buried, according to his wishes, in a military cemetery among the fallen soldiers of the U.S. Third Army.

The most worrisome thing about Patton's poetry is that it reflects none of the healthy skepticism toward conflict and strife that we have come to expect from war poets. It was, after all, the gruesome events of the Great War that contributed most to Patton's formative years and to his poetry. But the same events that led other soldier poets of World War I—writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen—to question, even deny the moral certainties they inherited from an earlier time, had an invigorating effect upon Patton.

Today the aggressively warlike stance of the General's poetry is chilling. But he was not the first to poeticize war as an ennobling enterprise, and however distasteful, shocking or sentimental his verses may strike civilian sensibilities, we must judge them as the work of a soldier writing for other soldiers, not a poet writing purely for the sake of art or for critical acclaim. Further, they provide unmistakable tokens to the personality and thinking of one of America's most controversial folk heroes, and they indicate that there was more to the character of "Old Blood and Guts" than most of his fans and his critics have remembered.

NOTES

¹ See Patton's endnote to his poem "The End of War," in the George S. Patton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

² Martin Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, Vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 686.

³ Martin Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, Vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 451.

⁴ Blumenson, vol. I, 121.

⁵ George S. Patton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Endnote to "Regret," Patton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Blumenson, vol. II, 270.

¹³ Martin Blumenson, The Many Faces of George S. Patton, Jr. (U.S. Air Force Academy, 1972), 17.

¹⁴ Blumenson, The Patton Papers, vol. I, 798. See also 723 for Patton's lecture to his officers (1919) in which he tells them that they "are not only members of the oldest of honorable professions, but are also the modern representatives of the demigods and heroes of antiquity."

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 637.

¹⁷ George S. Patton Papers, Box 30, Library of Congress.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid. See also Blumenson, The Patton Papers, vol. I, 106; Harry H. Semmes, Portrait of Patton (New York: Paperback Library), 260; James Wellard, The Man in A Helmet (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947), 11-12.

²⁰ George S. Patton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress. See also Semmes, 204-05.

²¹ Fred Ayer, Jr., Before the Colors Fade (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 239.

SELECTED POEMS FROM THE GEORGE S. PATTON PAPERS LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

THE RULERS

[Written in 1916, "The Rulers" reveals Patton's disgust with midwestern populists, congressional "Rulers from the corn belt," whom he perceived as being more concerned with their own special interests and reforms than with American military preparedness. World War I was underway in Europe and Patton was eager for active U.S. involvement. Additionally, he believed that Japan was intent upon invading the western United States, a fear especially strong in California, his home state, where resentment against Oriental migration had been growing for years.

Although he later claimed to be apolitical, in 1916 Patton was deeply conservative, wealthy, and at odds with the progressivism of the period. Utterly contemptuous of "the masses," Patton feared that the end of Western civilization was at hand, and warned that the "deluge" was certain to come. "It is everywhere the effort of the inefficient to pull down the great, [it is] mob courage," he wrote in 1912. "People who have money had best enjoy it for they may not have it long. The many headed beast called 'the people' is howling for its envious hordes. It will get [what it wants] and then stupid with gorging will be chained as before." Then he added solemnly: "I hope I help make that chain."¹

In "The Rulers" Patton prophesies a "day of reckoning" when the army—untrained and ill-equipped—will fail to expel alien invaders. The rulers will then be replaced by anarchic mobs until "a single man" arises to quell them and, with an iron hand, restores peace. Then, only "fools" will talk of equal rights. Neither Patton's poems nor his letters indicate specifically whom he thought this superman might be, but when he wrote of his wish to be "a dictator or a president,"² it is clear that he saw himself as physically and ideologically compatible with either role.]

The Rulers of the people
Debated vaporously
Enacting laws which should reform
The earth and sky and sea.

No longer should the angels
Continuously play
Eight hours set the limit
Even of celestial day.³

Yet the fishes in the ocean
Must abide by man made rules
And no longer stay congested
In those large unhealthy schools.⁴

While on the earth the Savior
Would surely feel at home
Where laws which banish every vice
Make every virtue come.⁵

Meantime to soothe the folks at home
They voted many a dollar
To make a Federal Building
In the woods at Turtle Hollow.

