December 24, 1936
General George S. Patton clamped his mouth shut as he stalked across his office in the ramshackle headquarters of the Confederate Expeditionary Force in Hermosillo, Mexico. His grip on the telephone tightened to the point of danger for the receiver as the volatile general struggled to rein in his legendary temper. The hisses and crackes and pops on the transcontinental line connecting him to Richmond were further annoyances in what was to Patton already a highly infuriating situation.
"Well of course I know there's a goddamn depression on Sidney, but what the hell are we building dams and factories and god knows what all else for if not to get the country back on its' feet. You and I both know these Watie tanks aren't the greatest, but they're a damn sight better than goddamn trucks with 'tank' painted on the side. What are we supposed to do, chuck rocks at the enemy?"
The voice of Confederate Chief of Staff William Sidney Graves was distant but no less audible for the vagarities of transcontinental communication.
"If I've told you once George, I've told you a hundred times. Scratch that, I know I've told you a hundred times. The President isn't going to go for it. Congress wouldn't approve it if he did. And you can bet anything you cared to lose that Jouett will never authorize something as crazy as a whole division of tanks. It's just not going to happen. Maybe if we had someone knocking on the door-"
"Mexico." Patton's interruption was sharp and to the point. "You and I both know they won't just let us sit on Hermosillo forver, no matter how many of their 'irregulars' we killed or captured when we rolled south in '34. Sooner or later, that Cardenas is gonna finally get into bed with the Communists and when he does we're gonna have a war on the southern border and four damn divisions to cover the whole country."
"Six. You're forgetting about-"
"I know, Ricketts and his new army in Louisiana. Fat lot of good it does us out here."
"George," Graves' voice took on the tone of forebearance he so often had to use when dealing with George Patton, "by all acoounts Cardenas is having enough trouble keeping his head on his shoulders and keeping everybody in his little junta happy, nevermind coming north for a fight he's got to know he can't win. You go out in public and say we need tanks to beat Mexicans, you're out of a job in a week."
"Hell Sidney I know that, we could whip those lousy Mexicans with what we've got now if we had to or I'm in the wrong army. I'm just looking towards the future, you know that. One old soldier to another Sid, the Germans-"
"Are on the other side of the goddamn Atlantic Georgie, and I'll thank you to remember it. Look, I know what you're playing at here, you want an independent armored force, like we set up in France during the War and you want to command it. Well and good Georgie, a man's got to have ambition, but for one I would've thought you'd covered yourself in enough laurels already, and for another, if you go around saying anything that even sounds like we're going to go to war with Germany, you might as well resign now. Country doesn't want to hear it, President Long damn sure doesn't want to hear it. End of discussion. No tanks, at least not now. No new exercises either. I already had the Quartermaasters in here bitching at me earlier today. Is that understood?"
Patton's gaze, had he possesed the ability, would have crossed two thousand miles and struck a very senior officer of the Confederate Army dead instantly. Fighting back another surge of anger he opened his mouth and gave the only answer he could, the only answer he hated most to give.
"Yes sir."
"Good," Having won his point, Graves was magnimanious in victory. "Keep a lid on everything down there, and have a merry Christmas George."
"You too sir."
The call ended none too soon for Patton, who growled and stalked across his rather spare office to his desk, wrenching a drawer open forcefully and finding a cigar which he quickly lit and got burning in short angry puffs. Grey smoke quickly filled the room and Patton crossed to open a window, letting a slight breeze into the space and clearing it of some of the haze. He sighed as he regarded the spare Mexican landscape and watched another year tick away. Another year stuck in a pissant litlle town in a pissant province in a backwards neighbor nation that had even in the best of times never had any reason to love the CSA, but now had an active reason to hate their northern neighbors.
Not that Patton thought his presence in the province was unnecessary. Well, he amended, the Army's presence was necessary. His particular presence, however could be of much more use elsewhere, in his opinion. Looking back over the two odd years of the occupation, Patton could, in times of levelheadedness, realize he had done a lot of good. Ejecting the leftist guerillas and workers councils and restoring some semblance of public order, even if foreign imposed, had won him friends in Hermosillo and even in some of the other northern Mexican states who had long been drifting further from the orbit of Mexico City. The division he had been entrusted with, the 1'st 'Stuart' Cavalry Division had lived up to its' namesake, moving fast and striking hard. The desert had allowed Patton to test some of his theories of a new type of warfare in suitable conditions, lots of open space and precious little of value to damage. Seeing the men who had rode south on horses now travel using trucks, jeeps, and halftracks pleased the general as well. Still, he felt as if he was wasted this far from Richmond. Too far away from the currents of Army life to have any impact on the future of the force he held so dear to his heart. He supposed that if he saw a horizon free of stormclouds he could perhaps allow himself to rest here, fulfill one of his last assignments before a hero's retirement. Sidney was right on one count, he had won enough laurels in his career to suit all but the Alexanders of the military world. But he saw, with a warrior's intuition he had honed all his life that his nation would not long be at peace, not if she was to defend the values for which she had already shed so much blood in her less than a hundred years.
"Germany." The one word carried great weight for Patton, equal parts admiration that one skilled craftsman has for another, and revulsion, forged in the fires of the Continent and the Great War which had dominated Patton's life from the time he set foot in France in 1915 till the day Germany surrendered in 1919. Even then, he had known that for all the promises and goodwill, the Allies would not be able to break Germany's power or ambition permanently, not without themselves becoming what they had fought against. The news from Europe, coming in muted tones though it was, was to Patton merely the stirring of a waking beast of war, a beast which unchecked, may very well conquer the second time what it had merely wounded the first.
Stabbing the cigar butt into the ashtray close at hand, Patton closed the window and took another look over the preliminary schematics he had drawn up for a new kind of tank, faster, better protected, and packing a 20 mm cannon instead of just a heavy machine gun. His superiors had told him, in no uncertain terms, what they thought of his tank designs and his ideas both. Surrender, however, was not a word that had ever found its' way into George Patton's vocabulary.
"Hell with 'em all. In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king...and the bastards will see who's right yet."
General George Patton outside Hermosillo, 1936