However, the neglect of ex-servicemen in the years following the war as the country fell into economic depression went from bad to worse. The sight of destitute veterans begging became common in most cities in the 1920s. Some were legless or armless, many were blind, others bore their scars internally. In London’s fashionable West End one particular beggar became a familiar figure as he went up and down the lines of theatregoers. He wore a cardboard placard around his neck on which was written, ‘I served through the whole of the war till I was shell shocked at Delville Wood. Now I have a small pension and I also have a wife and child.’21 Clearly, for this man, it was worth labelling himself as having had shell shock. It must have brought from caring Londoners not only sympathy but also donations of cash.
Pension arrangements after the war were handled in such a way as to provoke a vast number of complaints and no doubt an even greater amount of grumbling. Field Marshal Haig, in evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Pensions in July 1919, said he was ‘appalled’ at the bureaucratic muddle and red tape that led to delays in the provision of adequate pensions. He further criticised the medical boards, accusing them of ‘lacking in all sympathy and generosity … There is no uniformity in their decisions and some treat every wretched individual who appears before them as a malingerer.’ Claiming that pensions were so low that many families were forced to live in ‘abject poverty’, he called especially for a ‘more generous and sympathetic treatment to all who suffer from gas poisoning, shell shock and neurasthenia’. Having asserted angrily that ‘No man should suffer because he has served his country’, he ended his evidence with an appeal to the members of the committee: ‘You surely do not want to pauperise any man who has risked his life on the field of battle. You want to be generous.’22 The former commander-in-chief was rapidly distancing himself from his wartime reputation as ‘butcher Haig’ and reinventing himself as the veterans’ champion.23
However, pensions were never intended to provide for all the needs of a veteran and his family. The state was prepared to recognise a level of responsibility for the care and resettlement of disabled ex-soldiers. But the claimants had their responsibilities too. Apart from the very small number who were so tragically disabled that they would never be able to cater for themselves, soldiers returning from the battlefield were expected to look after and provide for their families in the traditional patriarchal way. This involved finding appropriate training or retraining, and then searching out their own employment so they could continue to be head of their household. The pages of the fortnightly magazine Recalled to Life, issued by the government and devoted to the welfare of soldiers, sailors and airmen, were not filled with sermons from care workers or state officials but featured articles written by ex-servicemen to address the needs and concerns of other ex-servicemen. For one issue Sergeant J.A. Bennet at Queen Mary’s Workshop in Brighton wrote a piece recognising that wartime pensions were never going to be generous and summing up the government’s attitude perfectly: ‘Your pension is not meant to live on; it is a pension for services rendered, not a retiring pension. To live on your pension is out of the question, it would be a mere existence … Do you want to be a respectable self-supporting citizen or a lazy good-for-nothing, depending on charity? Do you want to live comfortably, to have, and to save, money, or lead a miserable, grovelling existence?’24 No minister could have expressed it more succinctly and colloquially.
The problem facing shell shock victims was that those with mental conditions were the most likely to experience discrimination. Not only were there all the many stigmas associated with mental disease, but when it came to employment those with nervous disorders were traditionally seen as unpredictable, volatile and ultimately unreliable. During the war, shell shock victims had been a group apart. As Private Edwin Bigwood recalled, ‘We were all afraid of shell shock. We’d rather lose a leg, be wounded than to have shell shock. We didn’t mind being wounded, it was the dread of being shell shocked.’25 Similar prejudices appeared among employers after the war. The Secretary of the Ex-Services Employment Department explained to a reporter just before the end of the war that many employers were willing to take on physically disabled men but were more reluctant to consider the mentally wounded. He was quoted as saying, ‘The men we find employers fight shy of most are “nerve” cases – shell shock, etc. It’s easier to fix up a one-legged man.’26
The issue of shell shock and the sense that a great injustice had been done during the war never went away; in fact it only grew stronger as a consequence of the complaints about war pensions in the years after the war. During a debate in the House of Lords on 28 April 1920 Lord Southborough said, ‘The subject of shell shock cannot be referred to with any pleasure. All would desire to forget it – to forget … the roll of insanity, suicide and death; to bury our recollections of the horrible disorder … But we cannot do this, because a great number of cases of those who suffer from shell shock and its allied disorders are still upon our hands and they deserve our sympathy and care.’27 Southborough suggested setting up a committee of enquiry, and this was duly established by the War Office under his chairmanship with the remit of investigating the different types of ‘hysteria and traumatic neurosis, commonly called “shell shock”’, to try to establish ‘the ascertained facts as to its origin, nature and remedial treatment’ and to advise on actions that could be taken in a future war to reduce its incidence.28 The committee began its hearings in September 1920 and heard fifty-nine expert witnesses including senior military figures, officers with combat experience (including three winners of the VC), several MOs and military physicians. Myers, still smarting from his treatment by the army, was the only significant figure who refused to give evidence. The committee published its findings two years later.
