Chapter XXXVThe first day there, we lost the three battalion commanders. One killed in the first twenty minutes and the other two hit later. This is only a statistic to a journalist. But good battalion commanders have never yet grown on trees; not even Christmas trees which was the basic tree of that woods. I do not know how many times we lost company commanders how many times over. But I could look it up.
They aren't made, nor grown, as fast as a crop of potatoes is either. We got a certain amount of replacements but I can remember thinking that it would be simpler and more effective, to shoot them in the area where they de-trucked, than to have to try to bring them back from where they would be killed and bury them. It takes men to bring them back and gasoline and men to bury them. Thes
