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Wintergewitter「Er hat die Strapazen mitgemacht.」
「He shared the gaff.」
【1891.11.15 ~ 2024.11.16】
His frank preference for younger officers was held against him. Visitors to his headquarters were instantly struck by the difference in appearance of his subordinates from those of other higher commanders. Rommel's staff was markedly younger.
What earned the Fox the unconditional devotion of the young soldier? In talking to men who served under him one quickly becomes conscious of a recurrent idiom: Er hat die Strapazen mitgemacht: He shared the gaff. The young soldier saw in Rommel a man who feared no trouble or danger, who was always at the front, who always appeared when things were toughest and where there seemed no way out. He saw him not as a field marshal who knew how to move divisions, corps, and armies--he had not the perspective to judge him in this capacity--but as one who could tell the company commander how to lay out his platoon positions or how to deploy his squads and platoons so as to take a heavily mined, wired, and machine gun-defended strongpoint with a minimum of casualties.
This was not a field marshal who was content to command from a war room miles to the rear. This was one who was not above taking a shovel from a footslogging soldier and showing him how to dig a better foxhole. This was one who was there when the dying was being done.
2024-11-16 10:58:20 +0000