Despite the extensive wartime debate, by 1922 there was still no consensus as to what exactly shell shock was and what caused it. The varied conclusions of the enquiry reflect this. Some parts are quite progressive. The enquiry concluded that ‘any type of individual might suffer from one or other form of neurosis if exposed for a sufficient length of time to the conditions of modern warfare.’29 In other words, war neurosis was not a problem confined to the ‘weak’, the ‘feeble minded’ or those naturally inclined to mental collapse. On the other hand, the enquiry also continued to link war neuroses with victims who displayed ‘wilful cowardice’ and ‘contributory negligence’ of their military duties, and concluded that the process of court-martialling men found guilty of cowardice during the war had operated ‘in a thoroughly satisfactory manner’.30 The military authorities were found to be not guilty of executing men who should have been excused because of their mental state. The authors of the report thought that shell shock was a totally unsuitable term, ‘a gross and costly misnomer, and that the term should be eliminated from our nomenclature’.31 Although they accepted that it was the term most commonly used to describe a range of nervous conditions and war neuroses, they resented having to use it and consequently put it in inverted commas throughout.
The War Office enquiry reached a series of conclusions without taking the situation forward. First, they concluded that the term shell shock should not be used in future. They concluded that war neurosis or mental breakdown was usually a temporary phenomenon and a man suffering it should not be classed as a battle casualty, any more than one suffering from sickness or disease. They decided that unit morale played a vital role – high morale meant less neurosis. Senior officers should take all measures to ensure that tours of duty at the front were short, that the welfare of men received attention and that men showing signs of neurosis should be taken out of the line and given rest and care. The enquiry praised the models of treatment developed in the army by 1917 – that most men should be treated in forward areas, that only severe cases should be sent to neurological centres, which should be as near the front as possible, and that only in exceptional circumstances should a patient be evacuated to Britain. On the one hand they sanctioned the us
e of psychotherapy as a form of treatment; on the other, they also supported the use of electric shock therapy. They recommended against the use of psychoanalysis. And finally, they said that in a future war, efforts should be made during the recruitment process to ascertain the mental condition of candidates, and any who showed incipient signs of nervous disorder should be weeded out.32 The enquiry had aired the subject of shell shock once again in a very public way. But its conservative conclusions looked to many like a cover-up and failed to halt the swelling sense that men had suffered injustice during the war and that this was continuing throughout the pensions shambles in the post-war years.
Numerous clinics set up by the War Office after 1918 to try to treat the psychological victims of war were closed in government cutbacks brought on by the severe economic downturn of the 1920s. And there was pressure on officials to claim as the years passed that shell shock victims had recovered from their problems and no longer needed the pensions they had been drawing. However, by 1937, official figures showed that there were still 35,000 ex-servicemen receiving war disability pensions for neurasthenia and mental conditions.33 In the 1920s there had been a reduction of the number of ex-officers and an increase in the proportion of rank and file ex-soldiers drawing welfare. But overall, despite attempts to reduce the number of those on benefits, the total remained large throughout the inter-war period.
