Before My Helpless Sight by Bergen Leo van

Author:Bergen, Leo van.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2009-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The alleged hallmark: cowardice

It’s better to be a coward for five minutes … than dead your entire life.

Edlef Köppen, Heeresbericht

Although a subconscious flight into insanity was far from unusual, there is no reason to conclude that neurosis was caused by cowardice. Rarely were symptoms found to be less than genuine, and faking was no simple matter. Nevertheless, as Gibbs pointed out, in the early years of the war especially, the neurotic was commonly considered a deserter or a coward.252 After all, if he was suffering from mental exhaustion as a result of the conditions of war, then why was one soldier affected more than another? Any man who was treated as mentally ill or psychologically wounded rather than as a deserter had his luck to thank more than anything else. Many officers regarded neurosis as extremely convenient for the man concerned. In their view it was simply a new, rather charming euphemism for what had previously been called cowardice or lack of discipline. A number of officers testified before the War Office Committee on Shell Shock that the public acceptance of neurosis had been little short of a disaster. They believed it had given neurotics the kind of legitimacy that ought to be reserved for the physically disabled. E. Macpather, for example, could see no difference between shell shock and cowardice. Both were the result of fear.253 It is telling that the wound stripes British soldiers were allowed to sew onto their uniforms from mid-1916 onwards for every wound they had received were restricted to physical wounds.254 As we shall see, some of those accused of cowardice, court-martialled and condemned to death were in fact mentally ill at the time of their arrest.255 Perhaps this was one reason why so many psychological wounds expressed themselves in physical symptoms. Paralysis was not a punishable offence.

In August 1915 Gordon Fisher found a fellow British soldier in a dugout shortly after the order had been given to attack.

His face was yellow, he was shaking all over, and I said to him, ‘What the hell are you doing here? Your battalion is out in front. What are you doing back here?’ He said, ‘I can’t go. I can’t do it. I daren’t go!’ Now, I was pretty ruthless in those days and I said to him, ‘Look, I’m going up the line and when I come back if you’re still here I’ll bloody well shoot you!’ … When I came back, thank God, he’d gone. … He’d got genuine shell-shock. We didn’t realise that at the time. We used to think it was cowardice.256

Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Maxwell of the 12th Middlesex Regiment wrote in a letter to his wife dated 26 July 1916:

‘Shell shock’ is a complaint which, to my mind, is too prevalent everywhere; and I have told my people that my name for it is fright, or something worse, and I am not going to have it. Of course, the average nerve system of this class is much lower than ours, and sights and sounds affect them much more.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.