Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  Another patient treated at Craiglockhart was Wilfred Owen, who was more obviously suffering from shell shock. A sensitive young officer in the Manchester Regiment who had already started to draft some poetry, Owen had gone through some horrific experiences at the front. He had been sent with his platoon to a tiny flooded dugout in no man’s land where he spent more than two days under continuous shelling. He had fallen into a cellar and been trapped there for three days, and on a later occasion he was blown out of a trench by a shell blast and covered with debris. Noticing how shaky he was, his fellow officers sent him to the regimental doctor, who diagnosed him with neurasthenia. He was first seen by William Brown at Myers’ specialist centre in France. But he was bad enough to be sent back to Britain and to Craiglockhart, suffering from terrible nightmares in which he repeatedly saw the accusing faces of the men he had witnessed being blinded or gassed in front of his eyes, what he called his ‘barrag’d nights’.

  Depressed, anxious, with a strong sense of guilt and sleeping badly, Owen became the patient at Craiglockhart not of Rivers but of another doctor, Arthur Brock. Brock believed that every patient had it in him to cure himself, all he needed to do was to work at it. So he set Owen tasks like lecturing to the Craiglockhart Field Club, teaching at the Boys’ Training Club, editing the house magazine, The Hydra, and writing poetry. Owen also introduced himself to Sassoon, whose work he greatly admired. Sassoon later wrote that he did very little for Owen apart from loan him a couple of books, but the combination of Brock’s treatment and Sassoon’s friendship changed Owen altogether, and his nightmares began to fade as he began to confront his experiences in poetry. He left Craiglockhart towards the end of 1917 a different man, more secure in himself and more confident in his writing. For several months he wrote some of the finest poetry of the war, sometimes revisiting previous experiences, as in ‘The Sentry’, at others confronting the utter waste and futility of the war, as in ‘Dulce et Decorum est’, ‘Futility’ and ‘Strange Meeting’. Owen returned to the front in September 1918 and won an MC for bravery. Then, on the early morning of 4 November 1918, while crossing a canal in one of the final advances of the war, he was killed. He was twenty-five years old and the Armistice was signed a week later. Wilfred Owen later came to epitomise the innocent generation sacrificed in the Great War. But it was the treatment of shell shock at Craiglockhart that had helped to make him a great war poet.

  Although the experiences of Sassoon and Owen at Craiglockhart are probably the most famous shell shock stories of the Great War, they were in no way typical. The pair were highly sensitive men, treated by remarkable psychologists in a very unusual hospital. As officers they received far more humane, sympathetic treatment than did the men, of whom there were probably six times as many victims. The attitude of wanting to conceal patients who were thought to be suffering from some form of madness was probably more common. Many of the men evacuated to England found themselves in wretched, run-down hospitals where bored assistants probably relied more on using electric shocks than on talking with them and trying to understand the basis of their neuroses.

  The use of electricity to treat mentally disturbed patients had begun in the late nineteenth century and was politely known as the ‘faradic battery treatment’. The extensive use of electric shock treatment by most of the armies of the Great War was not therefore strictly a wartime innovation. It was, however, understandably much feared by patients. But that was part of the intention. The doctor often delivered it with some theatricality. The nurses would talk to the patient beforehand and explain how wonderful the effects would be. The doctor would then appear and take charge of the patient, forcefully explaining that he must listen to his instructions while the electricity was being ‘administered’.

  At the National Hospital in Queen Square, Lewis Yealland from Toronto, who had worked in asylums in Canada, adopted the use of electric shock therapy with fervent zeal. He took on patients suffering from hysteria whose arms or legs were paralysed or who had lost the power of speech, and who had defied previous treatment. He used small amounts of electricity at first, but if a patient resisted he applied more powerful charges. Yealland saw it as one of the disciplinary measures necessary to jolt a man into a cure, and many of his treatments became a sort of battle of wills. Perhaps surprisingly, he had a great deal of success. Yealland described curing six cases of mutism one morning in less than half an hour by using ‘electricity mixed with persuasion and encouragement’.25

  One young soldier he treated had collapsed suddenly after two years’ loyal and brave service and was unable to speak. Various treatments had been tried over a period of nine months, without success. As a last attempt at a cure the patient was taken to Yealland. He was brought into a darkened room, where Yealland announced, ‘You will not leave this room until you are talking as well as you did.’ He started the ‘treatment’ by applying through an electrode attached to the back of the man’s throat a shock so severe that the jolt threw him backwards. After an hour the patient was able to say ‘Ah’, and another half hour later, he could pronounce some vowels. Stronger shocks applied to his larynx slowly enabled him to whisper the days of the week. At each stage, Yealland gave the patient bullying encouragement intended to push him further.

