🎧 277: At that moment . . .

AT THAT MOMENT, Herb was in a field hospital, recovering from a wound that would keep him hors de combat for the rest of the war.
     The evening before, as the sun began to set, Herb had been lying in a trench just west of a wood outside the village of Quelquepart-sur-Marne. The sun was going down, and its golden light lit a low serpentine ridge between the trench and the wood, about two hundred yards from where Herb and his fellows crouched, waiting. The ridge was strongly fortified, and so was the wood. In a moment, Herb and the others expected the order to charge the ridge, to charge out of the blinding light of the setting sun.
     Herb crouched below the lip of the trench, waiting for the call to go up and over, to try to take the ridge and, beyond it, the wood. Before the call came, a shell burst in the trench, to Herb’s right, and the explosion pushed him backward, just as if someone had tackled him around the legs and shoved him, against a timber that supported the muddy walls of the trench, and then spun him around it, as if he were in a revolving door.
     May Castle recalled hearing Herb tell the story:

     Well, of course, if you know someone for as long as Garth and I knew Herb and Lorna, you’re bound to have to listen to the same stories quite a few times — you can count yourself lucky if the stories are at least interesting. Garth told his war stories over and over and over, God knows. Well, poor Herb really didn’t have much to tell. You had to twist his arm to get him to tell about being praised by Pershing, it embarrassed him so, and he only had one other story to tell — that one about the shell that exploded in the trench. Well, there he was in a trench at Someplace-or-other-on-the-Marne, and of course it was all just ghastly. Well, it was all ghastly, wasn’t it? Herb and his trench-mates or whatever you call them were supposed to come dashing out of the trench and overrun some Germans who were holding some damned hill or other. Well! Suddenly this shell exploded and Herb was tossed around pretty badly. “It was the darnedest thing,” he said. “I kept thinking that someone had hold of me by the leg and was shaking me. There I was spun around and flat on my back, and I reached down to try to push away whoever was holding me by the leg. Well, no one was holding me by the leg at all. I’d been hit, and my leg was opened up from the knee to the hip, just the way you’d cut open a baked potato.”

     Herb passed his time in the hospital, as soon as he was able, assembling kits to improve the drinking cup handle catches. He taught others of the recovering wounded how to make these, and soon he had a group of some fifty men working on them. The work was useful in more than the immediately obvious ways; the men who did it probably benefited as much as those for whom they made the kits. In Terror and Tedium,his important but neglected study of the psychology of war, Major Edward Keefe wrote of the work that Herb initiated:

     The typical field hospital was behind the lines but barely beyond the range of the shelling. The war was still so close, such a constant presence, that there was no emotional escape from it. Added to the whole catalog of feelings that the war inspired in these wounded men was an almost overwhelming sense of frustration, of impotence, of not being able to do anything about it, not being able to participate. (We see another example of the effect of this feeling of impotence, by the way, in the flourishing traffic within the hospitals in pornography of all sorts — photographs, drawings, literature, even pornographic jewelry and tiny netsuke-like carvings.) Those on the mend would sometimes plead to be sent back into the fighting, even when they were obviously unfit. They worked at various tasks in and around the hospitals, of course — orderly work, supply-train work, and work on the “ice flotillas,” the trucks and ice-making equipment that kept the hospitals supplied with the ice so necessary for their operation. But this was not enough. A sense of distance developed among the wounded, a sense of being a class apart. The work they did was most often work for other wounded. They felt that they weren’t doing anything for their fellows who were still fighting, and they began to think of themselves as not belonging to the same group, not worthy of belonging to it. The cup handle repair kits were something that they could do for the men who were still fighting, and the wounded were eager to get in on the action, so to speak.

Herb (arrow) behind the lines, somewhere near Quelquepart-sur-Marne, about 1920. Note cluster of doughboys behind Herb, examining mess-kit cup with noncollapsing handle.

In Topical Guide 277, Mark Dorset considers Places: Real and Fictional and War: World War I: Trench Warfare from this episode.

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