“You wuz robbed.”
Rudman looked hurt. “It’s the latest fashion,” he said.
“Yeah, if you’re in the SS.”
“You can be a real bastard when you want to be.”
“Ah, don’t be so thin-skinned.” Keegan laughed. “You look beautiful. Did you take the train in?”
“No, I drove from Paris. I thought about you, kiddo. Went right through the park at Belleau Wood. That hospital where we met is a big cow barn now.”
After fourteen years, Keegan remembered that day very well. The war was over for Keegan but it was the first time he had understood what was going on. It was Bert Rudman who had finally put it all in perspective for him.
By the spring of 1917, a whipped Woodrow Wilson, reelected as a liberal idealist with a clear vision for the future of the country, had watched his own rigid policies lead the country into arch conservatism. He was finally forced to admit the inevitable: They were on the verge of war. After a passionate speech in which he urged the Congress to declare war on Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire to save the world ‘for Democracy, “ he returned to his office in the White House with the cheers of the senators and representatives still clamoring in his ears.
His secretary was shocked by his appearance. He looked worn out, defeated, old and sick.
“Are you all right?” she asked with alarm.
He shook his head sadly and dropped heavily into his chair.
“My message today was a message of death for our young men, “he said. “How strange it seems to applaud that.” Then lowering his head to his desk, he wept.
His message started a wave of patriotism in the country. Hamburgers became Salisbury steaks; sauerkraut was “liberty cabbage. “Germans quietly slipped to the courthouse and changed their names. Conscientious objectors were beaten up and thrown in jail. Either you were for the war or you were a traitor, and thousands of young Americans were inspired to take up the fight. Keegan was one of them. Only eighteen, he joined the Marines and six months later he was in the first Marine battalion to land in France.
Jocko Nayles, a tough street fighter from Brooklyn, only three years Keegan ‘s senior, took Keegan in tow on the boat ride to France.
“How old’re ye?” he asked.
“Eighteen,” Keegan answered, trying to sound tough.
“Eighteen, then! Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Well, ye just stick with me, kid, I’ll get you through this.”
Together they had marched down muddy French roads toward the Marne River where they were baptized in fire, where Keegan had seen his first German and killed his first man. The meaning of these skirmishes was lost in the terror of hand-to-hand combat, of sky bombs showering shards of metal down on him from overhead, of the flashes of shells that temporarily blinded him, and of the mines underfoot. In horror, he saw his buddies struck down in rows like grass before a scythe and finally felt the burning punch in his shoulder, felt his knees give out, and he fell, not knowing how badly he was hit or whether he would live or die.
To Keegan, the war was five hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide and scattered with helmets and weapons and body parts. He could not relate to anything beyond his field of vision. Whether they were winning or losing, why they were there, were questions that did not even occur to him.
When the battle was over, Jocko had come back and found him huddled in a shell hole, a dirty handkerchief stuffed in the bullet hole in his shoulder, had picked him up and carried him back to the field hospital, had nursed over him for days until his fever broke and infection passed.
A month later he was back with his unit, wallowing through the mire on the outskirts of a French town called Chateau-Thierry, headed for the Marne River only seventy miles from Paris.
To Keegan, the length of -the French and German border was one great muddy battlefield, its trees reduced to stumps, its fields coursed with twisted barbed wire and miles of trenches, its villages reduced to rubble. For mile after mile, the disgusting perfume of death hung in the air like a fog. Mud-caked and broken, soldiers, driven to the edge of insanity, hunched in their trenches, cursed the rain and the shells which intermittently poured down on them, dreamt of home, faced chattering machine guns, aerial bombs, mines and an equally insane army of Germans in a crazy leapfrog of battles in which thousands sometimes died in a single day. All to gain a few miles of decimated earth.
