Fracture

by Philipp Blom

  Perhaps the best-known literary chronicle of this perceived collapse was Vera Brittain’s 1933 autobiographical novel Testament of Youth, in which the author dramatized the impact of the war on her own life and on those of the people closest to her. From 1915 until the end of the war Brittain had served as a field nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment; in 1919, with her fiancé, her only brother, and many university friends now dead, she returned to Oxford, bitterly disillusioned.

  Brittain’s purpose in writing the book that was to make her famous was partly to counteract the impression that only men had lived and suffered through the war. “Didn’t women have their war as well?” she asked herself, and then set out to answer the question. How had women experienced the war, and how had they experienced the peace that followed it? “I detached myself from the others,” she wrote, describing the armistice celebrations, “and walked slowly up Whitehall, with my heart sinking in sudden cold dismay. Already this was a different world from the one I had known during four lifelong years, a world in which people would be lighthearted and forgetful. . . . And in that brightly lit, alien world I should have no part.”8

  Killing Fields

  BRITTAIN’S SENSE OF ALIENATION was shared by many of the returning soldiers, particularly those who had served on the Western Front. Even if thousands of letters, diaries, and memoirs prove that the beginning of the war was not accompanied by the wave of collective enthusiasm bordering on hysteria that has often been written about, but instead drew more anxious and ambivalent responses, many young men had gone into the war with a sense of elation. In Europe and America boys in particular were educated to be patriotic and to value manly virtues such as courage, strength, and sacrifice. For many, there were paramilitary institutions such as the Officers’ Training Corps and the Boy Scouts in Britain and the Commonwealth, or the collective drill in Prussian and French schoolyards. There was also testosterone and the hope of battlefield glory.

  It was not easy to be a man in 1914. Traditional forms of manliness and social hierarchies had been undermined by industrialization and urbanization. Most factory work could be done by women, too, and life in the big city required working couples to bring home two wages and to have fewer children. New jobs and occupations were hard to reconcile with the ideas previous generations had had of manly virtue. Encased in anonymous buildings and wedged in front of a typewriter, pale from the lack of sunlight and nervous from the constant din of machines in the vicinity, the modern office worker looked nothing like the image of martial virility that had ruled his upbringing. The feminist writer Rosa Mayreder had even dubbed offices “coffins of masculinity.”9

  Feminism was another prewar phenomenon that did much to shake the image of what it meant to be a man. Women demanded the vote, entry into the professions, and places at schools and universities, and they were beginning to play an ever-increasing role in occupations traditionally reserved for men. A tide of male assertion had answered these demands. Scientists had vainly attempted to prove the physical and intellectual inferiority of women, and masculine rituals such as dueling had shown a sharp rise in popularity. But even before the war hundreds of thousands of men had succumbed to this new psychological pressure and fallen victim to “neurasthenia,” a nervous affliction similar to today’s burnout, and had been sent to recuperate in sanatoriums.

  Many men had greeted the outbreak of the war as an opportunity to reconquer their questioned manliness, saber in hand, braving the firestorms to reemerge stronger and purified of the dross of weakness and complexity that characterized modern life. Their hopes had been cruelly disappointed, largely because they found themselves fighting the wrong war.

  In fact, it was the very lack of real fighting that became a lasting trauma of the war. Previous wars had been decided by battles in which armies advanced against each other in a more or less skillful combination of infantry and cavalry, with artillery playing a supporting role as soldiers launched into close combat. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, nine out of every ten casualties were due to wounds inflicted by bayonets, handguns, and rifles.

  At the Western Front this was radically changed. Advances in artillery technology meant that powerful and accurate guns spewing shells weighing hundreds of pounds and packed with explosives, shrapnel, or gas could now be fired from many kilometers behind the front line, and for the soldiers in their trenches, every minute of every day became an agonizing wait. On the German side, where the trenches were extremely well built, two of every three soldiers killed in action died from shelling, not during combat. In the British and French units, this rate reached 75 percent. Conversely, only about 1 percent of fatal injuries on both sides were inflicted by close combat with handguns and bayonets. The soldiers were little more than sitting targets identified by reconnaissance planes and then mercilessly shelled from afar.

  For the soldiers, the experience was devastating. During the first battles, as military strategies proved slow to change in the face of automated warfare, soldiers ordered to go over the top hardly stood a chance. With bayonets mounted they ran toward the enemy lines, easy targets for machine guns and artillery fire. In some instances, 80 percent of attackers were killed before reaching the enemy lines.

