Driven MAD by the HORROR of WAR
The savagery of the Somme, 100 years ago this summer, is well chronicled. But a shattering book lays bare the true extent of the mental torment it exacted...and how pitiless top brass covered it up
THE British Army doctor serving in a casualty station just behind the front line in France knew ‘shell shock’ when he saw it.
Men in the trenches whose minds had gone under the barrage of explosives falling on their heads from enemy guns, or by being steeped in so much gore and misery for months on end, had a haunted look about them.
‘They are exhausted, their faces twitch and hands and arms shake constantly,’ he told his wife in a letter home. They were unable to answer the simplest of questions, their eyes were glassy and bulged out of their sockets, their skin was yellow, their teeth chattered, they swallowed constantly. Some could not speak at all. Others just stared into space without comprehension.
And in the summer of 1916, to his alarm, there were more and more of them reporting to him with these catatonic symptoms.
‘A boy of 17 does nothing but cry and say he can’t stand the noise. Another talks incessantly about the “black cloud” that stalks him. A shell burst between him and two of his chums, knocking him down but killing them instantly. It also threw up a great cloud of black smoke — and every morning he thinks he sees this, with his two friends in it.’
The litany of horror was endless. ‘I bend over the bed of man who whispers: “It’s the dreams, sir. I dare not go to sleep because of the dreams.” I have 12 men in my ward like this.
‘All have had friends killed by their side. If they do manage to sleep, they wake up with a cry and shriek out.
‘It’s very sad to see strong, brave men brought down like this.’
How many were affected in this way he cannot have known, only that his own station was overflowing with this new sort of casualty. Today, historians estimate that as many as one in every five of the wounded in World War I was a mental rather than a physical case.
If he’d had a choice, this doctor would have sent them all home to recover, far away from the ugly sounds, sights and smells of battle that had wrecked their minds in the first place.
But his duty was to make them just well enough to return to the trenches. After a few days, ‘the beastly time comes when you have to order them back to all the misery of it again’. Why? ‘Because otherwise there would be no men to fight.’
Here was a dilemma that vexed not only this medic but the Army establishment as a whole as World War I stretched into a third year, its bloodiest yet. Physical wounds were easy to assess, but mental ones were not.
This was a new phenomenon they were dealing with — a savage by-product of modern, industrialised warfare with its rapid-fire machine guns and far-reaching artillery. With armies dug into lines of trenches, battles were drawn out over weeks and months, unlike the past when, say, Waterloo, a century earlier, had been done and dusted in a single day.
The very description ‘shell shock’ was new, coined in medical journal The Lancet as recently as 1915, and what it meant was constantly being revised by the psychiatrists who were now joining the ranks of the Royal Army Medical Corps for the first time.
They tended to regard the fear men felt when they came under sustained fire as a perfectly natural human response, but this very idea had many Army chiefs growling into their moustaches about ‘bloody cowards’.
Such a diagnosis in an otherwise fit and healthy soldier offended the rigid military mind, bent on bravery and discipline under fire. It should not be encouraged in case it provided a way out and a safe passage home for cowards, malingerers, ‘skrimshankers’ and ‘dirty cheats’.
All this came to a head — as historian Taylor Downing explains in Breakdown, a new history of shell shock in World War I — at the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in human history, with casualties of more than a million.
It took place exactly a century ago this summer and was supposed to change the course of the war.
After more than 18 months of virtual stalemate on the Western Front, with both sides firmly dug in along a line of defences from Switzerland to the English Channel, the British aimed to break the deadlock with their ‘Big Push’ against German forces.
A huge army was built up, largely of new recruits rounded up in Lord Kitchener’s patriotic enlistment drive back home. They arrived in France enthusiastic for the fight but inexperienced, a citizen army tacked on to a much smaller professional one.
Plans were meticulously laid. The battle would begin with a massive, week-long artillery barrage, to cut the barbed wire hindering forward progress and destroy the Germans in their bunkers. Then the British would advance gloriously across a wide front and take over the German lines from an enemy retreating in disarray.
BuT as the whistles blew on the morning of July 1 and lines of Tommies, bayonets fixed on their Lee-Enfield rifles, climbed up from their trenches and out into no man’s land, it was quickly apparent that the big guns had not done their job.
In many places, the barbed wire was still intact, left on the battlefield by the wrong British shells that lacked the required cutting edge, and men had to queue at the gaps to get through, making them sitting ducks.
Even more alarming was that the Germans had not been winkled out of their deep shelters and forced to flee, leaving their lines undefended, as the British generals had hoped.
They had been pounded with explosives day after day, but had not been killed or dislodged. When the barrage stopped, they were able to scramble back to their machine gun and rifle positions.
From there they didn’t even need to aim, but just fire willy-nilly into the wall of khaki-covered flesh advancing towards them.
Tragically, if the British had run to the German lines, they might well have got there before the enemy had time to haul themselves out of their bunkers and up to their parapets. In which case, the outcome would have been very different.
But the British strolled, as they were ordered to. The generals had decreed that a walking pace would keep the raw recruits steady and in line. And what was the rush anyway, since all the Germans were presumed dead, killed by the bombardment?
This was a terrible error of judgment. On that first day alone, 20,000 British soldiers were killed and 40,000 were wounded, making it the worst day in British military history.
Little ground was gained, even less secured, and the Battle of the Somme continued for 20 bloody weeks, with bombardments that never seemed to stop and attempted advances that came to nothing.