Shell shock had taught the medical community a great deal about the working of the human mind. Hundreds if not thousands of young doctors had gained experience of treating mental conditions for the first time in their professional lives. A small library of books had been published in the attempt to explain the causes of shell shock, proffering many different approaches to treatment. Psychologists like Grafton Elliot Smith and Tom Pear argued that mental illness was not the reserved territory of degenerates and weaklings, as the parlance of the day had it, but was part of the human condition; anyone could experience it.
All this gave a great boost to psychology in Britain. Lunatic asylums were renamed ‘mental hospitals’ and those treating them were no longer called ‘alienists’ but were renamed ‘psychiatrists’. The Tavistock Clinic was opened in north London in 1920 to provide therapy for ordinary people who could not afford the high fees charged by Harley Street neurologists. Its founder, Hugh Crichton-Miller, had worked with shell-shocked soldiers during the war. But from the beginning it was open to children and adults alike, and it became a magnet for young, training psychiatrists from across the country who went there to carry out research while at the same time acting as the clinical staff. The Maudsley Hospital, which had treated 12,400 shell-shocked servicemen between 1915 and 1919, reopened its doors in 1923 to all Londoners suffering from mental illness. It adopted several of the therapeutic treatments developed during the war.
The First World War had unwittingly provided a huge laboratory in which psychiatrists could peer into the workings of the human mind, and had brought into the open much of the debate about the various forms of therapy. Shell shock had helped to push back the door against the Victorian and Edwardian shibboleths that surrounded mental health. The study of the human psyche was at last on a large-scale and very public map.
Shell shock cast a deep shadow across the literature of the post-war era. It has been described as the ‘mal de siècle’ of the post-war years, influencing everyday life and culture.34 Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) was the first of the ‘shell shock novels’. It tells the story of Christopher Baldry, an officer who has been shell shocked, through the effect it has on his married life with Kitty. Christopher is in hospital suffering from amnesia and has lost all memory of the recent years of his life and of his marriage. The only relationship he can recall is a summer fling with a woman called Margaret fifteen years before. Margaret, not his wife, is the one notified by the War Office of his shell shock, but she is dismissed when she visits Kitty, who is horrified to imagine that her husband used to love this woman and now has no recall of their marriage. When he returns home from hospital, Christopher is locked in the world he inhabited fifteen years earlier when he was a young man infatuated with Margaret. Kitty eventually decides she has no alternative but to ask Margaret to join them. She meets Christopher, who understands on one level that the relationship is over but still cannot reconcile himself to his current life. Kitty calls in a doctor, a psychoanalyst, who decides to confront Christopher by getting Margaret to bring him his dead child’s toys and clothes. This unlocks his repressed memories and he is cured. Margaret leaves, and Kitty and Christopher can resume their life together.
This poignant story attracted many female readers. The book is overlaid with issues of class; Christopher and Kitty are upper middle class, Margaret is lower middle class and depicted as rather drab. But its focus is on how the disabling effect of war on the male can destroy relationships. This is not the soldier’s tale of shell shock but the story of its impact on the lives of wives and families.35
A.P. Herbert’s The Secret Battle (1919) takes a different approach and is very much a soldier’s tale. Narrated by an anonymous fellow officer, it is the story of the long, gradual breakdown of Henry Penrose. Joining his battalion just before it leaves for Gallipoli, Penrose is full of doubts about his ability to be a good officer and while others fall by the wayside under the pressure of combat, he is determined to carry on and prove himself. When the battalion transfers to the Western Front, Penrose is picked on by the new commanding officer, a regular officer who wants everything done by the book. He repeatedly orders Penrose to lead night relief parties which always come under enemy shellfire at the same spot.
Herbert depicts a classic case of neurasthenia: Penrose is slowly worn down until his nerves are totally gone and he has recurrent nightmares of being under German artillery fire, unable to get away. He is wounded and although offered a desk job at the War Office, decides it is his duty to return to his battalion. There, still being picked on and given the worst jobs, Penrose and a relief party come under fire and he orders the men to withdraw. They are spotted rushing towards the British lines and Penrose is put on a charge of running away under fire. He is court-martialled and in order to defend the honour of the regiment is found guilty of cowardice and shot at dawn. The book ends with these words from the narrator: ‘That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry was shot for cowardice – and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew.’
