4 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, pp. 27–8.
5 Babington, Shell Shock, p. 81.
6 Dr Arthur Hurst, quoted in RWOCESS, p. 26.
7 Dr Bernard Hart, quoted in RWOCESS, p. 79.
8 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 39.
9 Both case studies from Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, pp. 32–3.
10 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 45.
11 C.S. Myers, ‘Certain cases treated by hypnosis’ in The Lancet, 1916, I, p. 69.
12 Shephard, A War of Nerves, p. 50.
13 W.H. Rivers, Conflict and Dreams, p. 6.
14 Quoted in Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, pp. 157–8.
15 Wendy Holden, Shell Shock, p. 55. The quote is based on an interview with Pear’s daughter; see also Elliot Smith and Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lessons, p. 25.
16 Edgar Jones, ‘An atmosphere of cure: Frederick Mott, shell shock and the Maudsley’, p. 416.
17 Lewis Yealland, Hysterical Disorders of Warfare, pp. 3–4.
18 Ibid., pp. 7–15.
19 Stefanie Linden, Edgar Jones and Andrew Lees, ‘Shell shock at Queen Square: Lewis Yealland 100 years on’ in Brain: A Journal of Neurology, February 2013, p. 11.
20 For instance, Elaine Showalter finds Yealland’s ‘Orwellian scenes of mind control … painfully embarrassing to contemporary readers’, and writes that ‘If Yealland was the worst of military psychiatrists, Sassoon’s therapist, Rivers, was the best’; The Female Malady, pp. 178 and 181. Pat Barker creates a dramatic contrast between the techniques of Yealland and those of Rivers in her 1992 novel Regeneration.
21 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 35.
22 The films are available to view on www.britishpathe.com/workspaces/BritishPathe/shell-shock
Sadly, being silent films, it is impossible to hear Hurst’s voice as he persuades, cajoles and instructs his patients. Pathé cameramen also filmed Yealland carrying out his electrotherapy techniques on two patients on the roof of the Queen Square Hospital, but unfortunately no copies of this film have survived.
23 Elliot Smith and Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lessons, p. 21.
24 IWM Documents 7915: Papers of Lt. J. Butlin. The letters from Craiglockhart extend from 5 May to 9 July 1917.
25 The full text of Sassoon’s declaration is to be found in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, p. 218.
26 Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, p. 17.
27 Ibid., pp. 11–51; Rivers, Conflict and Dreams, passim; Pat Barker’s trilogy: Regeneration (1992), The Eye in the Door (1994) and The Ghost Road (1996). The 1997 film of Regeneration, directed by Gillies MacKinnon, starred Jonathan Pryce as William Rivers, James Wilby as Siegfried Sassoon and Stuart Bunce as Wilfred Owen.
28 Winter, The First of the Few, pp. 146, 191.
29 Edmund Blunden had edited an edition of Owen’s poems in 1931, keeping his verse in print, but it was not until the explosion of interest in the First World War in the 1960s and the publication of an edition of his Collected Poems in 1963 that Owen’s story and his poetry became iconic; see Reynolds, The Long Shadow, pp. 342ff.
30 Norman Fenton, Shell Shock and Its Aftermath, p. 37.
31 Reid, Broken Men, p. 75.
32 TNA: WO 95/45/9.
33 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 11.
34 RWOCESS, p. 40.
35 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 16.
36 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 101.
37 Winter, Death’s Men, p. 136; Fenton, Shell Shock and Its Aftermath, p. 22.
38 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 41.
39 Ibid., pp. 44–5.
40 Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, pp. 31–3.
41 Fenton, Shell Shock and Its Aftermath, p. 29.
42 Ibid., pp. 22–9; see Appendix 3 for further analysis of these figures.
11 The Ghosts of War
1 Moran, Anatomy of Courage, pp. 67–9.
2 RWOCESS, p. 58.
3 Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, pp. 231ff.
4 Ibid., pp. 170–1.
5 According to MeasuringWorth.com, using a mix of the retail price index and the GDP deflator.
6 Taylor, English History 1914–1945, p. 76.
7 Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, pp. 144ff.
