I’d seen my share of action in France during the war. On another hot day, in Belleau Wood near the Marne, the air had been filled with gunpowder and blood and broken, screaming men. I’d trampled and crawled over my own dead and wounded, just so I could kill the Kraut bastards who were trying to kill me. There was a time when I dreaded the sounds of combat, when I hated the feel of plunging a bayonet into another man’s body. But there was also a time when I began to love it. I wanted to do it again and again, and keep on doing it for as long as I could. If I was still killing, I was still alive. And I wanted to be alive. The stately corner of Sixty-Sixth and Fifth is just about as far away as you could get from any battlefield in France. But on that particular August afternoon, with an angry mob bearing down on my position — on my men — it wasn’t that far at all. So I did what I’d done back there: I got up off my ass. I attacked. I pulled my sap from the back of my pants, and saw the left of O’Hara’s line buckle back toward the mansion beneath the crush of the mob.
