The Evil Hours (47 page)

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As Paul Fussell, one of the war's:
Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 7.

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Partly because of its catchiness as a phrase:
Winter, “Shell-shock,” 7–11. On page 7, Winter asserts, “‘Shell-shock' was a term which took on a notation which moved from the medical to the metaphysical . . . My central argument is that the term ‘shell-shock' was a specifically Anglo-Saxon representation not solely of damaged soldiers, but more generally of central facets of the war itself.” Winter concludes his essay by saying that “the history of shell-shock, properly configured, is not the history of the officer corps, but the history of the war itself.”

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One of the primary means for wounded minds:
Ibid., 10.

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As Pat Barker, the author of a Booker-winning:
See John Ezard, “Warring Fictions.”
The Guardian
, September 11, 1993.

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Owen and, to a lesser extent, Sassoon:
Lifton,
Home from the War
, 131. On page 19 of
Home from the War
, Lifton writes that “not surprisingly, World War I writings came closest [to the feelings of Vietnam veterans], especially battlefield recollections by Europeans of their responses to that war's dreadful combination of slaughter and meaninglessness.”

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The first hints that the war was impacting soldiers' minds:
See Lerner,
Hysterical Men
, 1; Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 1–3.

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The German offensive, intended to take:
See Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 43.

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“
Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire”:
See Owen,
Collected Poems
, 34.

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Charles Myers, a Cambridge psychologist:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 1; Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 20; Friedman,
Handbook of PTSD
, 20–21. See also Jay Winter, “Shell-shock and the Cultural History of the Great War,”
Journal of Contemporary History
35 (2000), 10.

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Qualified as a physician, Myers was an example:
See Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 21–27.

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On one side of the debate were the army's hardliners:
Ibid., 25.

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During World War I, more than 2,200 British soldiers:
Friedman,
Handbook of PTSD
, 21.

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According to one estimate, at least two hundred thousand British soldiers:
See Kelly,
Treating Young Veterans
, 263. See also Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 109.

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A distinguished neurologist, F
. 
W. Mott:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 30.

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Freud's ideas on hysteria:
Ibid., 104.

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Some contemporary trauma workers:
Interview with Bill Nash, 2012.

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This new policy, enacted by the Army Council in London:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 32.

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Confusion about how to treat war neuroses:
Ibid., 74–75. Also see Leed,
No Man's Land
, 170–180.

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Unsurprisingly, the use of electricity on soldiers was controversial:
See Winter,
Great War
. See also Laurent Tatu et al., “The ‘Torpillage' Neurologists of World War I: Electric Therapy to Send Hysterics Back to the Front.”
Historical Neurology
75 (2010): 279–283. Tatu describes in greater detail the controversy that followed the Deschamps case.

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One doctor who championed a more liberal approach:
Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 160–164; Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 121–127; Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 83–90; Leed,
No Man's Land
, 18–19.

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After the war, Rivers would conduct a study:
Leed,
No Man's Land
, 182.

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Rivers was fifty-one and serving as an army physician at Craiglockhart:
Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 121. For more on Sassoon's state of mind during this time, see Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 159–182.

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Whether or not Sassoon was technically suffering:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 89–90; Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 174, 176, 401; See also Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 111, where he talks about Sassoon's postwar nightmares.

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As Sassoon would later write in his heavily:
Sassoon,
Sherston's Progress
, 7.

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Rivers had been influenced by Freud:
Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 161; Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 85.

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As Sassoon saw it, the place was divided into two spheres:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 85.

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Also at Craiglockhart was another troubled infantry officer:
Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 165–171; Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 124; Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 93–95.

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By May, Sassoon was back in France:
See Egremont,
Siegfried Sassoon
, 203.

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The war was never far from his mind:
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 365; Fussell,
Great War and Modern Memory
, 86. In
The Great War and Modern Memory
, Fussell wrote about Sassoon, “By the time of the Armistice he was exhausted and trembly, sleepless and overwrought, fit for no literary work. He found peace and quiet again in Kent, but nightmares kept intruding. By 1926, however, he had recovered sufficiently to begin work on the obsessive enterprise which occupied most of the rest of his life, the re-visiting of the war and the contrasting world before the war in a series of six volumes of artful memoirs. The writing took him from one war to another: he finished the job in 1945. Exactly half his life he had spent plowing and re-plowing the earlier half, motivated by what—dichotomizing to the end—he calls ‘my queer craving to revisit the past and give the modern world the slip'” (111–112).

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In Britain alone, there were twenty shell-shock hospitals:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 110.

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Oddly, no veterans movement ever coalesced in Great Britain:
See Jay Winter, “Shell-shock,” 8.

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The one exception to this vast amnesia:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 154–157; Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 23–24.

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The book would be almost completely ignored:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 396.

