David Kenyon Webster

Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my friends. Then, pretending that we were doughboys in France, we assaulted one another with clods of clay and long, dry reeds. We went to the village hall and studied the rust rifles and machine guns that the Legion post had brought home from the First World War and imagined ourselves using them to fight Germans.But we never seriously thought that we would ever have to do it. The stories we heard later; the Depression veterans with their apple stands on sleety New York street corners; the horrible photographs of dead bodies and mutilated survivors; __ohnny Got His Gun_ and the shrill college cries of the Veterans of Future Wars drove the small-boy craving for war so far from our minds that when it finally happened, it seemed absolutely unbelievable. If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. I have always been glad that I could not look into the future.

Well, I thought, climbing slowly out of the slit trench, the shells will catch us above ground now. But if you have to go, you have to go. F Company__ in trouble, and we have to help them. We__e in reserve, so we have to go. And if we__e shelled, we__e shelled. There is absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?