'Mad, is he?' George II is reported to have said of General Wolfe; 'Then I wish he would bite some of my other generals!' Both remarks might have been made about General George S. Patton Jr, and no doubt frequently were. His sanity was seriously in question. As S.L.A. Marshall, the most judicious of American military historians, put it: 'Any man who thinks that he is the reincarnation of Hannibal or some such isn't quite possessed of all his buttons.' But this was exactly what Patton did think, and was not even half of it. 'He declared that he had once hunted for fresh mammoth, and then in other ages had died on the plains of Troy, battled in a phalanx against Cyrus the Persian, marched with Caesar's terrible Tenth Legion, fought with the Scottish Highlanders for the rights and hopes of the House of Stuart, [fallen] on Crecy's field in the Hundred Years War, and [taken] part in all the great campaigns since then.'

LRB 8 February 1996 | PDF Download