  This dreadful death toll ripped holes not only in battle units but also in families across the world. On July 1, 1916, the very first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British and Newfoundland forces alone sustained almost fifty-eight thousand casualties (including more than nineteen thousand killed), representing some 20 percent of British combatants. The Ulster Division of Irish Protestants who fought with the British on that first day suffered more than five thousand casualties, including more than two thousand dead. And of the 801 men of the Newfoundland Regiment, only sixty-eight could answer the evening roll call, and every one of its officers was wounded or dead.10

  Over a six-week period during the battle, ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces sustained thirty-one thousand casualties, representing for the tiny Dominion of New Zealand a loss of almost 1 percent of its entire population. As historian John Milne has noted, “The British Army’s loss on that one day easily exceeds its battle casualties in the Crimean War, the Boer War and the Korean War combined.”11 The battle also claimed the life of the first American soldier in the First World War: on August 31, along with all the other men of his Royal Artillery battery, San Francisco native Private Harry Butters was killed in a massive barrage of German shellfire.

  “Somme,” declared Friedrich Steinbrecher, a German officer at the battle, “the whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.’” The English Tommies were to dub the debacle more earthily, and the epithet has stuck: in the Anglophone world today, the Somme is still remembered as “the Great Fuck-Up.”

  Having entered what they hoped would be a short, cathartic war, most soldiers who did not return were torn apart by bombs, lacerated by shrapnel, assassinated by snipers, choked by gas, or mown down by machine guns, or they perished in no-man’s-land entangled in barbed wire or succumbed to gangrene, infections, typhoid, or other illnesses; as many as half of them died without ever having seen an enemy. Instead, death came out of the blue, suddenly, with devastating power. Verdun was an “academy of cubism,” reflected the French painter Fernand Léger in a letter from the front, describing how around him were sights and scenes too absurd to be believed. “For example, you discover a tree with a chair perched on top of it. Normal people would treat you as a madman if you painted something like this. But here is enough you can simply copy.”12 He was right: a photograph from the front even shows half a horse wedged in the shredded branches of a tree between the trenches.

  Soldiers on both sides of the conflict experienced this mechanical apocalypse as a deep betrayal of their bravery and their will to sacrifice themselves for a just cause. Their courage was no match for the industrialized slaughter; their very bodies were transformed into a raw material of death, almost indistinguishable from the grayish-brown mud
around them, pounded and churned up so often by shells and grenades that it became transformed into an omnipresent slime reeking of corpses and of human excrement, and swallowing boots and whole bodies like a putrid swamp.

  Rescued from this inferno, the helplessly shivering, mute, and emaciated bodies of the shell shock victims turned into wordless indictments of a war in which machines had finally and totally overpowered human beings.

  A Lost Generation?

  AT THE SOMME and elsewhere, the war was particularly lethal to young men from the social elite. On the British side, one-fifth of all Etonians who enlisted were killed, wounded, or listed as missing during the entire war, while the national average of casualties was one in eight men who had enlisted. But we can put an even more precise number on the lost generation: of the 26,529 students from Oxford and Cambridge universities, 4,933 were killed in the war, again roughly one-fifth. Not only was this proportion higher than the national average, but the number of those killed from these two universities alone was also greater than that from all other universities in Great Britain combined (4,920). So roughly ten thousand upper-class young men did not return from the battlefields.

  While it may be true that losses among the social elite were around 20 percent, this also means that 80 percent of middle- and upper-class soldiers did return home, and it is also important to remember that 96 percent of the infantry soldiers killed were not officers and not graduates of public schools or leading universities.

  But these numbers tell only half the story. Until the war, Britain had a professional army, offering careers for the younger sons of the wealthy and for working-class men with nowhere else to go. Social segregation had been maintained throughout, and much of the population had been shielded from the effects of bloody conflicts such as the Crimean War not only by sheer distance but also by unseen barriers at home. This distance held until the terrible losses among the professional soldiers at the Somme, but soon the decimation of the army meant that new soldiers would have to be found. With the introduction of conscription in 1916, young men throughout society were now affected, and their families with them. In addition to Britain’s dead, 1.7 million men came home with amputated limbs, horrific disfigurements, the lasting effects of shell shock, or other war injuries. British society experienced war as it had never done before.

  Despite these numbers, the lost generation is still largely a myth. In fact, with 673,375 dead or missing, according to army figures (just under 1 million if all of the Empire’s forces are included), the British loss of life on the battlefield, though horrific enough, was considerably lower than that of other combatant countries, both in absolute numbers and in terms of relative population. Two million Germans had lost their lives, as did 1.1 million from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1.8 million Russians, and almost 600,000 Italians—numbers that speak eloquently of the suffering away from the Western Front. Vera Brittain’s own brother, Edward, had been killed fighting at San Sisto Ridge, near Venice.

  In proportional terms, the greatest losses by far were incurred by Serbia and by the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey). France was the worst-affected Western country, with 1.4 million war dead, representing 3.5 percent of the entire French population and 17 percent of all enlisted soldiers; by comparison, the British figures (excluding Empire forces) were 1.6 and 12 percent, respectively. In fact, the so-called lost generation in Britain was even more numerous than previous generations, since many young men who otherwise would have been lost to emigration, mainly to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, chose to stay at home, often seeing action but nonetheless surviving the war.

