Kenneth

My mother loved Kenneth McDougall for sixty-one years.  For almost seven of those years, he was alive. 

They made a striking couple – he, tall and handsome; she, petite and beautiful with her big dimpled smile and dreamy, gentle nature. 

World War II interrupted their life together.  Kenneth joined the famed 10^th Mountain Infantry Division and then moved on to fight in Italy and France with the First Special Service Force.  Mother volunteered with the Army Nurse Corps and served in England with the 141^st General Hospital unit.  

When the war ended, Kenneth lived only in Mother’s heart.  But there he was very much alive, something my father accepted and my sisters and I never thought to question.  

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet XLIII from her Sonnets from the Portuguese provided the outline for this book.  In a condolence letter, Mother’s friend Louisa Rhine wrote that when she thought of how Mother must be suffering over the loss of her beloved Kenneth, she couldn’t help but think of the last line of this poem “…and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” 

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            The First Special Service Force carried out nightly patrols across no-man’s-land, sometimes venturing deep into German territory.  Colonel Robert Moore commanded the Force’s Second Regiment troops, the men who conducted the majority of the patrols. When Ken entered the FSSF, he trained under the “utterly fearless” Colonel Moore and wrote of participating in his first patrol.

“We were like a lot of thugs sneaking along the hedgerows in the moonlight.  We had blackened our hands and faces, wore our oldest clothes, and carried rifles, knives, and hand grenades in our pockets.  Quite suddenly we were fired on by a machine gun near a house, quite close.  One man was shot in the leg. We ducked behind a bank and another gun opened up from that side.  A flare went up and we squeezed ourselves against the ground, holding our breath till it burnt out.  Mortar shells started to burst around us, the shrapnel whining overhead like angry bees.  We scrambled back along the ditch and got away from all that.  We next made a wide detour and started along a ditch across a field but someone could see us as shells started coming over ‘s-s-s-s-BANG! – s-s-s-s-BANG!’  The ditch was full of muddy water but we got right down in it on our bellies and wriggled away from there like worms on a hot brick.  

 “We went back still further and tried a detour on the other side.  But we were seen again and mortar shells came crashing down close by.  They scared up a whole flock of Pee-wits that flew off in the moonlight crying their strange cry.  Every now and then one of those shells went ‘BANG!’ overhead and set the sky to rumbling as it whistled away over the horizon.  It was all very exciting and strange.  I was surprised to find that I was not particularly scared.”