4 - He Marches Off On an Entente Leg

Summary

Chapter 4 examines the manufacture and provision of artificial limbs reveals, demonstrating that the maintenance of masculine bodies as national bodies, in the strictest sense, was of paramount concern during the war. While wartime flows of technical knowledge ultimately meant that prosthetic limbs throughout the Allied nations became largely indistinguishable, government authorities who oversaw production were determined to see men refitted with goods that were in essence ‘national’, in their actual construction and in their materials. Technological processes could be transnational composites but the bodies that they managed could not. Wartime prosthetic devices embodied the values of the Allied culture of rehabilitation, manifesting the remaking of the working-class body according to middle-class values. New devices allowed men to perform according to the pre-war masculine ideal and to carry out the demands of labour, but the promises of science to return men to their pre-war forms fell short and veterans participated in various modes of self-fashioning and advocacy to achieve satisfactory solutions on their own terms.