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 Château-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.
“This is where we stop ‘em, lads, “a youthful lieutenant told them as they trudged toward the enemy. “Else they‘ll be in Paris before Christmas.”
From Château-Thierry they headed north toward a game preserve called Belieau Wood, singing songs as they marched. One platoon singing one song, the second answering with another.
K-K-K-Katie, K-K-K-Katie,
You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore,
When the m-m-m-moon shines, over the c—c-c-cowshed,
I’ll be w-w-w-waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.
Answered by:
You may forget the gas and shells, parley—voo,
You may forget the gas and shells, parley.-voo,
You may forget the gas and shells,
But you‘ll never forget the mademoiselles,
Hinky-dinky parley-voo.
They were singing as they approached the park. The Germans fired the first shot.
This time, Keegan went down with a shell fragment in the leg. He dragged himself to a battered wall where he found three Marines clustered around a machinegun, dead long enough that bags had begun to feast on them. Then there was a lull in the battle and he leaned his cheek against the wall, biting his lip to keep back the pain. An uneasy silence fell on the glen where he lay.
He was surprised by the first of the Germans. They were on horseback, like a ghost posse, suddenly materializing in the swirling smoke of battle. The hooves of their horses were wrapped in gunny cloth and their halters and cinches were greased to cut down the noise. They moved slowly and silently over the battered ground, their guns at the ready. Keegan started firing and he kept firing, his teeth rattling as the heavy machinegun kicked and thundered under hand, firing until the barrel of the gun was glowing red, warped from the heat, and the ammo belts were scattered empty around him.
When he stopped, the world stopped. There was not a sound. Not a bird singing, nor the wind sighing, nor even the cries of the wounded. There was silence. Before him was a grotesque frieze, as though the horses with their legs stretched up in the air and the men sprawled like sacks around them were posing for a photograph. Only then did the ghastly pain from the hole in his leg fire his brain and he screamed and passed out.
In the hospital he found Jocko Nayles, his face half covered in a bloody bandage, his bloody eye socket swollen with pus, lying in his mud caked uniform raving with fever. This time it wits Keegan who urged his friend away from death.