To build a pier in Duck Creek
To dredge an open bay
To pension veterans' grandsons
And to raise their own poor pay.

Yet while they cut the "Mellon"
And reformed the human soul
The building that they sat in
Trembled to the cannon's roll.

They knew the army had no guns
It also had no votes.
And the Rulers from the corn belt
Aren't interested in boats.

At last the day of reckoning came
The million farmers rose
To battle? No, they packed their things
And fled before their foes.

They saw their gunless army die
At each Thermopylae
They saw an alien rule their states
That fringe the western sea.

Then rose the cry which Tiber heard
From all the craven pack
And "Those in rear cried 'Forward'
While those in front cried 'Back.'"⁶

They found that money stays not steel
That credit stops not shell
So both were impotent to check
That tide of Yellow Hell.

The Rulers of the people
Debated feverously
Enacting laws that every man
Must serve on land or sea.

They builded no more buildings
They let the fishes school
They let the angels play at will
They settled down to rule.

They raised a mighty army
And sent it forth untrained
The desert drank the bloody due
But not a pass was gained.

The people then displaced them
And sought to rule instead
The desert was new watered
But the Yellow Menace stayed.

A single man displaced the mob
They welcomed him with cheers
Through blood he bained⁷ the sea shore
But it took him twenty years.

The land is once more peaceful
The people no more rule
And he who talks of equal rights
Is written down a fool.

¹ George S. Patton, Jr., to "Beatrice" September 1, 1912, Patton Papers, Box 7, Library of Congress.

² George S. Patton, Jr., to his parents, January 17, 1909, in Blumenson, The Patton Papers, vol. 1, 161. See also Patton's letter (239) to his father-in-law, September 14, 1912, in which he stated " . . . politics is what I am after. . . ."

³ In 1912, Congress passed an eight-hour-day law for all federal workers. The Ford Motor Company did the same for its workers in 1914.

⁴ Perhaps a reference to congressional resolutions in 1916 aimed at restricting American travel abroad. These were part of the effort to keep the United States out of the European war by preventing Americans from sailing on ships that might be sunk by the Germans.

⁵ In 1916, the Prohibition Party had its own presidential candidate and the Anti-Saloon League had influenced the passage of "dry" laws in twenty-four states.

⁶ Paraphrased from Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), Horatius, st. 50. The original reads, "But those behind cried 'Forward!' / And those before cried 'Back!'"

⁷ Obsolete form of "bathe" or "wash."

MARCHING IN MEXICO

[Although written in 1919, "Marching in Mexico" recalls Patton's experiences in 1916 as a young officer serving with the 8th Cavalry during the Punitive Expedition against Pancho Villa. Patton became a sensation in the United States after he led a small group of men in a dramatic gunfight against a group of Villa's outlaws. When the smoke and dust settled, three Mexicans were dead. One of them turned out to be Colonel Julio Cardenas, a key man in Villa's guerilla campaign. Patton then draped the bodies across the hood of his car and returned to headquarters where he won the adulation of John J. Pershing, his commanding general.

Because he used automobiles during this maneuver, Patton is credited with initiating motorized warfare in the U.S. Army. In retrospect, this must have seemed fitting when, two years later, he would organize and command the 304th Tank Brigade during the St. Mihiel and, for a time, the Meuse-Argonne Offensives.]

The column winds on snake like,
Through blistering, treeless, spaces;
The hovering gray-black dustclouds
Tint in ghoulish shades our faces.

The sweat in muddied bubbles,
Trickles down the horses' rumps;
The saddles creak, the gunboots chafe,
The swinging holster bumps.

At last the "Halt" is sounded.
The outpost trots away;
The lines of tattered pup-tents rise—
We've marched another day.

The rolling horses raise more dust,
While from the copper skies
Like vultures, stooping on the slain,
Come multitudes of flies.

The irate cooks their rites perform
Like pixies round the blaze;
The smoking greasewood stings our eyes;
Sunscorched for countless days.

The sun dips past the western ridge,
The thin dry air grows cold;
We shiver through the freezing night,
In one thin blanket rolled.

