Survivors

In August 2006 Defence Secretary Des Browne announced the Labour government's intention to seek a statutory group pardon for all 306 British and Empire soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice during the First World War. Across the political spectrum newspaper coverage of this decision emphasized the inadequacy of military courts martial during that war, and stated that many of the soldiers executed had doubtless been suffering from shell-shock.¹ The case of Private Harry Farr was used to illustrate these claims. Farr, a scaffolder from London, joined up on the outbreak of war, but developed 'nervous trouble' and reported sick with nerves four times between 1915 and 1916. He spent five months in hospital, during which time he had an uncontrollable shake so bad he could not hold a pen. In September 1916 he refused to go back to the trenches, saying that he could no longer stand the explosions of artillery. He was reported as trembling and not in a fit state, but was still executed in October 1916 after a peremptory court martial. Although the decision to pardon these soldiers did attract some criticism, on the whole it was an occasion for collective back-slapping: newspaper coverage invited the British people to ruefully shake their heads at the ignorance, injustice, and tragedy of the past, and to feel relieved and pleased at the levels of psychological understanding and compassion 'we' had achieved over the last 100 years.

Perhaps strangely, it is the repeated invocation of Farr's case which suggests that this national self-congratulation may be premature. The details of Farr's story allowed him to be represented as both victim and hero. He was young (only twenty-three when the war broke out) and volunteered for service in 1914, thereby proving his courage. He broke down not once, but several times. He was executed because he refused to return to the fighting, not for any action which might have put comrades in more immediate danger. Using Farr as the exemplar of the shell-shocked soldier may cause a reassessment of the legitimate costs of war, but it does not force a truly radical questioning of standards of heroism. Rather, when Farr's story is retold, the perverse effect is to reaffirm a certain set of social and cultural expectations attached to military masculinity. When we cry that he was brave, that he had broken down repeatedly, and that he was too young, we unwittingly imply that sometimes it might have been okay for the state to execute conscripts, or men who had only broken down once, or older men who might be expected to cope better with industrial warfare. These are not judgements most people who oppose war, conscription or capital punishment would consciously endorse. The cultural stereotype of the shell-shock victim does not always aid the articulation of a coherent moral and political position.

It is also, Fiona Reid argues, a cultural stereotype which does not reflect the historical realities of the lives of shell-shocked men either during the war or in the decade that followed. She emphasizes the complexity and multiplicity of images and experiences of shell-shock from 1914 onwards, and contends that by the late 1920s, in the main, 'the mentally broken man could be seen as honourably wounded, respectable and capable of full, or at least partial, recovery' (p. 164). Reid's research joins a host of works published in recent years which have challenged existing stereotypes of shell-shock through deepening and extending understandings of male experiences of trauma during and after the First World War. Broken Men makes two distinctive contributions to this literature: it takes the story of shell-shock beyond the Armistice into the 1920s, and it provides a detailed examination of the work of the Ex-Services' Welfare Society (ESWS), a charity set up in 1919 and now more widely known as Combat Stress. In this way, the book forces some important shifts of perspective. Reid's exploration of the ESWS is a...