The Long Run (6 page)

97
 Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 276.

CHAPTER SEVEN

E
VEN IN MASSIVE
conflicts like the American Civil War (1861-1865), with almost 650,000 casualties, it was disease, not enemy fire, that was the soldier’s insidious enemy. In the nineteenth century, cholera or typhus felled more men than swords or shells. As with all forms of weaponry, WWI created new such foes for the soldiers: trench foot, trench fever, gas poisoning. But the illness that spread most rampantly was shellshock.

Although “since the Greco-Persian wars there had been accounts of men behaving abnormally in combat,”
⁹⁸
in the First World War these incidents increased exponentially and created real manpower problems. They also affected outcomes on the battlefields, as soldiers on the front lines were reported, “running panic-stricken, casting away arms and equipment.”
⁹⁹

Military commanders were unsure which soldiers were truly shell-shocked and which were too frightened or unwilling to fight. Diagnosing the genuine sufferer from the malingerer fell to doctors.

Shellshock, though not always known by that term, had been studied for some time. Medical literature on the condition dated from the early seventeenth century, when it was called “nostalgia”;
¹⁰⁰
the soldiers lost all interest in the fighting and wanted only to return home. Their only relief seemed to be talking of home and family, but this was a reprieve, not a cure (which proved elusive). Even worse, from a general’s point of view, one soldier’s longing could infect another, which could prove epidemic to a force or fatal to an individual.
¹⁰¹

Published reports of shellshock (or, as it was known in Britain, a “soldier’s heart”
¹⁰²
) appeared before the end of 1914 and “during the course of the conflict more than 120,000 British soldiers were pensioned off ” with it.
¹⁰³
The symptoms included shakiness, fatigue, terrible dreams; some sufferers went blind or deaf or mute.
¹⁰⁴
The number of cases increased dramatically after July 1, 1916.
¹⁰⁵

Even as medical research progressed, many practitioners, as well as the military chain of command, felt the problem was sheer weakness of character—or worse, lack of courage. Hundreds of soldiers were shot for cowardice and desertion—Haig insisted on this punishment, fearing pardons would seriously dilute the morale and fighting strength of his forces.
¹⁰⁶
(This judgement stood until 2006 when the families of the WWI soldiers so sentenced were told their executed relatives would receive posthumous pardons.)
¹⁰⁷

German evidence, too, suggested a soldier’s personality, combined with his position in the field (for example whether he was near or on the front line), would determine whether he would develop a war neurosis. It was argued that soldiers away from the front, including prisoners of war, rarely displayed such an indisposition. And while the German soldiers might not be shot for desertion, the prescribed treatments could be terrible. After the war, German veterans cited Viennese psychiatric professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg for “the brutal use of electric-shock therapy to treat German soldiers invalided with functional somatic symptoms.”
¹⁰⁸

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist and father of psychoanalysis, thought the problem affected only unwounded soldiers, as soldiers who were injured had a physical manifestation of their ordeal, but this was not borne out by the evidence and experience of the men who came through the war.

Similarly, the once-accepted thesis that prisoners of war could not be affected by battle trauma would also be dismissed, and by 1945 it was noted that prisoners of war often had more trouble than other soldiers re-adapting to civilian life. But during and after WWI this line of thought still prevailed, and was the accepted view of the War Congress of the German Psychiatric Association in Munich in September 1916.
¹⁰⁹

Still in the trenches, many soldiers steeped in their own trauma. They began to believe the war would simply never end.
¹¹⁰
They did not discuss this. Even after the war, the soldiers seldom talked about it, their experiences and their trauma.

Robertson rarely did.

98
Terry Copp and Mark Osborne Humphries,
Combat Stress in the 20th Century: The Commonwealth Perspective
(Kingston: Canadian Defence Academy Press, 2010), 1.

99
David Rowland,
The Stress of Battle: Quantifying Human Performance in Combat
(London: TSO, 2006), 181.

100
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 63.

101
Copp and Humphries,
Combat Stress
, 1 & 3.

102
Copp and Humphries,
Combat Stress
, 2. In WWII it was called “battle fatigue,” and is now known as “PTSD” or “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” and it remains stigmatized. Gayle MacDonald, “A Picture of PTSD,”
The Globe and Mail
(9 June 2014), L1.

103
Copp and Humphries,
Combat Stress
, 8.

104
Ibid., 9-10.

105
Ibid., 11.

106
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 347.

107
MacDonald, “PTSD,” L1.

108
Copp and Humphries,
Combat Stress
, 412.

109
Copp and Humphries,
Combat Stress
, 412.

110
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 365.

CHAPTER EIGHT

R
OBERTSON WAS ADMITTED
to the 3rd London General Hospital in the London suburb of Wandsworth on July 8, 1916. The institution had been automatically transformed from the Royal Patriotic School (formerly Asylum) to a War Hospital on August 5, 1914, the day after war was declared. The building dated from 1859, established for the orphaned daughters of soldiers and sailors who had fought in the Crimean War (1854-1856). These children were allotted to nearby homes for the duration of this new conflict.

