And Youth Was Gone
by
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"Well, Frank," I said as he fell into step beside my litter, "I guess I’m on my way. They’re shipping me to the 95th General Hospital."
"Yes," he agreed. He fumbled through his jacket with his good hand, obviously looking for something. He pulled out several things and then put them away.
"Here, Bill," he said, thrusting a warm object into my right hand.
My fingers closed around the worn brass metal of his old cigarette lighter. I felt my throat tighten and almost cried.
"Thanks, Frank," I said quietly. "I owe you a lot. You saved my life out there."
As soon as I had uttered the words, I realized that they were embarrassing to him. Frank Hollister looked down at the ground for a moment, shrugged his shoulders, and then turned his warm gray eyes on me. He smiled.
"Everybody owes something to somebody, Bill."
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About the Book
The Second World War profoundly changed the people who fought in it. Bill Kress, a small-town Depression child, raised by his grandparents, became a part of that great drama just a few months after his graduation from high school. He enlisted mainly to delay his induction, but ironically, his enlistment actually brought him under the army's jurisdiction sooner than had he been drafted. Through his basic training and technical schooling to become an army medic, he was to learn that the army governed its people impersonally without regard for their desires, or even their imagined skills. There was "a right way and an army way." Forced to leave his "first love," a beautiful girl in Atlanta, he was sent overseas aboard the Queen Elizabeth, a woman's name that was to have a significant place in his life. In a series of flashbacks and dreams aboard the ship, Bill Kress tells us about his childhood and the profound influence his grandmother had upon his young life. It was her gentle kindness and love for him and others that was to triumph over the brutish forces of both his grandfather, a stern Pennsylvania Dutch disciplinarian, and the army. Grandfather taught him to survive; grandmother taught him how to live. Kress's life both at home and overseas was a mixture of horror and humor. The humor shows in the catastrophe of his first date, his army haircut, the tough medical sergeant's "making his own patients," and the romance between the little Chinese cook and the huge English ATS girl. These incidents furnish comic relief for the horrors of being pinned for hours on the beach D-day, and the deaths of friends there and at Bastogne. Bill Kress more than just survives the war; he reaches an understanding about the meaning of life through its sufferings and through the love of Elspeth. She, as well as his grandmother, was his Elizabeth Barrett who taught him that love is unselfish and requires a complete subjugation of self for the good of others. Bill Kress's lessons were hard, but their very toughness taught him that life, itself, is a struggle, a search for love.
About the Author
The first question that the reader may ask is: "Is Bill Kress the William Keim who wrote the novel?" The answer to that is both yes and no. William Keim did experience many of the events portrayed in the book, but he relied upon the experiences of others as well as his own. Born in the small town of Meadville, Pennsylvania in 1923, he was raised by his grandparents who are aptly described in the novel. Just nineteen, he joined the army and spent 3 ½ years as a medic, most of which was in the European Theater of Operations. He went into the army a boy and came out a person determined to manage his own destiny. He married in 1947, graduated from Allegheny College in 1949, became a teacher for a period of seventeen years, one of which was as a Fulbright instructor in Langside College in Glasgow Scotland, before becoming a school administrator, specializing in developing innovative school programs. He finished his formal professional career, retiring as Huntingdon, Pennsylvania’s School Superintendent after ten years in that position. Currently he is still writing novels, professional and political commentaries and caring for his wife Virginia, who has Alzheimer’s disease. When he was asked whether he felt life was fair, he replied, "For over forty years, Virginia raised our three children and was the wind beneath my wings who helped me pursue the profession I loved. I don’t know if life is fair, but it has been busy and good."