8 IWM Documents 612: Papers of Lt J. Gameson.
9 Reid, Broken Men, p. 87.
10 The Times, 25 February 1919; this number does not include payments to widows or dependents.
11 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, pp. 57–60.
12 Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, pp. 168–9.
13 IWM Documents 7915: Papers of Lt. J. Butlin; these letters were dated 2 March and 29 March 1918.
14 Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, p. 196.
15 Montagu Lomax, The Experiences of an Asylum Doctor, pp. 197–9; see also Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, p. 117.
16 Reid, Broken Men, p. 111.
17 Approximately 400,000 men among the British and Dominion troops were diagnosed with venereal diseases in the period Aug 1914–Nov 1918; of these the vast majority, 66 per cent or 264,000, were diagnosed with gonorrhea and 24 per cent or 96,000 with syphilis. By the end of the war, twenty military hospitals in the UK and eight hospitals in France were given over exclusively to the treatment of venereal disease; see Official Medical History: Diseases of War Vol. II, pp. 118, 130.
18 Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, p. 173.
19 See Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, pp. 196ff for many tragic cases; also Reid, Broken Men, pp. 105ff.
20 The charity, now called Combat Stress, still exists today; see Epilogue.
21 Reid, Broken Men, p. 88.
22 The Times, 2 July 1919.
23 In July 1921 Haig was elected the first President of the British Legion, which soon acquired as its symbol the red Flanders poppy. The first ‘Poppy Day’ was held on Armistice Day in November 1921 and was a huge success; by November 1926, 25 million poppies a year were being sold in aid of the ‘Haig Fund’. In other countries like France and even more so in Germany, veterans’ associations became heavily politicised groups, but Haig ensured that the British Legion remained a largely conservative organisation mostly concerned with the welfare of ex-servicemen and to provide social facilities for veterans; see Sheffield, The Chief, pp. 348–59; Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, pp. 148ff.
24 Quoted in Reid, Broken Men, p. 93.
25 IWM Podcast 33 on Shell Shock.
26 Daily Herald, 28 October 1918, quoted in Reid, Broken Men, p. 94.
27 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, Vol. 39, No. 29, column 1094; 28 April 1920.
28 RWOCESS, p. 3.
29 Ibid., p. 92.
30 Ibid., pp. 125, 140.
31 Ibid., p. 92.
32 Ibid., pp. 190–3.
33 Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, p. 4.
34 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 469.
35 The Return of the Soldier had a big impact in 1918 but was then largely forgotten until being revived in recent decades by Virago Press, when the emphasis was on West’s treatment of feminist issues like the role of women in a patriarchal society, and masculinity and war. In 1982 The Return of the Soldier was made into a film starring Julie Christie, Glenda Jackson and Alan Bates, directed by Alan Bridges.
36 Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body?, Chapters 8 and 9. Sayers wrote eleven Lord Peter Wimsey novels between 1923 and 1937. Some were unsuccessfully turned into films but were later successfully adapted by the BBC for television starring Ian Carmichael in a series from 1972–5 and by Edward Petherbridge in 1987.
37 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, pp. 220–1.
38 See Reynolds, The Long Shadow, pp. 201ff, and Jay Winter, ‘Shell Shock and the Cultural History of the Great War’ in Journal of Contemporary History, January 2000, Vol. 35 (1), pp. 10–11.
39 Stevenson, British Society
1914–45, p. 306.
40 The Times, 2 July 1919.
Epilogue
1 Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, p. 128.
2 There was intense debate about PTSD in 1980. Most psychiatrists claimed that the disease was entirely legitimate and that at last a clear definition had been found for the delayed psychological damage caused to soldiers in combat or civilians in situations of extreme stress or danger. However, some American psychiatrists claimed that the politics of the anti-war movement had invaded the world of medicine. They argued there was no epidemiological evidence for the existence of PTSD and that it was a disease entirely invented by modern society, where, for instance, ‘flashbacks’ in films and literature have become a common device and so have entered the psychological experience. See Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, pp. 132–6; Shephard, A War of Nerves, pp. 355ff.
3 Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, p. 134.
4 Mart Tarn, Neil Greenberg and Simon Wessely, ‘Gulf War syndrome – has it gone away?’ in Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, Vol. 14, 2008, pp. 414–22.
