Shell-Shock

A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis

Anthony Babington

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Select
• Year: 1990
• Print ISBN: 9780850525625
• eBook ISBN: 9781473818125
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

As Anthony Babington is careful to point out in his forwrd, this is not a medical book. It is, rather, a distillation, in words which any layman can understand, of the long struggle by the medical profession, and by influencail civilians of an understanding frame of mind, to persudae the Service Chiefs, in particuliar Senior army pfficers, that soldiers can only stand so much fighting. In the First World War, as Babington points out, men were shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion. One can only wonder that many more didn't crack up under the appalling stress to which they were subjected. By 1939 the situation had improved, and of course the Second World War was a much more mobile affair, without the set-piece mass slaughter that characterised the earlier conflict. It may also be remarked that it was much easier for the average private soldier to realize that he was fighting for a good cause, the Nazis being more readily identifiable as bogeymen than the soldiers of the Kaiser. There are those who argue that in the postwar era, things have gone too far in the opposite direction. Indeed Babington quotes the Duke of Edinburgh as saying: "We didn't have counsellers rushing around every time someone let off a gun asking "Are you alright" You just got on with it." Nonetheless few would argue that a counsellor is preferable to a firing squad. Judge Babington has produced a fascinating, if sometimes harrowing, study of the effects of war upon the fighting soldier, of the gradual understanding of the problem of battle fatigue and of the more merciful and sympathetic approach to its treatment. Readers of his earlier works will appreciate that it is a subject which he is uniquely qualified to handle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

On 12 March, 1915, Lance-Sergeant Walton, a 26-year-old soldier in the British Regular Army, was court-martialled for desertion. He was serving in the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and in the middle of the previous August he had been among the first troops to arrive in France with the original British Expeditionary Force. His Division had engaged the leading formations of the advancing German Army outside the Belgian town of Mons on 22 August, and during the days that followed they had taken part in the arduous retreat which had continued without a pause until the Allies had managed to establish a defensive line to the south-east of Paris on 5 September. By then the BEF had trudged a distance of nearly two hundred miles, continuously harried by the enemy and suffering very heavy casualties. In the words of the Official History of the campaign, they had been “condemned at the very outset to undergo the severest ordeal which can be imposed on any army.”¹ It was estimated that during the retreat the infantry had only had an average of four hours’ rest a day; and when it had ended, according to a young officer in the BEF, the men had been physically weak from the long marches and mentally weak from the continual strain of always being within range of the German guns.²

Throughout the month of September the depleted Divisions of the BEF had been in constant action. At the beginning of October they had been moved from their positions east of Paris to take over the left sector of the Allied line, stretching southwards from the Channel Ports. From there they had immediately launched an offensive across the Flanders Plain in what became known as the First Battle of Ypres. Sergeant Walton’s battalion was once again in the thick of the fighting.

On 29 October, when the BEF had been in hastily-prepared defensive positions round Ypres, the Germans had launched a massive attack on the town. Walton’s Division was guarding the approaches to Gheluvelt, a strategically-important village on the road from Menin to Ypres, and had borne the brunt of the assault. The bitter struggle had lasted for four days during which Gheluvelt had changed hands three times. Eventually the British, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, had been forced to withdraw to a new line. All the battalions which had taken part in the action had suffered severe casualties.

At this stage, the Official History commented, the British Army “was composed of tired, haggard and unshaven men, unwashed, plastered with mud, many in little more than rags.”³

The charge against Lance-Sergeant Walton was that he had deserted “near Ypres between the 1st and 9th November 1914”, and that he had stayed at liberty until he was arrested by a French gendarme in a private house at Arques on 3 March, 1915. The details of his court martial are still retained in the Public Record Office at Kew.⁴ He was tried by three officers, a Major, a Captain and a Lieutenant, and it is not disclosed whether or not he was represented by what was termed a “prisoner’s friend”. Usually a soldier on trial asked his platoon commander or his company commander to defend him.

The first witness for the prosecution was a sergeant from Walton’s own battalion, who had seen him on duty with his company on 1 November and had heard later that he had been wounded and evacuated to hospital. The sergeant added at the end of his evidence that the battalion had been in action on the 1st and 2nd of November and had sustained heavy casualties on both days. On 9 November Walton had been reported “missing”.