One hunkered-down soldier recalled: ‘We have been shelled since 11.30 this morning and all afternoon. The din is ear-splitting. The whizzing and whining of shells overhead is like the passing of express trains.’
He felt helpless: ‘All you can do is lie as low down as possible and wait for it to stop. No wonder some men go mad.’
FRANTICALLy, he dug out his sergeant from under a mountain of earth that had landed on him. ‘He was jabbering and mumbling like a maniac.’ Meanwhile, a friend standing just ten yards away received a direct hit.
‘He was blown to pieces from the waist down and body parts were scattered all around the trench. But his top half was untouched. His face didn’t have a mark on it except for a slight scratch on his balding head.’
With everyday experiences like this, it was not surprising that the numbers succumbing to shell shock and war fatigue soared, quadrupling in six months to around 50,000, and sending the British military establishment into a state of panic.
The top brass had always been suspicious of the diagnosis, preferring a traditional ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude in the men under their command and feeling embarrassed by those too disturbed by war to fight on.
That was why the shell-shocked were kept apart from other wounded men and shipped home from France in separate ambulance trains, their windows blacked-out and doors locked. They were shunted into specially built platforms at Denmark Hill railway station in South London, from which there was direct access to the Maudsley mental hospital, out of sight of prying eyes.
Behind the embarrassment was fear that this ‘disease’ would spread like wildfire unless stamped out. As Downing writes: ‘Commanders firmly believed that soldiers with symptoms of hysteria would infect the troops around them.’
So, as the tragedy of the Somme unfolded, every effort was made to halt what was seen as a potential epidemic of funk that would destroy morale, decimate the ranks and even cost Britain the war.
Every soldier lost to a diagnosis of shell shock was viewed not as a casualty but as ‘wastage’ — a reduction in the manpower needed to defeat the Germans. Compassion was now regarded as weakness. ‘Man up’ was the message from on high to those on the ground.
One recourse was to deny mercy to traumatised men who fled the battlefield. Death sentences for desertion
and cowardice soared: 100 British soldiers were executed in the two years before the Battle of the Somme, and nearly 250 in the two years during and after.
Shattered nerves were no excuse. Rejecting a plea for mercy, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief, confirmed the sentence on one particular Somme soldier with an exasperated: ‘How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?’
Another general said of a private who went to pieces during a gas attack: ‘Cowards of this sort are a serious danger. The death penalty is instituted to make such men fear running away more than they fear the enemy.’
The deranged private was tied to a stake and shot at dawn.
A second recourse was to play down and dilute the very concept of shell shock. Definitions and diagnoses were queried until the words ‘shell shock’ were actually banned. Any soldier displaying such symptoms was henceforth classified as ‘nervous’ — and under no circumstances was he to be recorded as a battle casualty.
Treatment also changed. It was originally thought wise to get men suffering from ‘nerves’ away from the battlefield and preferably back to Britain. Now the opposite was decreed: that they should be allowed a short period of recuperation immediately behind the lines before being thrown back into the fray.
The third recourse was to tell Army doctors and medics not to be so wet, and to rap the knuckles of those considered too ready to cite shell shock as a diagnosis.
Fundamental to this new approach was the case of Lieutenant George Kirkwood, medical officer of the 11th Borders, who on July 9 examined his men and concluded that they were unfit to fight.
On the bloody first day of the Somme on July 1, the battalion had lost all its officers and half its men. The survivors were demoralised, a condition worsened by exposure to constant shelling and lack of sleep.
One soldier told him how he had been sent to deal with the remains of comrades lost in the last futile attack and couldn’t get out of his mind — or his nostrils — ‘the legs broken off from trunks, heads that came off at a touch, and the overpowering stench of decomposing bodies in shallow trenches.
‘The fear of death had so entered into me that if I had been ordered to go over the top next morning I should not have been able to.’
Kirkwood reported to his superiors that ‘few, if any, are not suffering from some degree of shell shock’.
He recommended calling off a planned attack. His advice was ignored, they were ordered over the top anyway, but many refused to go.
At a board of inquiry into the incident, Kirkwood’s explanation was derided.
‘I don’t attach much importance to the medical officer’s ideas,’ his brigadier told him.
A general was even more scathing, blaming Kirkwood for ‘showing undue sympathy for the men’ and adding: ‘It is not for a medical officer to inform his commanding officer that his men are not in a fit state to carry out a military operation.’
Kirkwood was relieved of his duties and sent home in disgrace — a clear case of shooting the messenger. From the top of the command structure came an instruction that the medical corps must ‘understand that it cannot encourage “wastage” by approving large-scale cases of shell shock’.
The medical corps tried to defend its corner, but this was a fight the generals were not going to lose. Winning the war was their priority and sustaining morale and manpower was vital. Officially, shell shock cases peaked during the Somme and then fell off.
A year later, at the gruesome Battle of Passchendaele, only a little over 5,000 cases were logged, a tenth of those on the Somme. The figure was so preposterously low it could only have been achieved by manipulation and mirrors.
But the generals were pleased. As author Taylor Downing scathingly puts it: ‘Outwardly the Army could congratulate itself that the crisis of shell shock had been solved. In reality, it simply refused to count the cases any longer.’
Shell shock had not gone away, but recognition of it had. A giant lie had been perpetrated, and a successful one — until after the war, when mental hospitals filled with ex-soldiers and shell shock at last began to be understood as the very real affliction it was.
BREAKDOWN: The Crisis Of Shell Shock On The Somme by Taylor Downing is published by Little Brown at £25. To order a copy at the special price of £20 (offer valid until April 25, p&p free), visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640.