Vive la Postérieur

In the closing days of 1914, a strange occurrence happened in the trenches on Christmas Eve.  In several areas along the lines, British, French, and German soldiers declared an impromptu holiday truce, met between the lines in No Man’s Land, swapped greetings and gifts, played soccer, and generally outraged their generals who shooed them all back to their respective sides to continue almost four more years of incomprehensible slaughter.  The famous Christmas Truce has been celebrated in books, songs, and film, most recently the very good Joyeux Noel, depicting the poignancy and heartbreak of the participants.  The “War To End All Wars” of course did not, but it did leave some … interesting… legacies.   Word War I inspired significant advances in forward area triage, facial plastics, poison gas, the visual arts, tanks, submarines, music, fun new kinds of authoritarianism, brand new national boundaries that wouldn’t last a century, a unique attachment to the holidays, and new forms of recreation.

After all this, the French could be forgiven some sort of cultural/national PTSD, and one can hear the great grandchildren of les poilu rolling their eyes before clearing the ER in a panic.  “A French hospital was partially evacuated Saturday after a senior citizen arrived with a World War I artillery shell lodged in his rectum.”  If medical school and residency taught us nothing else, it was that there is no limit to man’s capacity to attempt insertions of new and varied items up his/her/they butt.  Some speculation remains online as to the caliber of the errant munition, with many believing the photo to depict a 37 mm shell.  This might well have been produced for the Canon d’Infanterie de 37 modèle 1916 TRP (37mm mle.1916), a light infantry support weapon, the smallest gun of the day to fire high explosive shells.  If this is in fact the shell, and it happens to post-date the famous Truce by a couple of years, it was clearly no less celebratory in intent.  “Bomb disposal experts at the scene determined there was little possibility the shell would explode inside the man.”  But wouldn’t even a “little possibility” animate the experience for the recipient?  It certainly did for the medical folks, who cleared out the ER, diverted inbound traffic, and for a hospital spokesman who said, “We had to manage the risk in a reactive framework.”  It’s comforting to know that administralian is truly the international language.

“Medics were forced to take the elderly man into surgery, cutting open his abdomen in order to remove the relic.”  It could be that “medic” is just a generic term for everyone in health care, or perhaps France has progressed to the blissful state where NP’s and EMT’s can successfully perform the majority of uncomplicated surgeries.  It is presumed that the 88-year-old inserted the unrequited explosive for “sexual pleasure,” but I disagree.  Had the author done a bit more research, he would have found an equally compelling, more noble motive.

Last year in the U.K., troops from the 11th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Regiment rushed to Gloucestershire Royal Hospital after an unfortunate patient presented having a 57 mm anti-tank round inserted in his rectum.  “He found the shell when he was having a clear out of his stuff.  He said he put it on the floor then he slipped and fell on it — and it went up his a**e … He was in a considerable amount of pain. I think he collected military memorabilia.”  Indeed.

Given the ancient enmity of the Anglo-Saxons and Gauls, it is much more likely that the elderly Frenchman felt it a matter of national honor not to be bested by the Limeys, and was simply keeping his end up.

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