By Cameron Telch

Cam Telch holds a Master Of Arts and a Master of Education and is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University. Cam has also volunteered at The Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada Regimental Museum and Archive.

Originally published in the Royal Canadian Military Institute’s Sitrep January-February 2024 Volume 84, Number 1. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

Introduction

The Canadian Centre for the Great War (CCGW) in Montreal is dedicated to preserving Canada’s memory of the Great War. Creating numerous virtual and in-person exhibitions, the CCGW has covered all aspects of the war, including the confinement of enemy populations in Canada, the demobilization of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and female nurses and medicine. At the beginning of 2023, the CCGW developed its latest online and travelling exhibition, Shell Shocked: The Long Road to Recovery.

Shell Shocked analyses the Canadian and some British narratives of shell shock. Covering the history of shell shock into five categories, they include “In the Trenches,” “Treatment,” “Malingerers,” “Armistice,” and “PTSD.” “In the Trenches” covers the connection between conflict and nervous breakdown; “Treatment” examines traditional and modern methods of psychiatry; “Malingerers” is the marginalization of shell-shocked soldiers; “Armistice,” is the aftermath of shell shock in post-war Canada; lastly, “PTSD” is the historical relationship between shell shock and PTSD. The CCGW’s exhibit argues that all soldiers and officers, regardless of social standing, were susceptible to a nervous breakdown during the war.

During the fall of 2023, the RCMI acquired Shell Shocked from the Lethbridge Military Museum in Alberta. While the exhibition covers a broad range of topics, this article will focus on the aftermath of shell shock in the post-war Western world. Shell Shocked reveals that two new schools of thought emerged during the war. The former was led by Dr. W.H.R. Rivers who argued that shell shock was a product of the war and developed treatments where shell-shocked victims were encouraged to discuss their trauma. Clarence B. Farrar, Chief Psychiatrist, the leading authority of the latter for the Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-establishment of Canada, asserted that shell shock was a condition of a weakened character deficiency or poor genetics. While the war did lead to the great shell shock debate, and often produced revolutionary new ideas toward the foundation of psychology, the latter school of thought about shell shock emerged, unfortunately, as the dominant position in Canada and Britain and, to some extent, in the United States after the war. As a result, shell-shocked veterans became victims of prejudice. This article will argue from a larger perspective in order to demonstrate that marginalization of shell-shocked veterans was not solely a Canadian phenomenon.

 The Official View of Shell Shock After the Great War

After the war, the question of shell shock lingered in the post-war Western world. Debates continued regarding the origin, diagnosis, and treatment of shell shock. The British government investigated the nature of shell shock with the 1922 Report of the War Office Committee Enquiry into Shell-Shock to try and settle the debate. Investigated and led by Lord Southborough in April 1920, the committee, including men who maintained traditional beliefs about mental illness, called forth fifty-nine witnesses to give evidence on shell shock, including army officers, psychologists, neurologists, and army doctors who treated shell-shocked soldiers, both on the Western Front and in Britain. After two years of testimony, and with the release of the final report in 1922, the committee recognized, to an extent, the need for psychological therapies to treat nervous soldiers; that doctors must acquire some understanding of psychology, and soldiers must be granted shorter periods of frontline service including constant rotation, and be sent home frequently to prevent nervous breakdowns.

While the 1922 document certainly contained some groundbreaking conclusions, they were overshadowed by the committee’s conservative beliefs about mental illness. The British War Office recommended that the term shell shock be abolished from the official military language, that nervous casualties not be listed as combat wounds, and that soldiers should receive better training to create a high spirit of morale to combat nervousness. As Lord Southborough’s committee concluded: “The most likely type of man for ‘shellshock’ is the brooding, introspective, self-analyzing man, the type who in the last war was constantly estimating his chance of survival, and whose imagination added the terrors of the future to those of the present.” Southborough’s committee disregarded the lived combat experiences of shell-shocked soldiers and officers. It unanimously decided that shell shock was a pre-existing condition that affected men with lesser masculine qualities, including those who easily succumbed to fear. It appeared that the lessons acquired from the war, including that every soldier and officer can have a breakdown in combat, were dismissed in favour of this new interpretation of shell shock.

