Super power

Running this afternoon in light rain through the serried ranks of a pine plantation on a springy bed of needles, I wondered at the contrast to the shell cratered, barded wire-littered, mud clogged landscape of Flanders in the First World War, as described in Emily Mayhew's Wounded, which I've been reading with awed emotions.

In this book, devoted to the subject of the medical treatment of British casualties, there's early on a chapter devoted to the stretcher bearers who headed out in teams into No Man's Land  armed with nothing but panniers of medical supplies to treat the wounded and carry them back to aid stations. She writes: In deep mud after heavy rain one of the team had to lead the way so that they wouldn't fall or become trapped. Some shell holes were big enough to bury a bus in and, when they got wet, their edges could easily subside. If one of the bearers slipped and fell, he could drag everyone down to the bottom. Then they had to gather themselves, disentangle the stretcher straps, reload the patient and crawl out again. And this at night, often under fire, in terrain without landmarks, over and over.

By contrast, my passage through the woods was light and prancy, a romp.

Later on, at the gym associated with the hotel, I was astonished by the number of weight machines specially configured to exercise particular muscles. A huge room was full of buff (or buffish) men and women devoted to the improvement of  particular parts of the anatomy, as if a body were a engine, already running well, that could be disassembled, polished piece by piece, and reassembled into something capable of better performance, clearer definition.

By contrast, I get the image from Mayhew's book of the Western Front as a kind of blender turning men and mud into a kind of homogenous slurry of man-mush. Some wounded were so covered with mud as to be almost indistinguishable as humans; unremoved, the mud could harden into a crusty shell that had to be chipped off to deal with the disruption of bones, flesh, skin, teeth and organs within.

The most powerful impact of the book comes from the stories of individual men and women of  the (in this case) British medical service--the bearers, the nurses, the surgeons, the medical officers, the orderlies, the chaplains, the ambulance drivers--as well as the wounded themselves, not complicit in the creation of carnage, but coping with it. Overwhelming numbers, hellish chaos alternating in with horrible hard work: these 'ordinary' people managed this for weeks, months, and more, while retaining their dignity, their compassion, their resourcefulness.

If I do a fraction of what they did, I'm tired. My resilience would be used up in just the first hours of experience like theirs. As for the ability to care about others: I would become self-centered after the first few days, not to mention the longer term.

And yet, who knows? What actually am I capable of, or any of us? These main characters in these stories of generosity, constancy, courage are actual people without any mythological back story of divine birth or selection. Comic book characters have super powers; these had just the power of persistence in well-doing.

Talk about God in the context of that war (any war) is a cruel joke, yet I think if ever a god worth existing were to be manifest, it would be in hands and hearts of such as these.