WWI was brutal, disgusting, soul numbing and terrifying. In between battles, the war was a mixture of grinding work and boredom in conditions so horrible we can hardly bear to imagine them now. Men who succumbed to mental distress – labelled ‘shell shock’ in 1915 because it was thought to be caused by the shock of exploding shells – were variously considered slackers, frauds and wimps while the medical profession had little understanding of conditions now referred to as post traumatic stress and even less empathy. Officers condemned some men to the firing squad and sent others home in disgrace.
Researching for stories set in WWI, I discovered a few articles on the topic such as Shell Shock during World War One and another written in 1917 by Grafton Elliot Smith who was at that time Dean of the Manchester Faculty of Medicine. The 1917 paper is interesting because it deals seriously and scientifically with the nature and treatment of shell shock and urges changes to the medical profession in order to train doctors to deal with something that is just as much a disease as smallpox.
According to Smithsonian.com, at the end of the war the British Ministry of Pensions “had been left with the care of 63,296 neurological cases; ominously, this number would rise, not fall, as the years passed, and by 1929—more than a decade after the conclusion of the war—there were 74,867 such cases, and the ministry was still paying for such rehabilitative pursuits as basket making and boot repairing. An estimated 10 percent of the 1,663,435 military wounded of the war would be attributed to shell shock”.
Siegfried Sassoon, poet and author, suffered shell shock and spent months recovering. He wrote a poem called Survivors that is more compelling than anything else I’ve found.
No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’—
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
As a side note – in my third novel, titled Time & Regret, one of the main characters spends some time in a ‘rest home’ suffering from shell shock.
This post was originally written for my first blog One Writer’s Voice. It seems timely to repeat some of those earlier posts as we commemorate the centennial of WWI.