The results from Southborough’s committee had far-reaching implications throughout the British Empire. In Canada, some doctors echoed a similar stance to that of their British counterparts. Sir Andrew (Dr.) Macphail, Canada’s official Great War historian, said: “that shell-shock is a manifestation of childishness and femininity and that against such there is no remedy; that hysteria is the most epidemical of all diseases.” Dr. Macphail, along with other Canadian medical authorities, contended that masculinity meant the suppression of emotions, and it was born on the battlefield. As Macphail thought, shell shock reverted its victims to a child-like mentality as they broke down crying, wet the bed, screamed when left alone at night, and panicked easily. He believed that shell-shocked men became overly hysterical as they “were not fit for the hard business of war.” In reality, the average shell-shocked Canadian soldier was 27 years old. In some ways, Macphail was correct to portray grown men as children as the image of “the early twentieth-century madman was widely held to be either dangerous or ridiculous.” While it was easier to depict shell-shocked veterans as boys to generate greater public compassion, the problem that Macphail implied was that they were grown men who required motherly affection, as he believed that shell shock deprived its victims of their manhood.

Throughout the mid-1920s, other experts in the United States interpreted shell shock differently. One expert, Dr. Frederick W. Parsons, of the New York State Hospital Commission, offered a radical view on it. Parsons denied the existence of shell shock, arguing “that there is no such thing as shell shock” from a psychological perspective. Parson still interpreted shell shock as a bodily injury from the result of an artillery explosion. Fear was the underlying reason why some soldiers broke down, despite the stoic state of the “soldier veteran who never complained of shell shock [as] real soldiers, the men who went through the crucible, never made a joke of a comrade laid up with shell shock.” For the shell-shocked veteran of the 1920s, their combat experiences were again undermined by this view. Shell shock was believed to be an example of mass hysteria where some soldiers panicked easily and could undoubtedly influence the behaviour of their comrades. Explaining shell shock from a physical point of view meant that wounds were attributed to their condition; Parson’s denial of shell shock from a mental health perspective indicated that there were no visible injuries to suggest otherwise.

The Shell-Shocked Veterans’ Experience

During the early 1920s, there was heightened anxiety in Britain that shell shock led to a surge in crimes among veterans. In February 1920, The Vancouver Sun reported that a former British officer shot and killed a bank manager during a robbery in Leeds. The same paper also relayed that, in a similar case, another robbery was committed by a veteran in Newcastle. The Vancouver Sun made it apparent that shell shock might make “[a] man (…) not know what he is doing and has left men weak-willed.” The debate that emerged during this period was that shell-shocked veterans were not in control of their actions when a crime was committed. Rather, they were the unfortunate victims of their mental tendencies. This image of the shell-shocked veteran probably created uneasiness among some Britons, who feared that they might not be held accountable for their crimes and used mental illness as their justification. However, not all people believed that the shell-shocked veteran would not be held accountable in the legal system. The Gazette conveyed that a report from the commissioners of prisons and the directors of convict prisons in Britain said, “shell shock [is] an excuse for criminal acts.” As this report argued, prosecuting and convicting shell-shocked veterans would send a clear message that they were not victims of their mental symptoms but had every intention to commit the crime for their own gain, whether it was robbery or fraud. The report communicated one message to the public: the shell-shocked ex-serviceman is highly unpredictable and menacing.

