Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century

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50 war and remembrance

violence. They seem to come from another world, one we ignore at our

moral peril.

This leads to the third level of witnessing, one of universal signif-

icance. For beyond the war crimes trials, and beyond narratives of

persecution or genocide, there stands the witness as a spokesman for

humanity as a whole. Witnessing has thus come to take on a kind of

categorical imperative which Kant wrote about two centuries ago.

They tell us of events which, whatever their origin, seem to make

moral thinking, indeed moral living, impossible. Thus listening to

witnesses, aiding them, respecting them, appears to be a precondi-

tion of moral life as a whole. ‘‘The duty to remember’’ is a phrase

which captures the multifaceted meaning of witnessing in our times.

This is part of the story of the memory boom, but by no means its

only source.

There were witnesses of many kinds who emerged from the

Great War to tell their stories and to make their moral claims on the

survivors. War crimes trials were held after the war in Germany and

in Turkey, but they were relatively limited in their scope, and they

were soon forgotten. But if the witnesses were not in courtrooms,

they were everywhere else. The two memory booms of the twentieth

century share this focus on the authority of direct experience, on the

words and images we have of those who went through la boucherie,

the slaughterhouse of the Great War, or through the concentration

and extermination camps of the Second World War.

One of the challenges of the next decades is to try to draw to-

gether some of these disparate strands of interest and enthusiasm

through a more rigorous and tightly argued set of propositions

about what exactly memory is, and what it has been in the past. The

only ﬁxed point at this moment is the near ubiquity of the term. No

one should delude herself into thinking we all use it the same way.

Our concern with memory has grown exponentially, and at a pace

much more rapid than the development of the conceptual tools we

The Setting 51

need to understand it. But just as we use words like love and hate

without ever knowing their full or shared signiﬁcance, so we are

bound to go on using the term ‘‘memory,’’ the historical signature of

our own generation.

With this set of cultural developments in mind, the rest of this

book dwells on one crucial element in the linkage between history

and memory. The primary focus of this study is on the ways groups

of people, particularly in Europe since 1914, have imagined and re-

membered war and the victims of war in the twentieth century.

While the subject of war by no means reaches all the protean features

of the ‘‘memory boom,’’ we cannot ignore war and memories of war

as central to the activity I term historical remembrance. The rest of

this book aims to show how this is so.

chapter 2

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity

In one particular way, the Great War reconