Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 1, 1993 TAG: 9306010079
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They heard a whistle. An incoming shell. Kennett dived into a ravine. Campbell and Eanes didn't get out of the way fast enough.
Eanes was hit bad. Shrapnel. "I was the first one that got to him," Kennett remembers. "I saw there wasn't anything I could do for him."
Eanes, a company cook from Southeast Roanoke, was one of 95 Roanokers who died in the First World War.
It's been 75 years, but Kennett will never forget his comrade who died. "You know how you tease your cook: He was just the nicest, kindest guy. Quiet. Very humble."
That day in France is one of the memories that came back to Kennett on Memorial Day.
Kennett, 94, is native of Franklin County's Red Valley section. He lives these days at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Salem.
He's more than willing to talk about his memories and show off his mementos of the war - including his Purple Heart. But he doesn't dwell on it all the time.
"If I see a World War I veteran, we might talk a little about it," he said. But "you just don't talk about it much."
Monday was a day for talking about it.
\ William Kennett had just turned 18 when he enlisted in the Second Virginia Infantry of the National Guard. His unit was sent to guard Norfolk and Western bridges around Natural Bridge.
Then, on Aug. 5, 1917, the unit was brought to Roanoke and mustered into federal service - as part of the 29th Division of the U.S. Army's 116th Infantry. Kennett was a private in a machine-gun company. His job was to feed ammunition to the gunner.
They trained in Alabama and crossed the Atlantic in a convoy of 14 troop ships.
The company spent several days marching to the front. One night, he remembers, he slept in an aircraft hangar - under the wing of the plane that belonged to American Ace Eddie Rickenbacher.
Then they arrived in the Argonne Forest.
The first day, the shellings came in intervals that lasted about 20 minutes each. "It was very scary," he says. "It was just a continuous roar."
Kennett had lost his sidearm, so his sergeant ordered him to stay in the rear and help the cooks.
At lunchtime the second day in the forest, Kennett, Eanes and Campbell, who was from Luray, toted 20 cans of salmon and two five-gallon cans of soup to the men at the front.
They had just dropped off the food when they saw a mist coming at them through the trees. It was chlorine gas.
Kennett reached into his pack and pulled out his gas mask and put it on. Not quite fast enough. His throat burned.
Still, he seemed to be all right, so the three headed back for more food.
The shell that surprised them killed Eanes almost instantly.
Campbell was hit in the leg. He was bleeding badly. Kennett poured iodine on the wound, and tied a tourniquet around Campbell's thigh. "I did the best I could for him."
He ran and got two stretcher bearers. "We had him on the way to the hospital in less than 30 minutes, I think."
Then Kennett started feeling dizzy.
The effects of the gassing - and perhaps the shock of his friend's death - were starting to show. "I got real weak and couldn't stand up." He crawled into a bunker and lay in a stupor. Finally, he was hauled away to a hospital.
He recovered from the gas, but it caused him much pain. "It ate all the enamel off my teeth. Six months later my teeth started to crumble like old cement."
After he recovered from a bout of diptheria - "32 days laid flat on my back" - he was asked to stay on at the hospital. He made up the beds and did anything he could to help.
He came home on a hospital ship, landing in Virginia on March 15, 1919.
He returned to Red Valley. He lived there for more than seven decades, save for a few years in Chicago and Miami.
Last fall, he cracked his knee on a stick of wood, and arthritis set in. That and a problem with his potassium levels put him into the VA hospital. But he's not complaining.
"This hospital is one of the nicest places," he says. "I'm hoping to spend the rest of my life here."
Kennett still drives his car every Sunday to Red Valley Methodist Church.
He has spoken a couple times to high-school classes about the war. The kids listened well and asked a lot of questions, but "they just couldn't understand why the war was so severe, you might say. They didn't understand why the people had to go and fight to save the country."
As for the present, he just hopes the United States will be prepared for whatever conflict may come.
He wouldn't like to see the country get into a war in Bosnia, though. That's the place where Austrian archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 - the spark that started the First World War.
And Kennett doesn't agree with veterans who say Clinton shouldn't have spoken at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Monday.
"People try to blame him for evading the war," Kennett said. "I don't know if he ought to be blamed for that. We all make mistakes. It just may be that he thought that [fighting in the war] was the wrong thing to do."
In Franklin County, Kennett notes, there are folks of the Mennonite faith who refuse to fight and kill. "They just don't believe in it," he said. "I can respect that."
by CNB