Soldier’s Don’t Go Mad by Charles Glass Extract

A brilliant and poignant history of the friendship between two great war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, alongside a narrative investigation of the origins of PTSD and the literary response to World War I.

The outbreak of war across across Europe in 1914, ushered in a new and unprecedented era of modern warfare. Soldiers faced relentless machine-gun fire, incredible artillery power, flame-throwers, and gas attacks. Within the first four months of the First World War, the British Army recorded the nervous collapse of ten percent of its officers.

During the war, Craiglockhart Hospital treated around 1800 officers with shell-shock. And it was here that two of the world’s greatest war poets met — Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Despite differences in age, class, education, and interests, both were outsiders – soldiers unfit to fight, gay men in a homophobic country, and Britons unwilling to support the war.

But more than anything else, they shared a love of the English language and poetry. As their friendship evolved over their months as patients at Craiglockhart, each encouraged the other in their work, in their personal reckonings with the morality of war, as well as in their treatment. The friendship acted as doctor, nursing them to both health and creative achievement.

Drawing on rich source materials, as well as Glass’s own deep understanding of trauma and war, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad tells for the first time the story of the soldiers and doctors who struggled with the effects of industrial warfare on the human psyche. Writing beyond the battlefields, to the psychiatric couch of Craiglockhart but also the literary salons, halls of power, and country houses, Glass charts the experiences of Owen and Sassoon, and of their fellow soldier-poets, alongside the greater literary response to modern warfare.

Written in the midst of the pandemic, when Charles Glass was hospitalised with Covid-19, Soldier’s Don’t Go Mad provided his own literary solace. Gripping, thorough and informative, Soldier’s Don’t Go Mad is this winter’s essential read.

Extract

And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.
—Siegfried Sassoon,
“Repression of War Experience,” 1917

“Many of the broken men recorded their experiences in diaries, letters, illustrations, and poems. Two young officers treated for shell shock, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, rank among the finest poets of the war. Yet much of their verse would not have been written but for their psychotherapy. Chance brought the two poets together, and chance assigned each to a psychiatrist suited to his particular needs.

“These analysts acted as midwives to their works by interpreting their nightmares, clarifying their thoughts, and encouraging them in their creations. Owen, who in another context might have been left to languish in trauma, benefited from intensive therapy under Dr. Arthur Brock. Brock’s interest in science, sociology, folklore, Greek mythology, and nature studies accorded with Owen’s. It was Brock who expanded Owen’s horizons and gave him the self-confidence to tackle sundry outside tasks and restore his mental balance. Sassoon, in contrast, enjoyed intellectual engagement with his psychiatrist, Dr. William Halse Rivers, who did not trouble him with the outside activities that Brock imposed on Owen. Had Rivers treated Owen and Brock been responsible for Sassoon, this would have been a different story. Had both young officers been sent to different hospitals, they would not have met, and the poems they wrote would have been vastly different from the masterpieces the world knows.”

About the Author

Charles Glass is an American-British author, journalist, broadcaster and publisher. He was ABC News chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993, and has worked as a correspondent for Newsweek and The Observer. He is the author of Americans in Paris, Tribes with Flags, and The Northern Front: An Iraq War Diary, among other books.

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A former Middle East correspondent for ABC News, Charles Glass has written for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine and elsewhere.

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