There were four Territorial General Hospitals in London, and the 3rd was the one in need of the most alterations:

The metamorphosis of the school into the hospital was an extremely complicated task: not only had practically all the school’s furniture to be removed, but many structural changes were made: the windows altered, hopper sashes put in, lavatories and baths attached to those rooms which were to become wards, and so forth.
¹¹¹

The dining room became the reception ward. The entrance hall housed the telephone exchange. Lifts were installed and the kitchen expanded. A bronze statue of Kitchener was on prominent display.

The main building was now composed of wards for medical and surgical cases, with two large wards for ophthalmic patients, whose eyes had been injured by gas. For patients deemed insane, there was the standard specially designed environment, a padded room.

The influx of shellshocked soldiers continued. By May 1915, all four Territorial General Hospitals had been required to establish neurological sections for patients suffering shellshock, also termed neurasthenia—fatigue, anxiety, headaches, neuralgia, and depression.

An X-ray department was much in use for detecting any bullets that remained inside soldiers. A camp for infectious diseases was isolated from the main structure. There was a mortuary and a post-mortem room and three chapels, one adorned with an ivory crucifix, a personal gift from Queen Amelie of Portugal.

To facilitate the transportation of wounded, who were being brought from their landings on England’s south coast, a temporary railway station was built out front.

Almost immediately it was obvious the facility, with 200 beds, was too small. Ten hutted wards holding twenty or twenty-five beds, of corrugated iron covered in asbestos felt and featuring a verandah (dubbed “Bungalow Town”), and an operating theatre, were ordered and constructed in eight weeks, allowing for 520 beds. Even then, the expansions continued. By May 1916, the 3rd in Wandsworth had 2000 beds. Altogether it became one of the largest hospitals in Britain. It was also the first to use women from the Voluntary Aid Detachment instead of male soldiers—a controversial but ultimately effective and widely adopted move.

The 3rd had its own special division. Several patients had severe facial injuries and sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, who was too old to enlist and volunteered at the hospital
instead, offered to help them. The War Office accepted his aid and Wood set up the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department (aka the “tin noses shop”). He took facial casts and made prosthetic masks of silvered copper, which were painted to match skin tone and held in place with spectacles. These innovative artworks allowed acutely scarred soldiers an entry back into the world, a face that could be shown in public.

In fact, the 3rd benefited from the talents of many other artists, writers, and sculptors from the Chelsea Arts Club who were too old for service and volunteered as orderlies. For example, they also produced a monthly magazine,
The Gazette
. All the hospitals had such publications, but
The Gazette
was one of the finest.

This contributed to the 3rd’s excellent reputation for treatment. By November 1917, 40,000 patients had been admitted, and only 270 died. By the time it closed in August 1920, over 62,708 patients from throughout the British Empire had been admitted to the hospital.

The building then became an orphanage once more, until 1938 when the children were evacuated to Hertfordshire with the threat of another world war. The children never returned to London.
¹¹²

As Robertson continued to recover,
¹¹³
he spent time in London and Oxford and on assignment with the Regimental Depot in Ayr. He was discharged August 28, 1917, as medically
unfit, returned to St. John’s, and went back to work with his father. The war would officially end on the Western Front at 11 am, November 11, 1918.

About one in eight of the men who fought, died.
¹¹⁴
Yet no country could point to substantial gains; in fact, entire empires—German, Russian, Turkish, and Austrian—were vastly diminished or entirely effaced. Nations were fractured into new states like Yugoslavia. France reclaimed the territories of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to the German Empire in 1871. France and Britain also gained the Middle Eastern “mandates” of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine, where Britain was committed to establishing a Jewish national home. While America stood on the brink of its financial and military superpower, almost all “The victors of the First World War had paid a price far in excess of the value of all their gains; a price so high, indeed, that they would very shortly find themselves quite unable to hold on to most of them.”
¹¹⁵

111
“The Origin of the 3rd L.G.H…Reprinted from The Gazette of the 3rd London General Hospital, February 1917,”
The WWI Document Archive
, online, accessed July 2014.

112
“The Origin of the 3rd L.G.H.,”
World War I Document Archive
, online, accessed July 2014. During WWII, M16, the branch dedicated to foreign intelligence, used the building for detention and interrogation. It later became run-down, abandoned, and a target for vandals. In the 1980s it was sold for one pound sterling, and was renovated and repurposed. The structure still stands and now includes apartments, artists’ studios, a drama school, and a French restaurant.

113
While Robertson was in hospital, a “Mr. Roy M. Robertson” received permission to visit him; the pass refers to Robertson as Eric’s “brother,” but Roy Robertson was more likely a cousin.

¹¹⁴
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 141.

¹¹⁵
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 434-436.

CHAPTER NINE