Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War

by Peter Leese

To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, 'shell shock' was uncanny, amusing and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British 'shell shocked' soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.

Genres: World War I, History, War, Cultural, Nonfiction

240 pages, Hardcover

First published July 12, 2002

Reviews

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Peter Leese does a decent job in this short book of giving an overview of how shell shock (now PTSD) was treated, understood, and perceived in Britain before, during, and after the Great War. The focus of the work, as the title makes clear, is the response of the English soldiers, civilians, and medical establishment, but since Great Britain's treatment of shell shock is contrasted with that of the Germans and the French, the work can't help but also shed some light on how the people in these other countries understood the still-contentious concept of war trauma. Because neurasthenia (as it was first known) was a close categorical cousin of hysteria, and hysteria was mostly associated with women, this naturally made men loath to claim that they were suffering from the illness, even when they had every right to be a bundle of shredded nerves after enduring long stretches under a rain of enemy shell fire.

Still, because the subject was tabooed at the time of the war, the reader gets the feeling that, try as the author may to investigate and understand how soldiers and doctors talked about these subjects, his path is barred by either the erasure of records (to respect the privacy, especially of the officers) or just the refusal of soldiers to divulge too much about their conditions.We may be curious about what these psychologically wounded men thought, but In a war in which soldiers were still being executed for cowardice, one can hardly blame these poor fellows for not being eager to speak honestly about their burgeoning neuroses.

Leese is on much solider ground when he leaves the medical literature produced during the war, and engages with the retconning of war experience in the post-war period, both by artists who were soldiers (like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves) as well as the playwrights and poets who created works that, while sometimes too didactic, were at least attempts to understand why so many had to die in what one writer called, "The great swindle."

There are some bits of interesting information here, and occasionally Leese does manage to find a record in which a soldier or doctor breathes life into the work and helps us understand their pain and confusion, but on the whole it feels like those from whom we needed to hear most are unfortunately the mutest in this work. That, of course, is not due to the fault of the diligent and insightful author, but I would be lying if I said that after I closed the book I felt as if my curiosity had even begun to be sated. I will search elsewhere, probably in fiction (as usual). Still, a qualified recommendation.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought that this book was very informative and interesting. I enjoyed the first two sections, Discoveries and Wartime, far more than the last section, Legacies, because they were less statistical. The issue of shell shock and how it is remembered is very important for our understanding of war in the 20th century and I believe that this book gives a good overview of the background to shell shock.

A weakness of the book was that, while it deals with the causes of shell shock and the medical, military, and government responses to it, it does not really address the social background that created society's interpretation of the disorder, except for addressing it briefly in the last chapter and conclusion. This is a very important part of history, understanding the societal context, so I think that more emphasis should have been put on the old Victorian ideals and the new ones that were created from the war.

Overall, I think that this book is a good starting point for understanding the facts surrounding shell shock but I believe that more societal background would have improved it. I did thoroughly enjoy the read, however.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very informative and intriguing. I especially appreciate Prof. Leese's careful scholarship and assertion that shell shock is not PTSD by another name. There are many lessons here about the effect of modern warfare, the reintegration of veterans into civilian life, and the reinterpretation of events by later generations.