  When he seemed almost able to speak again, his left arm began to shake, then his right arm, then both of his legs. Yealland told the poor man, ‘It is the same resistive condition only manifested in another part.’ Each tremor was stopped by the application of further pulses of electricity. After four hours of continuous treatment the man cried out, ‘Doctor, doctor, I am champion,’ to which Yealland replied, ‘You are a hero.’ At the end, the patient asked, ‘Why did they not send me to you nine months ago?’26 Today, it seems difficult to see the difference between treatment like this and torture, but at the time Yealland became famous for his successes and was sent patients from all over the country to ‘cure’.

  By 1918 the term ‘shell shock’ was no longer admissible in the army. Doctors, though, were still looking for new explanations for the nervous disorders that continued to appear. When the American army and its surgeons arrived in France they brought an enthusiasm for the new science of endocrinology, applying it to front-line neuroses. In situations of sudden and intense pressure, glands fire adrenalin into the blood, making the heart rate shoot up and helping muscles to perform. This was thought to be a primitive response of the body to ‘flight or fight’ at a sudden threat. In the trenches under shellfire, neither flight nor fight was possible and it was thought that maybe the products of the glands simply built up and the body was unable to properly process them. Doctors looked at physiology as well as psychology for explanations of neurotic behaviour but still no consensus was reached.

  Of course, soldiers in the British Army were not the only ones to suffer from neuroses brought on by the horrors of the war. The French and German armies also experienced severe problems, as did the Americans when they joined the conflict. In the first year of the war it was estimated that 111,000 German soldiers passing through field and military hospitals exhibited some symptoms of psychological disturbances known as Nervenschock or Granaterschiltterung (shell disorder).27 There were several professors of psychiatry in German universities before the war, along with a network of free public clinics to cater for the mentally disturbed, while the French had been the world leaders in the study of hysteria and the development of the science of psychotherapy. However, the armies of both countries found it as difficult as the British to deal with this explosion of strange new cases. The French army, like the British, found the sooner and the closer to the front line a man could be treated, the more likely he was to be capable of returning speedily to his unit. According to French statistics, about one in three soldiers diagnosed with mental neuroses were returned to the front line within two to three weeks.28

  The two major French thinkers on the subject profoundly disagreed as to the causes of shell shock. Jules Dejerine believed that physical symptoms
had emotional origins, and that until these were discovered and treated there could be no resolution to a man’s mental disabilities. Joseph Babinski, a towering figure in the world of pre-war psychiatry, took an entirely different and far less sympathetic point of view, arguing that the physical symptoms were not caused by the horrors of war but by a victim’s auto-suggestion, or by his wish to imitate others who had been taken out of the line. He believed that most patients were malingerers, and under his influence the French ushered in a tough regime known as traitement brusque, in which doctors confronted their patients in a battle of wills, shouting at them or administering electric shocks in an attempt to bully them back to work. Hydrotherapy, or the use of cold baths and showers, was also applied as a means of coercion. Dr Clovis Vincent meanwhile was one of the more enthusiastic practitioners in the school that believed in electric shock therapy. In a neurological centre at Tours, Vincent would apply painful levels of electricity while telling his patients to distinguish between the physical reality of pain and their traumatised state of mind. In one celebrated case, a poor soldier wounded in October 1914 who had passed through a succession of hospitals, when faced with Dr Vincent approaching him gleefully holding out two electrodes simply got up and punched the doctor in the face five times. When the soldier was charged with striking a senior officer, the ensuing military trial became something of a cause célèbre in France. While the professional medical world stood behind Dr Vincent, public opinion rallied to the soldier, and the man was finally given nothing worse than a suspended sentence of six months.

  In Germany treatment was often equally harsh. At the start of the war, one German specialist, Max Nonne, had firmly believed that no German man could ever suffer from hysteria and that it was a condition unworthy of the German soldier. Confronted by hundreds of cases, Nonne had to rethink his outlook; trying hypnosis, he found that he was good at it and that it often had a beneficial effect. Most other doctors resorted to more familiar techniques, electrotherapy once again being commonly administered. Neurologist Dr Fritz Kaufman made his name thanks to the severity of the treatment he offered in a hospital near Mannheim. Insisting on a strict regime, he hoped to deter any soldier from malingering by the fact that word would spread about the harshness of the conditions. Kaufman believed that if a man had experienced a shock, the best way to treat him was to administer another, physical shock. He would give his patients electric shocks lasting between two and five minutes, while shouting at them that they should be ashamed of themselves and should snap out of their condition. Extraordinarily, in many cases this sadistic approach seemed once again to work. Not only did some of the men recover but they were enormously grateful to Herr Doktor for his treatment.

  Sadly, in a few cases, men died undergoing this electric shock treatment. There were about twenty German victims during the war, while others committed suicide rather than face the treatment. By 1918 the German press and members of the provincial assemblies began to speak out about the harshness of the treatment, calling for a more sympathetic approach. The German army defended itself by arguing that if a few patients were lost, the vast majority, at least 50,000 men, had been successfully treated and returned to the front line. More humanely, the Germans were realistic in recognising that soldiers who had suffered a major nervous breakdown should never be sent back to the front, and as a result thousands of wounded soldiers were allocated to work as farm labourers or factory workers for the duration of the war.

