The trauma with no name

REVOLUTIONARY AND NAPOLEONIC WARS

Soldiers with ‘nostalgia’ were said to be gripped with fantasies about returning to their homeland

Shakespeare’s histories may have alluded to war trauma but it would be another two centuries before the British public would experience vicariously the horrors of combat – courtesy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the birth of the military memoir.

More than 200 British veterans of the conflicts published their tales of life on the front line, and these autobiographies increasingly addressed the emotional impact of war. In one, Captain Howard chronicles his hallucinations in the catacombs of Paris, when touring the capital after 1814’s battle of Toulouse: “Cold perspiration broke over my whole body; I stood fixed to the spot in a trance of horror and despair… the skulls with their eyeless sockets, seemed to scowl upon me – my head became dizzy… my brain reeled, and I fell against a crashing pile of mortality, where I swooned away.”

Despite many soldiers reporting disturbed post-battle mental states, there was still no medical recognition of war trauma. Instead, the condition was given a number of vague labels. One was le vent du boulet, translated as ‘wind of a cannonball’. Another was ‘nostalgia’, derived from the Greek words nóstos, meaning ‘homecoming’, and álgos, meaning ‘pain’ or ‘ache’. Medical records described soldiers with nostalgia to be gripped with fantasies about returning to their homeland.

These terms sparked a wider interest in bodily and mental suffering, which was communicated through the arts. Romantic poets like Wordsworth wrote of the returning soldier who had a “strange half-absence”. In his caricature John Bull’s Progress (shown above), James Gillray depicts a veteran returning home to his family, who cower in horror as he walks through the door. Although war trauma still had no name, it rippled through Britain’s cultural landscape.