Soldiers Don't Go Mad | World War I | Discover War Poets

Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry and Mental Illness During the First World War, by Charles Glass, Penguin Press, 2023.

ISBN 9781984877956

The title of Charles Glass’s thought-provoking Soldiers Don’t Go Mad is, fittingly, taken from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Repression of War Experience’, 1917 which appears in the front matter of the book.

And it’s been proved that soldiers don’t go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

In his Introduction Glass explains:

‘All the armies in the Great War had a word for it: the Germans called it “Kriegsneurose”; the French “la confusion mentale de la guerre”; the British “neurasthenia” and, when Dr. Charles Samuel Myers introduced the soldiers’ slang into medical discourse in 1915, “shell shock.”‘

He notes that in December 1914 ‘Britain’s armed forces had lost 10 percent of all frontline officers and 4 percent of enlisted men to “nervous and mental shock.”‘ A year later the medical journal The Lancet reported that ‘nearly one-third of all admissions into medical wards [were] for neurasthenia.’ The problem of soldiers’ mental health intensified in the summer of 1916 with the beginning of the Battle of the Somme on July 1st, where ‘nearly 20,000 British soldiers died and another 40,000 suffered wounds or were missing in action.’ As Sassoon himself noted in his diary entry for that day, just after 10 a.m.

I am looking at a sunlit picture of Hell. https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-09852-00001-00007/24

Starting in November 1914, the War Office opened a series of hospitals expressly to deal with shell shock: in this book Glass concentrates on perhaps the most famous of these – Craiglockhart in Scotland. Originally opened as a Hydropathic Institution in 1880, the Hydro, as it was familiarly known, was requisitioned by the War Office in the summer of 1916 and opened as the Craiglockhart War Hospital for officers only on October 27 1916. Commanded by Major William H. Bryce, the hospital had two outstanding psychiatrists, Dr Arthur John Brock and Dr William Halse Rivers, both of whom had qualified as neurologists and psychiatrists and both of whom sought to show that sympathetic therapy would work better than harsh discipline. Before it was closed in April 1919 the hospital had treated 1,801 officers, returning 758 of them to combat.

Probably the two best known patients of the hospital were Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. As Glass says:

‘much of their verse would not have been written but for their psychotherapy. Chance brought the two poets together, and chance assigned each to a psychiatrist suited to his particular needs. These analysts acted as midwives to their works by interpreting their nightmares, clarifying their thoughts, and encouraging them in their creations.’

Wilfred Owen arrived at Craiglockhart in late June 1917, Siegfried Sassoon arrived almost a month later in July: Owen was Dr Brock’s patient, Sassoon Dr Rivers’. Although the major part of this fascinating work concerns these two poets – their lives, their military experiences and treatment at Craiglockhart, their poetry, as well as their growing friendship – this is also a detailed history of the hospital and its personnel. Glass covers the experiences of many other patients and the development of the treatments at Craiglockhart, including the various societies and associations organised by the patients, and, most importantly, the new house journal, The Hydra, which Glass describes:

‘For all the hijinks portrayed in The Hydra, a suppressed truth haunted its writers and readers: the war had crippled them in mind and body. Many felt guilt for shaming their families and deserting the men they commanded. To get back to those they left in the trenches, they were fighting tough mental battles. Their struggles emerged in the pages of The Hydra. The journal was on its way to becoming a vehicle, not only for the men to voice their woes, but for some of the most profound and heartrending poetry of the war.’

An early contributor to The Hydra, was Max Plowman, a lesser-known poet, who became a patient at the hospital in March 1917 and was treated by Dr Rivers until deemed fit to return to light duty in May of the same year. His subsequent career is covered in some detail by Glass, culminating in his Court Martial in April 1918. The seventh edition of The Hydra, published in July 1917, introduced its new editor, Wilfred Owen who edited the journal only briefly, handing over the editorship in October 1917.

The friendship of Owen and Sassoon is not the only one covered here: the poet Robert Graves was a close friend of Sassoon who introduced him to Owen on October 13, 1917 – the only occasion when all three met together. This meeting resulted in a growing friendship between Graves and Owen with Graves, like Sassoon, suggesting minor changes to Owen’s work. Owen was discharged from the hospital on October 30, 1917, Sassoon left on November 26. They maintained a steady correspondence and exchanges of poetry from the time they left. Their final meeting took place in London in mid-August 1918, shortly before Owen returned to France.

This is a wide-ranging and absolutely fascinating study of the impact of war on the individual, the literary response to modern warfare, and ultimately to the value of simple friendship. Highly recommended.