🎧 274: One cannot . . .

Chapter 6

In Which Lorna Becomes a Legend and Herb Is Decorated

ONE CANNOT leave oneself behind. Emerson and Huber were right: one’s giant always tags along. When we say that success or divorce or war changes people, and mean by it that it makes great changes, we are likely to be commenting not on the people, but on our perceptions of them. In war, certain traits sometimes appear with a prominence that they do not have or cannot have in peacetime. The bookkeeper who becomes the fabled hero of his regiment, who astonishes us with his valor and nobility, may have stoutly but quietly refused to juggle his employer’s books the week before he enlisted, but that civilian demonstration of valor and nobility may have gone unsung, may even have cost him his job. Of Herb’s traits, the one that came to prominence in the Great War was his mechanical ingenuity.
     Training in the muddy woods of North Carolina, Herb learned to fire a rifle and jump into a trench and breathe through a gas mask and throw a grenade and thrust a bayonet through a stuffed sack. He worried about his mother, and he dreamed about Lorna, and he was drawn with all the foolhardiness of a Piper toward the schemes that flourished in the camp. He was ever wary, though, of doing a foolish Piper thing, and his wariness kept him out of lotteries and pyramid plans and, most of the time, whorehouses. He brought his talent for salesmanship with him, but he found that he hardly needed it to sell coarse goods among his fellow draftees and recruits. When he realized how large the demand was, he decided, knowing how short the supply was, that he could increase the price by exaggerating the shortage. He invented a mysterious character who, he claimed, brought him the goods a few pieces at a time, from an orphanage, where young girls carved the items to earn their keep, using one another as models. To provide the unlikely detail that lends verisimilitude to a lie, he gave the man a mutilated right hand.
     When he had time to kill, he often killed it, as he always had, by tinkering. He found plenty to keep him occupied. There was always something to fix, and there was always something that could be improved. By the end of the war, his love of tinkering had made him famous. He was known among the doughboys as “that guy from Boston,” who found a way to fix the handle on the mess-kit cup.
     Each infantryman was issued a cleverly designed mess kit that combined all the essential containers and implements in one package. In fact, it became its own package, the pan mating with the plate, like the two halves of a clamshell, and the handle of the pan rotating to hold the two together. One component of this kit was a cup with a folding handle. This coffee cup showed how ill prepared America had been for war: the folding handle had never been tested under combat conditions, or even under rigorous training conditions. The handle couldn’t be depended on to stay in the open position, and it was most likely to fail when the cup was full. The first time Herb’s failed, coffee spilled down his right leg. He wasn’t alone in having this happen; it happened to many. He was, however, alone in his reaction to it. He immediately began thinking of a way to make the cup handle work as it should. He wore a little grin while he ate, though his leg was scalded and his food was insipid, because he was turning over in his mind ways that he might solve the problem the Army had given him to keep him from feeling miserable.

In Topical Guide 274, Mark Dorset considers Gadgets: Mechanical and Reality: Real and Fictional from this episode.

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