 

4. The Haunted Mind

 

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While people suffering post-traumatic symptoms:
On the abnormal states of consciousness that sometimes result post-trauma, see Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
, 96. Describing certain aspects of Great War literature, Fussell argues, “The movement was towards myth, towards a revival of the cultic, the mystical, the sacrificial, the prophetic, the sacramental and the universally significant” (
Great War and Modern Memory
, 152). Annette Becker, in a 2000 article in the
Journal of Contemporary History
titled “The Avant-garde, Madness and the Great War,” argues that the madness of World War I was the catalyst for surrealism, an art movement fascinated with hallucination, the irrational, and the mysteries of the unconscious. “To psychiatrists, mental confusion and hallucinations were characteristic wartime syndromes, and the numerous case studies discussed seemed to the surrealists to be poems in prose suited just for them” (79). Becker quotes Surrealist poet ­André Breton: “I insist on the fact that surrealism cannot be understood historically without reference to war—I would say from 1918 to 1938—both the war it left behind and the one to which it returned” (71–72). Becker goes on to describe the art movement as one created by men haunted by the war: “In the 1920s and 1930s, many surrealist and expressionist artists and poets wrote that they were marked by war, trapped between beauty and violence, between despair and fascination. One case in point is the painter André Masson: ‘For me, violence is part of existence, and one must express it. That is why I returned from Switzerland to serve in the army, to be a common soldier, to see violence—not to inflict it, but to see it—but I was in it and had to be in it'” (72).

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The day before I hit an IED in Baghdad:
For more on these sorts of compensatory rumors and hallucinations, see the “Myth, Ritual, and Romance” chapter in Fussell's
The Great War and Modern Memory
, specifically pages 148–149.

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Modern science tends to look on such episodes:
Personal communication with Steve House.

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Perhaps, as Laurence Gonzales wrote:
Gonzales,
Surviving Survival
. Gonzales wrote that “dreams can be thought of as conversations between two parts of the brain, the hippocampus . . . and the neo-cortex” (134).

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The year after she was raped in a tunnel:
Sebold,
Lucky
, 216. See also ibid., 225–227. Personal communication with Alice Sebold, 2014.

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Ambrose Bierce, the most important American writer:
Gilpin Faust,
This Republic of Suffering
, 196, 199.

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Freud, a passionately secular man:
Caruth,
Trauma
, 115.

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Seventy years later, Cathy Caruth, a writer:
Ibid., 4–5.

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Beliefs about trauma's connection to the spiritual realms:
See Percy,
Demon Camp
. Personal communication with Jen Percy, 2014.

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Neuroscientists have long known that not all memories:
McGaugh,
Memory and Emotion
, 83. Interview with James McGaugh, 2013.

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But the extraordinary flashback memories:
See Chris Brewin and Steph J. Hellawell, “A Comparison of Flashbacks and Ordinary Autobiographical Memories of Trauma: Content and Language.”
Behaviour Research and Therapy
42 (2004): 1–12.

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“Memories gone wild”:
Interview with Clint Van Winkle, 2013.

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“In the past six years I've recoiled from remembering”:
Deraniyagala,
Wave
, 165–166.

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By 2007, at the height of the surge:
David H. Petraeus et al.,
FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency
, 80, 121.

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This situation was not, needless to say, governed by a rational process:
See Gonzales,
Surviving Survival
, 26.

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For this reason, cases of chronic PTSD:
As Jonathan Shay put it on page 169 of
Achilles in Vietnam:
“PTSD can unfortunately mimic virtually any condition in psychiatry.” See also Nicosia,
Home to War
, 182; Sarah Haley, “When the Patient Reports Atrocities: Specific Treatment Considerations of the Vietnam Veteran.”
Archives of General Psychiatry
(1974)
.

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So powerful, so transporting, are these intrusive memories:
Personal communication with Dewleen Baker, May 2012.

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One woman, who had been molested:
Sacks,
Hallucinations
, 238.

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Nearly all survivors report that certain:
O'Brien,
In the Lake of the Woods
, 79.

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Writing about it in an epilogue to his bestselling book:
Simpson,
Touching the Void
, 210.

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Needless to say, Simpson, who considers:
Personal communication with Joe Simpson, 2013.

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One study of 115 combat veterans with PTSD:
Holmes and Tinnin, “Problem of Auditory Hallucinations,” 1–7.

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Douglas Bremner, a researcher at Emory University, makes the point:
Bremner,
Does Stress
, 214.

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Post-traumatic hauntings require no such invitation:
Dean,
Shook over Hell
, 104.

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Michael Ferrara, a veteran wilderness first responder:
Sides, “The Man Who Saw Too Much,” 2011.

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As we saw in the previous chapter:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 85.

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An Indiana physician who treated Newell Gleason:
Dean,
Shook over Hell
, 151–153.

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The dead seem most likely to visit us at night:
Herr,
Dispatches
, 244.

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In fact, it was the modern war nightmare:
Gay,
Freud
, 400–401; Sacks,
Hallucinations
, 241. Cathy Caruth, on page 24 of
Trauma: Explorations in Memory
, says, “
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
indeed opens with Freud's perplexed observation of a psychic disorder that appears to reflect the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of violent events on the psyche. Faced with the striking occurrence of what were called war neuroses in the wake of World War I, Freud is startled by the emergence of a pathological condition—the repetitive experience of nightmares and relivings of battlefield events . . . the returning traumatic dream startles Freud because it cannot be understood in terms of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits.”