Shocked and Forgotten

Elegy displaces anger; touches of the sacred are always at hand even when the author's purpose is to show the terrible waste of life and hope in the war. When irony dominates the account, it provides a natural distancing device, a way of looking at the war with detached sadness.¹

As a research student in the mid 1980s beginning an investigation of 'shell shock' cases in the First World War I wrote to many organizations and institutions – veterans' support charities, working hospitals that had taken such cases – to find out what records or knowledge of such men might still exist. Usually the reply was helpful but unproductive, sometimes it was blandly polite, and occasionally it was hostile. 'We do not discuss such cases or allow access to records', I read in a letter-headed reply, 'for obvious reasons.' The right to privacy was indeed obvious, but it seemed to me that these were not the only 'reasons' to which the letter-writer referred. Rather, seventy years after the war, those most closely involved with veterans' affairs often still felt a lingering awkwardness that had less to do with rights and more to do with continuing stigma. First World War 'shell shock' and related conditions were still not entirely respectable, and those who suffered them remained tainted by associations with malingering, cowardice and madness.

Later, as I looked at a soldier's twisted hand or face in a medical textbook, watched a convalescent with a misshapen torso relearning to walk in a medical training film, or read an ex-serviceman's account of his failed or misfired attempts to speak, I was struck by the physicality of the conditions that affected the war's trauma cases. Such textbooks, films and memoirs evoked with startling clarity the mind's ability to grip and paralyze, to convey through the body what words could not express.

These recollections came to mind while reading Peter Barham's innovative, affecting account of the 'psychiatric fallout' of the Great War. The author's background as a psychologist as well as a social historian lends Forgotten Lunatics a deeply humane and sympathetic understanding of mental disorder and disability. Barham challenges the idea that such soldiers and ex-servicemen are only to be understood as traumatized, mute victims, or even that they were the sole psychiatric casualties of the war. The author reports, for instance, one medic's startled response to a patient who was anything but mute. 'He is self-satisfied and rather expansive. . . . Instead of answering many questions, he asks me some in return, as "what is war?", "what is a nation?", what do I mean by this and that' (p. 79). Barham argues that trauma cases – the shell-shocked – were only the most obvious category within a wider group whose conditions were associated in some way with the war. Other categories included those with mental histories before August 1914 who were reclassified and whose care improved as a result of shelter within the ex-servicemen's treatment network; those who were severely depressed as a result of wartime experiences but were categorized, for instance, as 'mentally defective' by military-minded or asylum-minded medics; and those who made it through the war and yet at some later moment foundered and quite possibly languished with little or no state recognition or financial support for the remainder of their lives, which often spanned a good portion of the twentieth century.

The case for rethinking the meaning and context as well as the memory of all these groups is compelling, both within the context of existing scholarship, and in the larger arena of public debate. One reason is that until now they have been almost beyond recollection. Another is that while French soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice following the 1917 mutiny were pardoned in the 1930s, the 306 British soldiers executed during the war, some of whom were very likely mental casualties of the war, have only in 2006 received posthumous pardons. Even...