Unable Bodies
Risk-but in comfort!
<sup>-</sup> Marshal Goering
HERMAN GOERING BECAM E a pilot in the First World War because he had a tendency toward rheumatism and thus, as a foot soldier, sufered from the long marches.
In the course of the various battles, especially since the seventeenth century, awareness had grown of the increasing problem of military infirmity. A flourishing industry developed: orthopedics. It was discovered that the damage caused by the war machines to the mechanics of the surviving bodies could be compensated for by other machines-prostheses. While in France the handicapped are exempt from military service,- this is not the case in Germany: in 1 9 14, the German army had few or no exemptions, for it had decided to make physical handicaps fonctional by using each man according to his specific disability: the deaf will serve in heavy artillery, hunchbacks in the automobile corps, etc. Paradoxically, the dictatorship of movement exerted on the masses by the military powers led to the promotion of unable bodies. The use of the technical vehicle is at this point so assimilated to that of the surgical prosthesis that it will be some time before the French military command finally hands the tanks over to personnel other than the "one quarter sick with malaria, the rest rehabilitated young men who had never seen battle" (Renaudel's report) .
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