It is when the bayonet charge has forced one side’s soldiers to turn their backs and flee that the killing truly begins, and at some visceral level the soldier intuitively understands this and is very, very frightened when he has to turn his back to the enemy. Griffith dwells on this fear: “Perhaps this fear of retreat [in the face of the enemy] was linked to a horror of turning one’s back on the threat…. A type of reverse ostrich syndrome may have applied, whereby the danger was bearable only while the men continued to watch it.” And in his superb study of the American Civil War, Griffith
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