The night wind stirs the cactus,
And sifts the sand o'er all;
The horses squeal, the sentries curse,
The lean coyotes call.

1919

MEMORIES ROUSED BY A ROMAN THEATER

[In November 1917, Patton was an observer at the tank training school for French officers at Chamlieu. For two weeks, he learned all he could about the development and operations of tank warfare, which was still in its infancy. At the end of his brief tour, Patton wrote a report that became the "rock upon which the American tank effort was established."¹ During this time, he also toured the walled town of Langres and wrote this poem, which combines his belief in reincarnation with his newfound destiny as a tank commander. Patton saw the armored, mechanized vehicle as the modern example of earlier forms of armor, the "brass of Rome" and the "rattling plate" of medieval knights.]

I sat in my throbbing Char d'Assaut²
In the shade of the ruins of Rome;³
And I knew that despite the dimming years
This place had once been home.

Yes, more than once have I seen these walls
Rise sharp on the brow of the hill;
And more than once have I trod that road
That winds like a snake from the rill.

First it was in the brass of Rome
With the white dust on my brow;
And the second time 'neath the flag of a Duke
Whose name is legend now.

And that old rock so chipped and worn
Was a bench in an earlier day;
And I rested on it while hurrying slaves
Stripped helm and grieves away.

This hollow where the three small arches are
Was a pool of water clear,
Which mirrored the forms of war scarred men
Who bathed and rested here.

Later I passed in rattling plate
When time had crumbled the walls;
And a laurel thicket covered the slopes
That once were watchers' stalls.

'Twas here they brought us after the fight
We had in the field out there;
And underneath that pile of stones
Is the place where our corpses are.

And now again I am here for war
Where as Roman and knight I have been;
Again I practice to fight the Hun
And attack him by machine.

So the three old hags⁴ still play their game;
Still men the counters are;
And many peg out in the game of peace;
Pray God my count shall be war!

1917

¹ Blumenson, The Patton Papers, vol. 1, 448.

² "Char d'Assaut" (assault car) is a French two-man miniature tank designed by Louis Renault and improved upon by American manufacturers.

³ Among the various "ruins of Rome" at Langres, Patton ascertained that a Roman gate was still part of the city's walls and that drawbridges of Roman vintage were still operable (Blumenson, The Patton Papers, vol. 1, 439).

⁴ The "three old hags" are the Fates. In Greek mythology, they were the three goddesses who controlled human destiny and life: the first (Clotho) spun the thread of life the second (Lachesis) determined its length, and the third (Atropos) cut it off.

THE SONG OF THE TURDS OF LANGRES

[While organizing the American Light Tank Center and School in France in 1918, Patton had time on his hands as he awaited the arrival of his tanks from the United States. "The Song of the Turds of Langres" is one of several poems, possibly a drinking song, he wrote during this period.

Although this poem is not among those Patton intended to publish, the Preface he wrote for that volume includes comments that shed some light on the General's use of profanity: "This rough talk like other diseases of childhood is but transitory and the fact that it is the common parlance of heroes in no way detracts from the splendor of their deeds. It is the language of a period, not a profession."¹ Transitory or not, Patton continued to use profanity in highly imaginative ways throughout his military career.]

Dedicated to Warren Lott

Hark to the song of the turds of Langres
Whose black and gruesome shapes
Which litter up the side walks
And slither 'neath our steps.

The turds which in America
Old Warren Lott has seen
To him appeared less brutish
And look less fierce and mean.

'Tis his opinion, we fear,
On shittings he has seen
That such turds are not shit at all
But broken off quite clean.

Lott has a project cherished
To gather all these turds
And shoot them off as solid shot
To slay the Hunish herds.

But Tate² avers 'twere better far
To grease the shit with cheese
So that these shots will deadlier grow
And gas the Boche with ease.

'Tis my opinion we could find
Cheese in sufficient lots
If we would simply strain the piss
We find in French piss pots.

So this is the song of the turds of Langres
Whose texture is so tough
That when they fall on sidewalks
The hard stones cry "Enough!"

1918

¹ George S. Paton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress.

² A fellow officer and longtime friend of Patton.