A crucial prosecution witness was a French civilian, a cobbler from Arques, a small village a few miles south of St Omer and about twenty-five miles from Ypres, who had first seen Walton in the vicinity of his house on the evening of 18 December. Walton was then without any arms or equipment; he looked cold and wet, had a bad cough and appeared to have been wounded in his left hand. The cobbler had taken sympathy on him and invited him to come in for a while and get warm by the fire. Walton had agreed to this proposal. Later he had asked if he could be put up for the night. The cobbler only had one bed in his home but he told Walton that he did not mind sharing it with him. The arrangement had, in fact, continued for over two months. During this time, the cobbler said in his evidence, Walton had never tried to hide; he had drawn his rations from a neighbouring depot and he had frequently chatted to other British soldiers who happened to be in the village. Apart from one absence of five days, Walton had remained at the house until the day of his apprehension.

A gendarme gave formal evidence that, on 3 March, 1915, following a tip-off, he had visited the cobbler’s house in Arques. He had found Walton there, wearing army uniform khaki trousers and a civilian jersey. The gendarme had arrested him as a suspected deserter.

On the following day Walton had made a written statement to the Military Police. He said that at the beginning of the previous November, during the fighting around Ypres, he had been detailed to collect some stragglers from other regiments. He had done this and had just taken them back to the front line when he was shot in the left hand. He had taken shelter in a trench to dress his wound and had remained there for several days before coming out to look for his battalion. His account continued in a somewhat rambling manner. He had found his way to Cassel, near St Omer, where he had reported to a French guard. Next he had been taken by car to see an English naval officer. Ever since then he had been walking about making enquiries, but he had been unable to find anyone who knew the whereabouts of the battalion. He concluded the statement by saying, “I am suffering from a nervous breakdown ever since I was wounded.”

The day after Walton’s arrest the Assistant Provost-Marshal for the Arques District had written a letter to the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, a copy of which was attached to the court-martial proceedings. Sergeant Walton, he said, “seems half-dazed and to be either unwilling to, or incapable of, giving straightforward answers to the simplest questions.”

At his trial Walton gave evidence closely in accordance with his written statement to the Military Police. He had added that his reason for being in Arques was that he had been taken there by a naval officer who was trying to help him in locating his battalion. The court heard no medical witnesses for the prosecution or the defence and did not deem it advisable to adjourn so that further enquiries could be made. Apparently, Walton’s contention that he had suffered a nervous breakdown was either disbelieved or was not considered to be a valid defence, as he was convicted of the charge of desertion.

At that time a soldier on active service who had been found guilty of desertion could be sentenced to death, or to “such a lesser penalty as a court thought fit to impose”.⁵ The three officers who tried Sergeant Walton obviously thought that the facts of his offence were serious enough to warrant the penalty of death. The court-martial papers had then to be submitted in turn to his commanding officer, his brigade, division, corps and army commanders for their comments as to whether the sentence should be commuted or confirmed. The ultimate decision would be left to General Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF. On 19 March, after the court-martial documents had reached Walton’s Divisional Headquarters, a senior staff officer had requested that he should be kept under medical observation “until a Medical Officer can report on the state of his mind”. Although there is a brief note in Walton’s court-martial file to the effect that a Medical Board was held on 20 March, there is no record of its conclusions. In spite of this, however, Sir John French found sufficient information in the papers for him to confirm the death sentence on 22 March.

After he had made his decision, the course of military justice moved swiftly to the final act. As dawn was breaking on 23 March Lance-Sergeant Walton was taken out and shot by a firing squad. He was the fourteenth British soldier to be executed for desertion since the BEF had begun their retreat from Mons at the end of the previous August.

Chapter 2

Herodotus, writing about the Greek-Persian wars, described an incident during the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, which may well have been an example of conversion hysteria, a fairly common form of war neurosis. A large Persian army had crossed the Aegean Sea and landed in the Bay of Marathon. The Greeks, taken by surprise, had hastily assembled a numerically inferior force and charged down from the hills around the bay. After a short, ferocious engagement the invaders were defeated and driven back to their ships. In his account of the battle Herodotus wrote:

The following prodigy occurred there: an Athenian, Epizelus, son of Cuphagoras, while fighting in the medley, and behaving valiantly, was deprived of his sight, though wounded in no part of his body, nor struck from a distance; and continued to be blind from that time for the remainder of his life.¹

