Long before Paul Fussell, who died this week, became famous for The Great War and Modern Memory, about how the charnel house of World War I trench warfare affected English writers and poets who suffered through it, he was a lieutenant leading a 103rd Division rifle platoon in eastern France in late 1944/early 1945.
In his memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, Fussell wrote intensely and well about his World War II experience, from college ROTC to learning to kill in boot camp, from his grievous wounding after the war in Europe was essentially over to his unalloyed joy that the atomic bomb had ended the Pacific war, so that "we infantrymen" who had survived the Nazis "were not going to be killed after all" on some Japanese beach.
Fussell became an angry skeptic about war, informed by his experiences, but he saluted Sgt. Edward Hudson, who died in the same artillery burst that seriously wounded him in March 1945, in several ways in his memoir, and by dedicating The Great War and Modern Memory to Hudson.
On Memorial Day, we should solemnly remember those who died in war.
Here's one of those stories, told by a great writer who was there.
Fussell was a self-described "boy lieutenant" in a replacement division, and Hudson was nearly twice his age.
They first met at Camp Howze in Texas:
When I first presented myself to thirty-six-year-old Technical Sgt. Edward Keith Hudson, my immediate subordinate, I could read in his expression a combination of weary disbelief and outrage that a creature so babyish was now in charge. My light blond crew cut made me resemble a week-old chick.
But after a few days, both he and the almost forty members of the platoon seemed reconciled to the inevitable, and we got along fairly well, although there was occasional stifled laughter, immediately repressed by the loyal Hudson, when I shouted a command and my voice suddenly went treble.
snip
How we boy lieutenants got away with our act I don't know. I'd chalk it up to the decency and generosity of the men we commanded. As we used to repeat when the troops complained of having to salute some officer detested for incompetence or cruelty, you don't salute the man, you salute the uniform.
You don't obey the boy, you obey the lieutenant. And Sgt. Hudson, bless him, required that I be taken seriously. "Say 'Sir' when you address the lieutenant," he would admonish some thirty-year-old long-service regular-army buck sergeant writhing with hatred and contempt.
Hudson was at Fussell's side during combat in Alsace, sharing foxholes and on one night a bed in a farmhouse, and helping to lead the platoon against elements of the far-more-experienced Sixth SS Mountain Division.
On the Ides of March, during the initial days of the Seventh Army's Operation Undertone, Fussell, Hudson and Lt. Raymond Biedrzycki (even less experienced than Fussell), were sitting on top of a German bunker planning the platoon's next move and:
listening inertly to the shells coming systematically closer and closer until one went off right above us. Its intolerably loud metallic clang! did more than deafen me, It sent red-hot metal tearing into my body. One piece went into my right thigh. Another entered my back.
When I got my hearing and my senses back, the first thing I did was take a deep breath to see if my lung had been penetrated. When I found it had not, I felt less panicky and, despite the indescribable pain, able to look around.
Hudson, lying a few inches to my left, let out a couple of subdued groans and was silent. I saw his face turn from "flesh color" to white, and then to whitish green as his circulation stopped.
One of my men looked down at me in distress and dragged me to the rear. Juan the Medic patched me up, scissoring my trouser leg off and cutting a large hole in my jacket and shirt over the back wound. He shook in the sulfa powder and injected morphine.
When I asked him how Hudson and Biedrzycki were, he answered quietly, "Both dead."
I shouted No! and felt a black fury flow over me. It has never entirely dissipated.
More than 45 years later, Fussell was alerted by a friend to the Silver Star citation for Hudson, which describes him as taking command after Fussell was wounded and heroically reorganizing the platoon and then moving forward alone to his death.
"Pure fiction, all of it," Fussell noted.
Sgt. Hudson, actually, although no very conspicuous coward, was no more given to this kind of heroic selflessness than the rest of us.
snip
(Fellow 103rd officers') silence (at the time) about Hudson's notable behavior, which might have been thought interesting enough for me to be told about it, for I knew Hudson better than almost anyone else, argued something definitely wrong. I have heard from a few of these officers over the years, but none has ever alluded to Hudson's fascinating post-mortal performance or its reward.
snip
I can think of two impulses that might have motivated my fellow officers to commit this act of misrepresentation. One is the desire to bring glory to Company F and to suggest its value as a forcing ground of heroes.
The other is a more condonable urge to deliver comfort to Hudson's next of kin, a widow in a remote West Virginia town.
But a letter retailing no lies and signed by us all would have done the job better, and more honorably. In a letter we could have said that Hudson was respected by all, that he was an excellent soldier and an effective noncommissioned officer, and that he would be greatly missed.
All true, and I would have signed that without reservation. But an unnecessary set of narrative lies, no.
Even the other officers must have felt a bit uneasy over these lies, for they all refrained from telling me the happy news that Hudson had been awarded a medal, which would have pleased me.
Fussell wrote the Silver Star lies "augment[ed] my already intense skepticism about official utterances of any sort, military, political, ecclesiastical or academic."
Fussell was lucky to survive as a boy lieutenant of a replacement rifle platoon, most such did not in 1944-45 close combat with more-experienced and more-desperate German and Japanese soldiers.
And therefore to be able to memorialize his fellow combat infantryman and friend -- Sgt. Edward Hudson of West Virginia.
RIP.