OUIJA

[In this poem, written in 1919, Patton compares himself as poet to the Ouija planchette used to convey and record messages from the spiritual world. He is merely the "instrument" of a higher force; his poetry is the inadequate rendering of ultimate truth. But the poem also addresses the limitations of other art forms: painting and music, too, are but feeble representations, "poor daubs and discords" of the mysteries known by the "spirit legions." If artistic expression was incapable of capturing those elusive "beauties of the worlds beyond," then action in the form of heroic deeds and duty rightly performed might take up the slack.]

It is not I who writes these lays,
For through my earthly hands
An unseen spirit puts in words
His thoughts from viewless lands.

I am the instrument, no more,
His is the brain and soul
My hand is guided by his will
And works to reach his goal.

How sad it is that such gross means
Can scarcely ever show
The splendid subtle mysteries
The spirit legions know.

The finest blend of colors,
Music's sublimest art
Are but poor daubs and discords
Of what the ghosts impart.

We can but dimly sense at times
Like perfumes wafted far,
The beauties of the worlds beyond,
From which all beauties are.

Perhaps the ages far ahead,
Shall make less dense our clay
So that the light of spirit truth
May light a shade our day.

'Till that time comes we can but hope
At times to faintly see
The light of knowledge absolute
Shine dimly, as through me.

1919

THE VANISHED RACE

["The Vanished Race" was one of two "uncompleted" studies Patton wrote in 1921, portraying the effect of civilization and peace upon the warrior spirit. In both poems, the souls of great conquerors are stifled by "the milling throng" and, like Patton, they yearn for a return to wilderness expanses:

And further midst the mountains of the west,
Where the lean trail is wet with snow borne spray
Where soars the eagle o're the dizzy peak
The pale eyed conquerors of the world hold sway. ("The Forgotten Man"¹)

When he wrote these poems, Patton was still going through a period of readjustment. World War I had ended too abruptly for him, before he really had the opportunity to become thoroughly immersed in it. After the war, the National Defense Act of 1920 reorganized the military and abolished the Tank Corps, assigning its personnel to the Infantry. Patton then requested a reassignment to the cavalry where he could play polo, participate in horse shows and hunt. In many ways it was an anachronistic life but it was not a soft one, and was perhaps the only way the peacetime warrior would exercise certain "Age old" instincts.]

Midst the prospect of limitless ridges
In the shadows of measureless peaks
Where the beckoning trail leads onwards
And the echoing silence speaks.

My soul sloughs off the bondage
Of its softly pampered life
My muscles feel the tingle
Of a million years of strife.

Again I have the memories
Of my bodies long since dead
Feel the wholesome righteous loathing
For the peaceful life I've led.

To the mountains and the desert
Age old instinct brings me back
And I find again the wisdom
Which the foetid cities lack.

1921

¹ George S. Patton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress.

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

[The first and twenty-second stanzas of "Through a Glass, Darkly" are quoted by George C. Scott in the movie, Patton, when he refers to himself in a conversation with General Omar Bradley as "the Poet." The title comes from the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians (13:11): "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." The most detailed expression of Patton's lifelong belief in the reincarnation of the warrior spirit, "Through a Glass, Darkly" chronicles human conflict from prehistoric times to the present and asserts Patton's grim conviction that this strife will continue into the future. In a poem he wrote in 1917, Patton declared " . . . Truth and History vainly shout / 'THERE IS NO END TO WAR'."¹

The two final stanzas of this poem illustrate a theme that Patton explored in "Ouija": He acts merely as the instrument of the spirit world. Because of his "blindness" he cannot understand the divine plan that he is destined to help execute. His role as this instrument, however, is not to understand but simply to perform his duty which includes: "Dying to be born a fighter, / But to die again once more."]

Through the travail of the ages
Midst the pomp and toil of war
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.

In the forms of many peoples
In all panoplies of time
Have I seen the luring vision
Of the victory Maid² Sublime.

I have battled for fresh mammoth
I have warred for pastures new
I have listened to the whispers
When the race track instinct grew.

I have known the call to battle
In each changeless changing shape
From the high-souled voice of conscience
To the beastly lust for rape.

I have sinned and I have suffered
Played the hero and the knave
Fought for belly, shame or country
And for each have found a grave.