It is now recognized that a soldier’s personal valour might afford him little protection against war neurosis. In the Roman army the Caesars used to select their bravest men to be Eagle-bearers in the legions. For all their courage, it was not unknown for Eagle-bearers to break down suddenly on the battlefields.²

Early in the seventeenth century European physicians became aware of an illness affecting soldiers on campaign, which caused them “to sink into a state of deep despair”. It was especially prevalent among Spanish soldiers conscripted for service in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years War.³ The Swiss physician Johannes Hofer published a paper in Basle about this mysterious malady in 1678. Hofer called it ‘nostalgia’ and likened it to “the pain which the sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears he is never to see it again”. The ailment originated in the brain, he said, as the result of a disordered imagination. He described the symptoms of nostalgia as being “a continuing melancholy, incessant thinking of home, disturbed sleep or insomnia, weakness, loss of appetite, anxiety, cardiac palpitation, stupor and fever”.⁴

Hofer considered that nostalgia was only curable if the yearning to return home could be satisfied, but that the disease could be very grave, even mortal, if circumstances made this impossible. For immediate treatment, he recommended the use of purgatives. Insomnia and restlessness could best be rectified by “the administration of narcotic mixtures”.⁵

A medical directory published in 1755 described nostalgia as “a very specific disease, which was most commonly found among the Swiss, and arises chiefly from a passionate longing for their native land.”⁶ However, the illness was widely recognized by then as being endemic in armies generally. In 1754 the Physician-in-Ordinary to the King of France put forward a theory that “tedium and vexation” has caused nostalgia among French soldiers.⁷ A few years later an Austrian physician reverted to Hofer’s view. He said:

When young men, who are still growing, are forced to enter military service and thus lose all hope of returning safe and sound to their beloved homeland, they become sad, taciturn, listless, solitary, musing, full of sighs and moans. Finally, they cease to pay attention and become indifferent to everything which the maintenance of life requires of them. This disease is called nostalgia. Neither medicaments, nor arguments, nor promises, nor threats of punishment are able to produce any improvement.⁸

Dominique Larrey, a military surgeon in Napoleon’s army, regarded nostalgia as a form of insanity. He described the course of the disease in a medical essay, published in 1821.⁹ Nostalgic patients suffered from fantasies, he wrote. They thought of their homes as comfortable and enchanting, no matter how mean and poverty-stricken they might be, and they visualized their relations and friends, “richly-clothed, advancing towards them with affectionate greetings”. Initially the patient had a feeling of oppression and weariness and he was continually stretching and sighing. Also, he became constipated and felt wandering pains in various parts of his body. Next, he developed a fever, a sense of numbness and a partial paralysis of his stomach and his diaphragm. As a result, he suffered from gastritis or from gastroenteritis, “with a derangement of the digestive functions”. In the final stage of the disease, said Larrey, the patient entered a state of debility, accompanied by increasing mental depression and constant groaning and weeping. In this phase he had a horror of food, and even of liquids, until “At last life becomes a burden; sometime the patient commits suicide, but more often the victim surrenders to death without resistance.”

Not many of Larrey’s medical contemporaries were prepared to accept that nostalgia was a form of madness, but they preferred to regard it as being akin to a severe type of melancholy. Nevertheless, most of them agreed with his exposition as to the progressive stages of the illness.

Another malady which seems to have been peculiar to the military was known as “soldier’s heart” or “the irritable heart of soldiers”. The cardinal symptoms were exhaustion and breathlessness after moderate physical exertion, an abnormally rapid pulse-rate, pains in the area of the heart and attacks of giddiness.¹⁰ Various theories were advanced regarding the cause of this complaint, such as overstrain, deficiency of rest and nourishment, and the tightness of army equipment. However, Dr John MacCurdy, who came over to England from the United States of America in 1917 to study the problem of shell-shock, believed that it was in fact a form of anxiety neurosis, as the functions of the heart, he said, were as often influenced by anxiety conditions.¹¹ Hundreds of British soldiers on the Western Front during the First World War were diagnosed as suffering from “irritable heart”, without the cause of the illness ever being conclusively established.¹²

In many past campaigns soldiers have been affected by battle hysteria, but their symptoms were unexplained at the time because of the limitations of medical knowledge. Sometimes they went mad; sometimes they became mute, or blind, or paralysed, or they were affected with vari...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Forword
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Postscript
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index