look at the Grand Canal where the light is lovely now, and you tell me more?”
When they were looking out at the Grand Canal where the light was, indeed, lovely, the Colonel went on, “I got a regiment because the Commanding General relieved a boy that I had known since he was eighteen years old. He was not a boy any more, of course. It was too much regiment for him and it was all the regiment I ever could have hoped for in this life until I lost it.” He added, “Under orders, of course.”
“How do you lose a regiment?”
“When you are working around to get up on the high ground and all you would have to do is send in a flag, and they would talk it over and come out if you were right. The professionals are very intelligent and these Krauts were all professionals; not the fanatics. The phone rings and somebody calls from Corps who has his orders from Army or maybe Army Group or maybe even SHAEF, because they read the name of the town in a newspaper, possibly sent in from Spa, by a correspondent, and the order is to take it by assault. It’s important because it got into the newspapers. You have to take it.
“So you leave one company dead along a draw. You lose one company complete and you destroy three others. The tanks get smacked even as fast as they could move and they could move fast both ways.
“They hit them one, two, three, four, five.
“Three men usually get out of the five (that are inside) and they run like broken-field runners that have been