I cannot name my battles
For the visions are not clear
Yet I see the twisted faces
And feel the rending spear.

Perhaps I stabbed our Savior
In His sacred helpless side.
Yet I've called His name in blessing
When in after times I died.

In the dimness of the shadows
Where we hairy heathens warred
I can taste in thought the life blood—
We used teeth before the sword.

While in later clearer vision
I can sense the coppery sweat
Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery
Where our phalanx Cyrus met.³

Hear the rattle of the harness
Where the Persian darts bounced clear
See the chariots wheel in panic
From the Hoplites⁴ leveled spear.

See the mole⁵ grow monthly longer
Reaching for the walls of Tyre
Hear the crash of tons of granite
Smell the quenchless eastern fire.

Still more clearly as a Roman
Can I see the Legion close
As our third rank moved in forward
And the short sword found our foes.

Once again I feel the anguish
Of that blistering treeless plain
When the Parthan showered death bolts⁶
And our discipline was vain.

I remember all the suffering
Of those arrows in my neck
Yet I stabbed a grinning savage
As I died upon my back.

Once again I smell the heat sparks
When my Flemish plate gave way
And the lance ripped through my entrails
As on Crecy's field⁷ I lay.

In the windless blinding stillness
Of the glittering tropic sea
I can see the bubbles rising
Where we set the captives free.

Midst the spume of half a tempest
I have heard the bulwarks go
When the crashing, point-blank round shot
Sent destruction to our foe.

I have fought with gun and cutlass
On the red and slippery deck
With all Hell aflame within me
And a rope around my neck.

And still later as a general
Have I galloped with Murat⁸
When we laughed at death and numbers
Trusting in the Emperor's star.

Till at last our star had faded,
And we shouted to our doom
Where the sunken-road of Ohain⁹
Closed us in its quivering gloom.

So but now with Tanks aclatter
Have I waddled on the foe
Belching death at twenty paces,
By the starshell's ghastly glow.

So as through a glass and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names—but always me.

And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.

So for ever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again once more.

(n.d.)

¹ "The End of War" (1917), George S. Patton Papers, Box 60, Library of Congress.

² The "Victory Maid" refers to Nike, the Greek goddess of victory and her Roman counterpart, Victoria, who was worshipped by the Roman legions.

³ "When our phalanx Cyrus met" is possibly a reference to the Peloponnesian War. A phalanx was an ancient military formation of infantry in close and deep ranks with shields joined together and spears overlapping. Thus, the reference to the bloody pikes that "grow wet and slippery."

⁴ "Hoplites" were citizens of Greek city-states who could not maintain horses but who had sufficient property to equip themselves with full personal armor. Their chief defense was the heavy bronze shield and they were armed with short swords and nine-foot spears.

⁵ The "mole" is the causeway built by Alexander the Great during his siege of the Phoenician island-city of Tyre in the year 322 B.C. The capture of Tyre was Alexander's greatest military conquest. After the city fell, 10,000 of its inhabitants were killed and 30,000 sold into slavery. Alexander's causeway remained, turning the island into a peninsula.

⁶ "Death bolts" refers to the arrows the ancient Parthians shot at their retreating enemies. Thus, the reference to arrows in his neck and to the popular expression, the "Parthian" or "parting shot." Although Patton's early incarnation is described as retreating, he died, we are told, on his back and managed to kill a "grinning savage."

⁷ On August 26, 1346, during the first decade of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III of England defeated the French led by Philip VI at Crecy-en-Ponthieu.

⁸ Joachim Murat was a leader of cavalry and one of Napoleon's most famous marshals. As a cavalryman, Patton would have felt a special affinity for this man whose fortunes rose and fell with Bonaparte's. Thus, the reference to the "Emperor's star." It is possible that Patton may have known Charles Murat, the Marshall's great-great grandson who was a French first lieutenant in the Somme counter-offensive of the spring of 1918. This acquaintance would have reaffirmed Patton's belief in the brotherhood of warriors and the reincarnation of the warrior spirit.

⁹ Ohain is a town southeast of Waterloo where Napoleon was defeated on June 18, 1815.