The Somme by Martin Gilbert

Author:Martin Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2006-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

On August 8, after making an official report on the situation at the front line, Lieutenant Arthur Preston White wrote to his sister of how ‘Parties were at work everywhere clearing up the battlefield. Much of their work was done, but here and there bodies were still lying where they had fallen, the faces all blackened by this time. An occasional shell from beyond the ridge that lay in front of us served to remind us that not the whole of the Bosche army had been wiped out yet.’ Going even further forward ‘we ran into a bunch of shells, but we jolly soon ran out again.’

As the fighting on the Somme continued, thousands of men left the battlefield with their nerves shattered. Reporting sick and being asked what had happened, most would answer, ‘Shell shock.’ With some, this was clearly the case, but for the medical authorities it was not necessarily so. The British Army official medical historian states, ‘To explain to a man that his symptoms were the result of disordered emotional conditions due to his rough experience in the line, and not, as he imagined, to some serious disturbance of his nervous system produced by bursting shells, became the most frequent and successful form of psychotherapy. The simplicity of its character in no way detracted from its value, and it not infrequently ended in the man coming forward voluntarily for duty, after having been given a much needed fortnight’s rest in hospital.’

Still, the genuine cases of shell shock were also growing, reaching more than fifty thousand by the end of the war. It was during the Battle of the Somme that, because of the intensification of nervous breakdowns and shell shock, special centres were opened in each army area for diagnosis and treatment. The view of the military authorities, as the official medical history emphasizes, was that the subject of mental collapse was ‘so bound up with the maintenance of morale in the army that every soldier who is non-effective owing to nervous breakdown must be made the subject of careful enquiry. In no case is he to be evacuated to base unless his condition warrants such a procedure.’

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