A.P. Herbert was a lawyer with a passion for reform and the novel played on the widespread feeling that many men had been unjustly executed by the military during the war years. He subsequently wrote several volumes of Misleading Cases, satirical stories of miscarriages of justice some of which were much later televised by the BBC with Alastair Sim as the judge. Injustice is also at the heart of The Secret Battle, along with a realistic account of life in the trenches and a moving description of a slow mental breakdown.
In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked soldier who has completely lost his identity after the war’s end in a form of deferred traumatic disorder. In his wife’s words he is ‘not Septimus now’. Septimus’s mental state has not been properly understood and the doctors are so poor in their treatment of him that in order to avoid further confinement he takes his own life by jumping out of a window. Mrs Dalloway hears of Septimus’s death at a party she hosts the same evening and although she has never met him, she comes to admire him for his act. The story is particularly touching and revealing in that Woolf suffered from bipolar disorder and herself tried once to jump out of a window. Sixteen years after publishing Mrs Dalloway she committed suicide by drowning.
A very different approach came from Dorothy Sayers, who created a shell-shocked central character who not only survived the war but carried on a successful post-war career and was something of a hero. Lord Peter Wimsey is the archetypal amateur detective. He works alongside the police and uses his aristocratic name and connections without shame. He is a model British lord, a scholar, an athlete,
an avid book collector and somewhat eccentric. But it emerges in the stories that he suffered badly from shell shock in France in 1918, and he has recurrences of the problem in several of the books.
Lord Wimsey first appeared in Whose Body?, published in 1923; in this book his mind wanders late at night as he sleepily tries to piece together the elements of the crime he is solving and he hallucinates that he is back in the trenches and is deafened by the noise of the German guns. This, apparently, is his first attack in nine months. Lord Peter’s valet, simply referred to as Bunter, turns out to have been his sergeant in the Rifle Brigade in 1918 and knows how to deal with the problem. Their relationship reverts to that of officer and servant, and Bunter looks after him and gets him into bed. ‘Thought we’d had the last of these attacks,’ Bunter says, referring to the night time panic attack. We are told that Wimsey was ‘dreadfully bad in 1918’ and ‘we can’t expect to forget all about a great war in a year or two’.36
Similar attacks occur in many of the later books, both to Lord Wimsey and to other central characters. The delayed after-effects of shell shock never seem to prevent Wimsey from successfully tracking down criminals, but Sayers brings it in as an aspect of her hero’s character, most probably as a reminder that men of his age – Wimsey is in his mid-thirties when the series of books begin – had to learn to live with scars from the war no matter how outwardly glamorous, calm and collected they appeared to be.
Many wartime memoirs were published after the Armistice and they often drew out the heroism and courage of those in battle. But ten years after the war had ended a new wave of anti-war memoirs became fashionable, not only emphasising the horror of the trenches but also the comradeship shared by men at the front while usually pointing at the utter futility of the war. Such a view soon proved to be the dominant vision of the Great War years. In Britain, Robert Graves led the new publishing boom with Goodbye to All That (1929). Siegfried Sassoon, already known for his poetry, produced a trilogy of autobiographical works, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). Edmund Blunden’s account Undertones of War (1928) was part memoir and part poetry anthology. Most of these works were evidently autobiographical, others were novels but largely based on actual wartime experiences, like Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We (published anonymously in 1930) and Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929) and Roads to Glory (1930). In Germany, war veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues was first published in serial form in 1928 and was soon translated into English as All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Within a year the novel had sold 2.5 million copies in twenty languages, including a million copies in Germany and one-third of a million in the English language. Hollywood soon came calling and the book was turned into a feature film, one of the early ‘talkies’, directed by Lewis Milestone in 1930.
Breakdown Page 30