  But myths pay little heed to absolute numbers. Britain’s myth of the lost generation concerned specifically the “flower of youth,” the well-educated young men from middle- and upper-class families who were believed to have suffered disproportionately. Here the myth has a basis in fact. Young men of relatively affluent backgrounds were indeed more likely to volunteer, in part because they had imbibed the strongly patriotic rhetoric of their public schools and in part because they were economically more dispensable than working-class youths, whose parents and siblings were partly dependent on their income and who therefore could not simply put down their tools and go off to war.

  In addition to this, in a glaring reflection of Britain’s powerful class system, young graduates from “good” public schools or universities were likely to be immediately commissioned as junior officers and sent straight to the front lines with very little training and no experience at all; consequently they were more likely to be killed than the men in the ranks. This was the case even after the introduction of conscription in 1916.

  Traumatized

  THE NOTIONS OF “SHELL SHOCK” and the “lost generation” became deeply embedded in the British memory of the war precisely because they went some way toward explaining the feeling of betrayal and uncomprehending horror that seeped into the national consciousness after 1918. A whole continent felt shell-shocked by the events it had lived through, and the symptoms of former soldiers served as a useful shorthand, a metaphor for collective trauma.

  In fact, shell shock, or what we might call today “post-traumatic stress disorder,” was observed not only in Britain but also among soldiers from all parties engaged in the conflict. Germany and Austria (formerly the Austro-Hungarian Empire) had their Kriegszitterer (war shiverers), France its névrosés de la guerre; other countries with soldiers in intensely mechanized theaters of war reported similar cases. Particularly on the Western Front and on the rocky slopes of the Dolomites, in the Italian Alps, where the war had been fought in the inferno of trenches, the minds and bodies of the men subjected to this terror had simply given way under the constant strain. Some of them suffered from disorders that had symbolic force: a young Australian sniper lost the sight in his right eye, used to take aim, while others lost the use of their trigger fingers, as if their bodies had decided to refuse to work against their consciences. Most reported horrible, oppressive dreams coming to haunt them every single night.

  Shell shock was new to the medical profession, and it became the reflection of a new, more intensely inhuman way of fighting. In 1919, the pioneering American psychiatrist Elmer Ernest Southard published a collection of case studies of soldiers suffering from shell shock and other injuries that left deep scars, perhaps not on their bodies (many of which were often apparently unhurt) but certainly on their minds. His work was exceptional not only because he was one of the very first specialists to recognize the phenomenon of shell shock in its severity and diversity but also because he took a truly inclusive, international outlook. Here, in the sober medical language of its time, was a catalogue of shattered minds and war-torn bodies, catalogued together with the names of the doctors treating them in their country of origin:

  Case 81 (Juquelier and Quellien, May, 1917) [French]

  Soldier, shell burst near him, observed in hospital: “He suddenly rose from the bench, made a few steps, seemed to be listening and anxious, as if he ought to be on guard. He looked up, seemed to be looking for something whose noise was approaching, lowered he head, made a slight jerking movement, and said ‘Poum!’ as if to express the noise of an explosion. He took a few more steps, the same movements were repeated, and the same ‘Poum!’ was uttered. This lasted for about a quarter of an hour, during which the patient was unaware of his surroundings.”

  “Apples in No-Man’s-Land”

  Case 165 (Weygandt, 1915) [German]

  A soldier in November, 1914, suddenly climbed out of the trench and began to pick apples from an apple-tree between the firing lines. The idea was to get a bag of apples for his comrades, but he began to pelt the French trenches with apples. He was called back and on account of his strange conduct sent to hospital. Here he was at times given to pressure of speech and restlessness; he would climb the posts of the sleeping room and then loudly declare he wanted to get back to the trenches; he did not want to go back to Germany alive; did not want to live b
eyond to-morrow; was guilty of a sin; had a spot of sin, Schand [sic; German Schande, “shame”], on his heart.

  Case 475 (Purser, October, 1917) [British]

  An Englishman, 21, in a rifle regiment, arrived in May, 1915, at the Dublin University V. A. D. Hospital, being dumb, impaired in vision and hearing, having dilated pupils, tremors, restlessness and weakness, and giving the impression of visual hallucinations. Although suspicious, he was treated kindly for a few days, recovered his hearing, and wrote the few things that he remembered about home and the war, now and then tremulously and perspiringly, writing down, “Asylum; do not lock up; I am not mad.”13

  Shell-shocked soldiers were dealt with differently in different countries, according to the willingness of the medical establishments to recognize the nature of the phenomenon and to treat it with more or less innovative methods. As an ironic by-product of wholesale slaughter, the treatment of soldiers resulted in enormous advances not only in the production of anatomically correct prosthetics and in cosmetic surgery but also in the treatment of psychological trauma.

  The trauma, however, was pervasive and collective. After November 1918, having endured what no one should ever endure and seen what no one should ever see, soldiers on all sides often found the demobilization they had so dreamed of in the field a painful, bewildering, and enraging experience. On their return, many of them felt abandoned in a peaceless postwar existence in which nothing seemed to be as it had been.