ORNA also threw herself into work.  All over America, women answered the call to do the work of men who had answered the call to war.  In Chacallit, there was much work to do.
    In the years before the United States entered the war, Chacallitans gave the outward appearance of favoring neutrality, but in fact neutrality had made everyone nervous, since Chacallitans of German and British background distrusted one another’s private convictions.  When the United States had finally decided to go to war, Chacallit had rushed to support the decision.  Several of the young men of Chacallit had enlisted at once, and the town was surprised to find itself fuming unanimously with anti-German sentiment and puffing with pride in America and Chacallit.  When the draft began, Chacallit showed none of the resistance shown in some other small towns—towns that answered the call by drafting ruffians, drunks, and layabouts—nor was there any of the grisly pettiness of towns where officials on a local draft board, handed the power to administer fear, pain, even death, used it to revenge lost boundary disputes or arguments over rights-of-way, to return, horribly inflated, schoolyard taunts, to exact satisfaction for cuckoldry.  Chacallit sent its best, and the draftees were treated in the Chacallit Sentinel as if they’d already won the Croix de Guerre.
    The gentlemen’s furnishings industry converted to production of bits and pieces for uniforms: buttons, buckles, snaps, grommets, hooks, clamps, straps, bandoliers, and such.  Since women had long been employed in the mills of Chacallit, replacement sometimes meant advancement, when women moved into positions their supervisors vacated.  Such was Lorna’s case.  She had been the only woman in the carving section of the coarse-goods operation.  Two of her co-workers enlisted, and her supervisor, John Caldwell, who had always kept to himself and rarely spoke to any of the workers on any subject but their work, surprised them all by announcing that he was leaving to assist in the work being done by the Young Men’s Christian Association in France.  Said he, in part:

    When this terrible war is over, who will return to us?  Will the men who return to our shores prove to be a greater menace than the Prussian bullies?  Will they be the sons and husbands and brothers we sent over there, or will they be a syphilitic horde of Frenchified monsters?  I am going to France to do my part to see that when our boys return we can embrace them without fear and loathing.  I’ll counsel abstinence, but I will also provide protection, for no doughboy should be without his three safeguards: his helmet, his mask, and his condoms.

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    I finished delivering The Automobile: Its Care and Use.  I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that everyone is quite satisfied with the book.  Reverend Binder even stopped me the other day to say that he had been reading the chapter on “Housing the Automobile,” and that it has inspired him to build a garage.  I knew you would enjoy hearing that.

    With those deliveries finished, I will go back to my work for the Red Cross, putting together Comfort Kits.  Have you gotten one of these kits?  I think about you sometimes when I’m working on them, because sometimes the thought strikes me that you might get one of the kits that I put together.  What do you think of that?  I think it would be quite a coincidence if you did.  It has become a great game among us girls to slip some personal token into a kit, just some little thing that could only have come from the girl who put it together.  Some of the girls write a little note.  Others put a picture in or something else. . . .

T 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.”

    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.

    A lot of the other guys complain about the food, but I’ve had worse.  We generally have boiled potatoes and onions, and sometimes we have rice or stew.  Breakfast might be just crackers and coffee, but it wasn’t many years ago that I didn’t have any breakfast.  Lots of times, when I went to school, for lunch I would just take a potato.  Sometimes I’d have an onion sandwich, which didn’t make me too popular with the other kids!  I used to sell papers on the street and also a thing that my buddies and I called rat pie.  We got these pies at a bakery so we could sell them, and we used to joke that they were made of rat meat.  I think all of us thought it was probably true.  If a rat pie got wet in the rain or if somebody dropped one on the pavement, I’d take it home, and we’d have that for dinner.  Many nights we’d have just potatoes. So I don’t mind this food at all.  In fact, sometimes when we have just bread and onions I make an onion sandwich and it reminds me of home.  The truth is, I like onion sandwiches. . . . I’m glad that the books are arriving on time.  I’d be pleased if you would continue to write to me to let me know how things are going, if it isn’t too much trouble.

    So, you mustn’t worry about me, because, as I said, I’m all right.  My leg is healing just fine, and everyone says that I probably won’t walk with a limp or be able to predict rain.  I’ve arranged to have some money sent to Uncle Ben for you.  I don’t need any money where I am, so don’t you worry about taking it.

    I’ve had a good week—prices are climbing.  Please give Mother an extra twelve dollars.  I know you’re keeping track of everything you give her, and you can rest assured that I will be able to pay all of it back and then some.

    Here’s a funny thing.  Some of the fellows here have been buying “special” carved buttons for their uniforms.  Where do you suppose they’re buying them?  Do you think we have competition?  Some of the fellows say they heard that sometimes special carvings—not buttons, but very special carvings—come in packages from the Red Cross, but I don’t think that could be right, do you?

ORNA DID go to work in the suspender fitting section.  It doesn’t seem likely to me that she actually feared Luther’s spilling the beans about her erotica work if she didn’t do what he wanted.  She must have known that their standoff was stable.  It’s more likely that she took a place on the main floor, where an American flag was mounted on each of the machines, at each of the benches and tables, because she knew that more hands were always needed and because she would have missed the company of the other women.  At her cutting machine, she worked among women who gave their work only the necessary effort.  She made herself work in the same manner, letting her hands perform while her mind wandered.  More and more often her thoughts were of Herb.