5 The report was from No Offence! CIC, a research organisation focused on the criminal justice network. In 2014, there were approximately 2.8 million veterans in the UK, although this includes all Second World War veterans still living and 64 per cent of this total are over sixty-four. The vast majority of ex-servicemen in prison (about 77 per cent) are ex-army personnel over the age of forty-five.
6 The Veterans’ Transition Review, p. 8: http://www.veteranstransition.co.uk/vtrreport.pdf (accessed May 2015).
7 BBC News, 21 December 2014, ‘Ex-services personnel to get more help in prison’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30558280 (accessed May 2015).
8 The Combat Stress website contains a great deal of information about the charity and many well-told stories of ex-servicemen and their families who have suffered from various forms of trauma: https://www.combatstress.org.uk/veterans/ (accessed May 2015).
9 Interview with the author, 15 May 2015.
10 Richard Holmes, Firing Line, pp. 36–56.
11 For a clear expression of this sense of survivor’s guilt see Macmillan: ‘We almost began to feel a sense of guilt for not having shared the fate of our friends and comrades [who had died in the war]. We certainly felt an obligation to make some decent use of the of the life that had been spared to us’ in Winds of Change, p. 98.
12 See for instance, Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War.
Appendix 1: Numbers
1 RWOCESS, p. 7.
2 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 11.
3 Shephard, A War of Nerves, p. 41.
4 The psychiatrist was Edward Mapother, the first Superintendent of the Maudsley Hospital; quoted in Watson, Enduring the Great War, pp. 238–9.
5 Maj-Gen. Sir W.G. Macpherson, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents: Medical Services General History Vol. III, p. 41.
6 Bean, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916 Vol. I, p. 597; see also Chapter 8.
7 See Chapter 6.
8 The total number of wounded on the Somme from 1 July to 30 November was 316,073; see Macpherson, History of the Great War: Medical Services General History Vol. III, p. 50.
9 Edgar Jones, Adam Thomas and Stephen Ironside, ‘Shell Shock: an outcome study of a First World War “PIE” unit’ in Psychological Medicine, Vol. 37, 2007, pp. 213–23.
10 Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Psychiatric battle casualties: an intra- and interwar comparison’ in British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 178, 2001, pp. 242–7.
11 Fenton, Shell Shock and Its Aftermath, pp. 24–5.
12 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 10.
13 See Chapter 10.
14 A total of 5,707,416 men served in the British army during the war; figures quoted in Watson, Enduring the Great War, p. 240. The German figure is given in Appendix 3.
Appendix 2: War Trauma before the First World War
1 RWOCESS, p. 8.
2 Babington, Shell Shock, pp. 7ff; Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, Act II, Scene 3.
3 Quoted in Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, p. 4.
4 This was Doctor George Burr, an army surgeon who counted 130 such cases in military hospitals; see Babington, Shell Shock, p. 19.
5 Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, p. 13.
6 Capt R.L. Richards, ‘Mental and nervous diseases in the Russo-Japanese War’ in Military Surgeon, Vol. 26, 1910; quoted in Babington, Shell Shock, p. 40.
Appendix 3: Shell Shock in other First World War armies
1 Quoted in Jones and Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, p. 25.
2 Quoted in Shephard, A War of Nerves, p. 102.
3 Shephard, A War of Nerves, p. 103; Downing, Secret Warriors, p. 262.
4 Quoted in Watson, Enduring the Great War, p. 239.
5 Shephard, A War of Nerves, pp. 98–100.
6 Fenton, Shell Shock and Its Aftermath, pp. 22–9.
Appendix 4: The Somme battlefield today
1 An excellent recent account of the debates that raged around the work of Fabian Ware and the establishment and early work of the Imperial War Graves Commission can be found in David Crane, Empires of the Dead. See also Rose Coombs, Before Endeavours Fade, p. 156.
2 The website of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has information on every official cemetery and is an easy place in which to search for the location of a grave: www.cwgc.org
3 For a full account of the discovery, identification and reburial of the bodies, see Julie Summers (compiler), Remembering Fromelles.
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