  For all the armies that fought in the First World War, the purpose of military discipline was to ensure that men obeyed orders when faced with the extreme pressures of the battlefield. And the ultimate way to enforce discipline was through a court martial. In order to discourage others, the military believed, it was necessary to make an example of men who had shown signs of cowardice or indiscipline. Strict military tribunals were held at which a man’s commanding officer would be called to give evidence; sometimes a medical officer would be summoned as well, although MOs did not always receive a sympathetic hearing. During the war nearly 2700 men in the British Army were found guilty of cowardice or desertion. Some were classed as ‘insane’ and were sent to an asylum. For those who were regarded as responsible for their actions, the sentence was death by firing squad. One in nine of those found guilty were actually executed, a total of 306 men. Some of them had received only a basic hearing lasting just a few minutes.

  These cases included Sergeant Walton, accused of desertion near Ypres in November 1914. He claimed this was a case of mental confusion and not a wilful act. But the court took no notice of his defence and he was executed on 23 March 1915. Private Harry Farr had been a professional soldier since 1910 and fought bravely until May 1915 when he was evacuated for shell shock. Five months later he returned to the front. Twice more he was kept in an aid station suffering from various forms of shell shock. When, on 16 September 1916, his battalion was sent into action during the Battle of the Somme, Farr pleaded he was sick but the doctors refused to treat him and sent him back up to the front. Farr went missing and was later arrested in the rear. At a court martial he was found guilty of cowardice and sentenced to execution. He was shot on 18 October 1916. His wife, Gertrude, was not at first told of his disgrace; only when it was explained that she would receive no widow’s pension did the full story come out.

  Private Earp was found guilty of desertion during the build-up to the Battle of the Somme, but his divisional and corps commanders recommended clemency because of his poor mental state. His case went up through the military hierarchy right to General Haig, who confirmed the death sentence. ‘How can we ever win if this plea is allowed’ he wrote in the papers. According to Haig’s biographer, Gary Sheffield, this indicates both the general’s acceptance that Earp had shell shock, and his belief that to commute the sentence would be to legitimise the condition and open the floodgates to thousands of others who would see it as a way of escaping the trenches.29 Haig clearly believed it was essential to maintain discipline at all costs. He wrote in his diary about the sentencing of Lieutenant E.S. Poole, another soldier with a clear case of shell shock, ‘After careful consideration, I confirmed the proceedings … Such a crime is more serious in the case of an officer than of a man, and also it is highly important that all ranks should realise that the law is the same for an officer as a private.’30 Haig personally confirmed the death sentences of 253 men and three officers, all of whom were shot.31

  Even during the war the executions aroused intense controversy. In December 1917 an MP raised the subject in Parliament, asking if any men who suffered from shell shock had been executed. The Under Secretary for War told the House that not a single soldier had been executed ‘without being examined before trial and before sentence by a medical officer’.32 However, thanks to widespread public sympathy for shell shock victims, the matter of military executions would not go away. In 1923 a War Office Committee of Enquiry Report failed to end suspicions that men who should have been regarded as victims of war had been shot rather than given medical treatment. Throughout the inter-war years, whenever the subject came up the authorities denied that there was a single case in which a man suffering from shell shock had been executed. As the records were kept secret it was impossible to verify this one way or the other.

  After seventy-five years, however, the Ministry of Defence released the papers of the relevant courts martial, and in the 1990s the topic returned to the headlines. Once more questions were asked about the number of men ‘shot at dawn’, as the popular phrase had it. The evidence showed that some men’s psychological condition had clearly not been taken properly into account. Harry Farr’s case became notorious as his widow Gertrude, then aged ninety-nine, and his family led a campaign for justice. Following more questions in Parliament, Prime Minister John Major refused to issue any retrospective pardons, arguing that it was wrong to impose modern judgements retrospectively on historical cases. However, it was becoming clear that many soldiers had been executed despite suffering from vari
ous forms of shell shock, and public pressure continued to mount. At the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire a special memorial to the men shot at dawn, showing a blindfolded soldier facing execution, was unveiled in 2001. Finally, in 2006, the Defence Secretary, Des Brown, who had strong personal views on the subject, announced a posthumous pardon for all 306 men who had been executed. Claiming that it would be invidious within the limitations of the surviving records to go through each case one by one, he decided to pardon them all in a single gesture. Their families were of course delighted.

  Despite official denials issued over the last hundred years, the evidence is absolutely clear that some men who had psychologically broken down under the strains of the fiercest and most deadly war fought to date were subjected to appalling injustice. The army had never really known how to deal with shell shock cases and was always afraid that if it did not take a firm line, mass hysteria would break out and the fighting spirit of the men would collapse. But that does not condone the treatment of men who, instead of receiving sympathy and understanding for the terrible mental injuries they had suffered, were put up against a wall and shot. The German army executed 48 men and the French army 700 on similar grounds. It is a stain that hangs over not just the British Army, but over many of the armies that fought in the terrible, brutalising conditions of the Great War.