How soldiers and doctors struggled with effects of industrial warfare

READ MORE: Children of this Land by Serafina Crolla

The War Office responded by opening a series of “mental hospitals” to deal with this epidemic. “The best of them,” writes Charles Glass in Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, was the reconfigured Craiglockhart War Hospital, whose elegant portals opened to its first batch of traumatised officers on October 27, 1916.
Subtitled A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry and Mental Illness During the First World War, this absorbing book is much more than the history of a single institution. For within Craiglockhart’s walls, far from the rattle of gunfire, ferocious battles were being fought not only for the health of its residents, but over the morality of Britain’s continued pursuit of the so-called “Great War”.
“A complete and glorious loaf” was how one patient caricatured Craiglockhart, whose “country house” ethos saw residents lounging around in carpet slippers and passing their days playing billiards or cricket. By night, however, those genteel corridors resounded with the screams of young men reliving in nightmares the horrors they had endured in the trenches. 
Helping patients address those spectres through Freudian dream therapy was among the techniques used by Craiglockhart’s psychiatrists, including Scot Dr Arthur Brock and Englishman Dr William Rivers.

Craiglockhart (Image: free)

As disciples of the Austrian neurologist, both had studied in Germany – a controversial legacy in itself, at a time when soldiers were schooled to hate “the Boche”. (Some patients recalled bayonet training led by Highlander Major Ronald Campbell, who taught that the only good “Boche” was a dead one. “You might meet a German who says, ‘Mercy! I have 10 children,” he warned. “Kill him! He might have 10 more.”)
In fact, simply by recognising the condition we now term PTSD, those medics were confounding contemporary wisdom that construed traumatised young soldiers as malingerers or cowards deserving of punishment rather than treatment. Moreover, their pioneering therapies contrasted with institutions that favoured treating neurasthenics with rest, isolation and a milk diet, or, alternatively, electric shocks, cold-water ducking and convulsion-producing drugs. 
Craiglockhart patients were encouraged to socialise, exercise and participate in artistic endeavours, the fruits of which were published in The Hydra: an in-house magazine curated by a series of patient-editors, most famously, Wilfred Owen. Already an emerging poet, Owen’s work blossomed at Craiglockhart under the influence of fellow patient Siegfried Sassoon, who’d been declared insane and sent to what he called “Dottyville” following his public opposition to Britain’s “prolongation” of the war. 

READ MORE: Murder at Holly House by Denzil Meyrick is a change of direction

The tale of the two poets’ meeting there has been oft-told, not least in Pat Barker’s novel, Regeneration. Glass’s meticulously researched account adds thought-provoking context to their stories and those of other, lesser-known patients. It also includes lots of interesting details about the Edinburgh encountered by Craiglockhart patients, who were often so alarmed by the booming of the one o’clock gun that the hospital’s commandant lobbied successfully for it to be silenced. 
Glass raises searching questions about warfare, human fragility and class. As an officers-only facility, Craiglockhart cared mainly for well-educated young gentlemen who, even at the Front, would have been billeted in superior (though still squalid) quarters, with working-class “batmen” to clean for them. The wealthy Sassoon, who seems to have spent much of his civilian life riding to hounds, had a uniform tailored for him in London before reporting for duty with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. 
Owen’s background, as the son of a railway inspector, was less vaulted and his diction less polished. While at Craiglockhart, he spent time teaching literature to pupils at Tynecastle High School but he also made valuable links among the hospital’s well-connected residents that would help pave the way for his works to be published, albeit posthumously. 
The most significant facet of the class system, however, was the fact those men were there at all. That their nerves had been pulverised is not in doubt, and some were beyond help. No amount of dream therapy could salve the torment of one young lad who had regained consciousness after a shell-blast to find his head inside the rotting torso of a dead German soldier. But as Glass points out, Tommies who had been mentally disabled by horror had no choice but to carry on or be shot for cowardice or desertion. 
Nor need we look far to find evidence of that disparity. Craiglockhart’s head gardener, Henry Carmichael, had already lost a son, a nephew and a grandson to the war. When another son and nephew returned home severely shell-shocked, “the only therapy such enlisted men were likely to get”, writes Glass, was mowing the lawns on which the officer-patients played cricket. 
It is, however, due in no small part to Craiglockhart that “the old lie” about the glory of dying for one’s country was punctured. Wilfred Owen was killed shortly after returning to the Front but the poems he completed in Edinburgh – including the magnificent Anthem for Doomed Youth and Dulce Et Decorum Est – survive. And no-one can doubt that consciences were sincerely exercised in the hospital’s consulting rooms, as Sassoon wrestled with conflicted loyalties to his principles and his comrades and doctors pondered the ethics of reconditioning wounded psyches only to return them to the hell that had caused their breakdown. In Rivers’s view, “shell-shock” was a misnomer for a perfectly “normal reaction to abnormal circumstances”.
Soldiers Don’t Go Mad powerfully underlines the important lessons Craiglockhart’s most famous patients had to teach us. For of course, the real madness of 1914-18 lay not in tortured minds, but in the forces that obliged people to kill, die or suffer unspeakable agonies for dubious ends. More than 100 years after the Armistice, that message remains as pertinent as ever.