ERB HAD BEEN assigned to a prisoner-of-war camp, where he and other recuperating men supervised German prisoners who were put to the task of fabricating cup handle repair kits.  The men who ran the camp were a mixed lot, thrown together from among the wounded of many divisions.  They were a group that represented the whole fabric of American society, including men from the warp and men from the woof, the only truly integrated group of soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces.
    About three weeks after the Armistice was signed, a tremor of excitement rippled through the camp.  Herb was stretched out on his bunk, writing a letter, when Ezio Corelli, a wisecracking, curly-haired pastry chef from Brooklyn, burst in with startling news.
    “Hey, Piper!” he shouted, “you better polish your fucking shoes and practice your fucking salute—they’re gonna make a fucking hero out of you.”
    “What?” said Herb.  He grinned at Corelli, anticipating the gag that was sure to come.
    “Yes, Herbie, that’s right,” said Jo Jo Washington, a serious-minded cornetist from Chicago.  “That certainly is right.  No jokes this time, Herbie.  They are going to recognize you.  That’s the truth.”
    “What is this?” asked Herb, his amusement and caution growing.
    “Herb! Herb!” called Anton “Boom-Boom” Delacroix, a big-hearted fisherman from New Orleans.  He burst into the bunkroom, lumbered to Herb’s bunk, and lifted Herb to his feet.  “You are one damn lucky son-of-a-bitch, you,” Boom-Boom boomed.
    “What on earth are you talking about?” asked Herb, wriggling in Boom-Boom’s bear hug.
    “Herbert!” called Izzy Moskowitz, a devil-may-care dental student from South Bend, “I certainly hope you are prepared for this.  This is going to be one of the most memorable moments of your life.”  He stood in front of Herb, regarding him with evident pride, as a brother might.
    Herb put his hands on his hips. “All right, all right,” he said.  “What are you—”
    From the doorway, Seamus O’Brien, a freckle-faced barkeep from Alabama, cried, “Tennnnnnshun!” and in a moment, without other fanfare, Black Jack Pershing himself strode into the bunkhouse.
    “Which one of you figured out how to fix the coffee cups?” asked the General.
    “Here, sir,” said Herb.  For the first and only time since it had healed, his leg gave him some trouble.  A queer flutter ran through it, and he was afraid it would fold under him.
    “Herb Piper,” said Pershing, “it’s a pleasure.”  He saluted Herb and then held out his hand.  For a moment, Herb thought that Pershing wanted to shake hands with him.  Then, pointing, with the other hand, to a spot on the extended hand, Pershing said, “See this scar?”  Everyone craned his neck to see.  “A damned cup of coffee did that.  Before you came along.”  He paused, stared at his hand, and said reflectively, “You know, it’s a funny thing how life doesn’t really change much in a war—how the little things are still annoying.”  He took a deep breath and frowned at the bitter mysteries of war.  “I’ve seen a man with one leg gone—torn away—prop himself up so he could keep firing, and I’ve seen men just as brave scream in pain and lose all their will to fight when they were burned by one of those damned collapsing coffee cups.”  He put a hand on Herb’s shoulder.  “Piper, you’ve done more for the morale of our men than taking Quelquepart-sur-Marne did.”  Grinning, he reached into his pocket.  “Now, what you did,” he said, “isn’t the sort of thing I can give you a medal for, you understand, but you ought to get something, so—”
    He extended his hand, and Herb cupped his under it.
    “—here’s something for what you’ve done.”
    Into Herb’s hand he dropped a pornographic shirt button.
    “Sew that on your shirt, Piper,” said Pershing, “and if anybody complains, tell ’em I gave it to you.”
    Herb did what Pershing told him to do.  He sewed the button onto his shirt, and he wore it with some pride while he was still in France.  On the way home, however, he tore the button off.  It embarrassed him and it frightened him.  He couldn’t help feeling, though he knew that the feeling didn’t make sense, that the button would somehow give him away.  When asked, he claimed to have lost it, and he even suggested that it might have fallen overboard somewhere in the Atlantic.  In the next forty years, he showed it to only one person, his uncle Benjamin, who said when he saw it, “Will you look at the workmanship on that!”
 

I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token: anything between half-a-crown and a hundred pounds.  Authors would then receive what their publishers give them as a flat rate and their “tips” from grateful readers in addition, in the same way that waiters receive a wage from their employers and also get what the customer leaves on the plate.  Not more than a few hundred pounds—that would be bad for my character—not less than half-a-crown—that would do no good to yours.

You can toss a little something onto Kraft’s plate through the Amazon.com Honor System.

Herb ’n’Lorna is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $13.00.

You should be able to find Herb ’n’ Lornaat your local bookstore, but you can also order it by phone from:

Bookbound at 1-800-959-7323 
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Libros en Español: Herb ’n’Lorna is also available in Spanish from Ediciones Destino.

Herb ’n’Lorna  is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 

First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin's Press.

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.