Grab 'em by the nose and kick 'em in the ass

Whenever I run out of books to read, I turn back to Mr. Sawyer's interesting but very difficult The Tao of Deception. Last night I broke up laughing when I spotted this advice, quoted from the One Hundred Unorthodox Strategies:

"When engaging an enemy, frighten them in the front and overwhelm them in the rear...."

Which put me in mind of General George Patton's speech to the troops in May 1944, just before the D-Day landing in France. His words, which are usually misquoted in the more pungent form above, went like this:

"We're going to hold onto [the enemy] by the nose, and we're going to kick him in the ass."

Do you suppose Patton was reading the Chinese military classics at the time? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford