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Mayo Carter teaches a lesson about World War I while wearing an authentic uniform from the war.
Chancellor Middle School sixth-grader Noah Ferrell-Stienger reads the accounts of World War I soldiers by flashlight.
Chancellor Middle School history teacher Mayo Carter leads students into her classroom, which she transformed into a WWI trench.
While playing the role of a WWI soldier, Carter tells the story of a soldier who brought a Victrola into the trenches. |
BY LAURA L. HUTCHISON
Dressed in an authentic World War I uniform, the soldier addressed two lines of students sitting against the lockers in the hallway.
"So you guys are finally in it?" the soldier asked. "I suppose you came for adventure. It's not like that at all."
The soldier issued the students their orders and their provisions, then led them into a pitch-black room, with only flashlights to guide them.
Cool, musty air flooded their nostrils, and dried leaves crunched beneath their feet.
The phrase "in the trenches" was about to take on a whole new meaning for them.
What only days before had been Room 209 at Chancellor Middle School had become a World War I trench built by sixth-grade history teacher Mayo Carter, who'd become the soldier leading the new recruits.
Their orders consisted of a few pages of recollections from World War I soldiers. As they sat solemnly in the dark trench, they read about the men's horrific experiences and answered questions on a worksheet.
The only noises were the occasional shifting of feet on the carpet of dried leaves and the scratching of pencils on paper.
Carter created the trenches project about eight years ago.
"I was speaking to a young teacher who talked about a simulation where they stacked up chairs, crouched behind them and threw wads of paper at one another," Carter said. "I asked him what he liked about it and he said it was fun. It bothered me that they'd taken death and made it entertainment.
"We say we want education to be fun," Carter said, "but when we really look at it, what we really want to do is make it meaningful. I hope that's what this does."
She created the trenches project to give a glimpse of what life in wartime might have been like:
"Almost imperceptibly, the first day merged into the second, when we held grimly to a battered trench and watched each other grow old under the daylong storm of shelling," Sgt. J.E. Yates recalled of his experiences in 1916. "Big shells landed in the crowded trench. For hours, sweating, praying, swearing, we worked on the heaps of chalk and mangled bodies."
As the students finished their worksheets, she started a clip from "All Quiet on the Western Front." As the students lined up along the edge of the trench, it sounded like shells were whistling and exploding overhead, and enemy soldiers were charging toward them.
The clip ended, but the students remained silent.
Carter turned on the lights, slipping out of her soldier character and back into her role as teacher.
The lights exposed walls coated in black fabric, military parachutes creating the trench walls, and grapevines serving as barbed wire on the top. There was an authentic gas mask and trench shovel, sandbags along the walls, and meal pans, as well as the rats (these were the only fake things in the room) that would have fed on them.
She asked the students what words they'd use to describe the trench. They came up with "crowded," "like a cemetery" and "disgusting."
"These men had to figure out a way to deal with death all around them," Carter told her students, who sat rapt on the floor of the classroom. "If you got too emotional, you couldn't do your job."
She spoke of Fredericksburg's own Dr. Urbane Bass, memorialized in a stained-glass window at Shiloh (New Site) Baptist Church in Fredericksburg. He left home to become a military medic. He was treating soldiers on the front lines in France when shrapnel severed both his legs. He continued trying to attend to his men, and he died on the battlefield.
Carter ended the lesson by having the students read Lt. Col. John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields." One of the soldiers' accounts they'd read recalled his surprise at seeing flowers growing where there was so much death and destruction. Carter reminded the students they'd see people handing out poppies on Veterans Day next week.
She told the students the uniform she was wearing belonged to a soldier who survived World War I and went on to a long military career.
They asked about other survivors.
Frank Buckles, the last known surviving World War I veteran, lives in Kentucky and is 108 years old.
One student asked if there are many World War II vets living, and several responded that their grandfathers had fought in the second World War.
"It's very important we get their stories recorded," Carter said, encouraging the students to ask their grandparents to share their stories.
Laura L. Hutchison: 540/374-5485
Email: lhutchison@freelancestar.com
| The recollections the students read of soldiers' World War I experiences came from the book "1914-1918 Voices and Images of the Great War" by Lyn MacDonald and Shirley Seaton.
"Then came an order that you must not stop to help "It was indescribable, all that area, after the fighting. It was a mass of dead bodies really. You sat on something, and it moved up and down. You knew perfectly well that underneath you was a dead body that had swelled up." --Lance Sgt. J. L. Bouch, 1916"The armistice was timed "At 11 a.m. there came great cheering from the German lines; and the village church bells rang. But on our side there were only a few shouts. I had heard more for a rum ration. The match was over; it had been a damned bad game." --Col. W. N. Nicholson, 1918 |