With the end of hostilities, Canadian veterans expected to receive their fair share from the state in the form of a pension. But those veterans with invisible wounds were at a massive disadvantage compared to ex-servicemen with physical injuries. Several government organizations were established between 1916 and 1918 to assist returning soldiers. The first of these was the Board of Pension Commissioners (BPC), created in 1916, to assist wounded soldiers who were ineligible to return to the workforce, and which eventually administered a pension system by 1918. The Department of Soldiers’ Civil Re-establishment (DSCR) was created in 1918 to evaluate the injuries of returning servicemen and determine the kind of medical treatment and job training they required. The DSCR submitted the medical forms of returned soldiers to the BPC, which determined their pension eligibility. Canadian veterans with a missing limb or in a sling or cast were granted a pension as their injuries proved beyond doubt that their injuries were war-related. Those veterans with shell shock and other mental health disorders experienced greater struggles as there was no evidence to suggest that their mental wounds were attributable to their service. One medical officer at the Ontario Military Hospital in Cobourg, Ontario dismissed shell shock as “simply exaggerated” as a special “kind of medical evidence” was required to qualify for a pension. The challenges of shell-shocked veterans were unparalleled since it was difficult to acquire a source of income, whether pension or job, to support themselves and their families. As The Calgary Daily Herald exemplifies, “a returned man, made a physical wreck through shell shock watches the mail hopefully twice a day for the pension which never comes. Until it does come, he and his two halfstarved little boys must have enough food and warmth to sustain them.”

During the Great War, there was a stigma in the Allied medical community that shell shock caused its sufferers to go insane. That same stigma was still associated with shell shock after 1918. In Canada, there is some evidence to suggest that some shell-shocked soldiers were admitted to lunatic asylums during the war. After the war, there are scant statistics in the archives about how many Canadian veterans with shell shock were declared insane and confined to mental institutions. While the reality is not as clear in Canada, the situation of shell-shocked veterans in Britain created a fulsome image. In Britain, as many as 5,000 or 6,000 British veterans with shell shock and other mental health disorders were sent to lunatic asylums. The situation for British veterans was gloomy, it was almost as if the British government absolved itself of caring for its citizen-veterans. The circumstances concerning the families of shell-shocked veterans were more demoralizing as some families could not handle the challenges, including screaming and violent outbursts, brought upon by their shell-shocked loved ones; to preserve their sanity, some families abandoned their loved ones and admitted them to lunatic asylums, where some veterans spent the remainder of their life.

Conclusion

Historian Martin Stone argued that the Great War was a watershed moment for the development and advancement of mental health. While it is certainly true that the war led to some groundbreaking psychiatric treatment methods, including talking therapies, the need for a quiet environment, diet, and rest, it appeared that the lessons of the war were forgotten during the post-war years. With the Second World War, the mental health lessons and treatments of the First World War had to be rediscovered and relearned. Even with the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cycle of rediscovery and relearning occurred yet again. With the endless pattern of violence and conflict throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, soldiers and officers of Western armies must suffer psychologically for the lessons of the past to be realized.

The CCGW’s Shell Shocked showcases the Canadian experience of shell shock but also touches upon the British experience. While highlighting the many commonalities between the Canadian and British experiences of shell shock, including combat and breakdown, the stigma of mental health, and the aftermath of shell-shocked veterans at the end of the Great War, Shell Shocked also demonstrates traditional and modern attitudes about mental health. The war was a clash of thinking between old and new ideas. This article argued that mental health attitudes did not change after the war, as the old way of thinking lingered. Shell-shocked soldiers were the victims of prejudice by the medical community during the war as they were mostly perceived as cowards, malingerers, or insane. While their service might have held personal significance in 1914, the war eventually changed by December 1914 as it became one of survival and attrition. From 1915 onwards, the service of shell-shocked soldiers to the Canadian Expeditionary Force and British Expeditionary Force meant almost nothing if they were to be treated quickly by doctors, only to return to the same inhumane conditions, including mud, rain, sleet, rats, lack of sleep, and constant artillery bombardments in their trenches, all of which was responsible for their breakdown, but rejected by many medical personnel. Even in the years after the war, many shell-shocked veterans were cast aside by the Canadian and British governments, receiving the same kind of treatment they underwent during the war. Deprived of the promise that the Canadian and British governments would care for their citizen-veterans, many shell-shocked veterans were left to their own devices to cope with their broken minds. They resorted to heavy drinking, or were confined, in some cases, for decades in mental asylums. Some also committed suicide, or existed on the fringes of their respective societies. Shell-shocked veterans truly suffered for nothing during and after the war, only to become marginalized and outcast in the official historiography of the Great War.