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David Kenyon Webster

David Kenyon Webster Biography

Journalist

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“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; “Johnny 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.”

WarSoldiers
Book:Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich
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“Poor bastard, I thought, listening to him. He’s trying to hide from us. He’s dying, and he knows we want to kill him. What a fate: to gasp your life out all alone in the mud of a dirty little creek, helpless to hold off the slow death that is inside you and the quicker death that is walking up on you on the other side of the water. A death without love, a death without hope. God, who invented war? But if he gets back alive, I may be dead.”

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Book:Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich
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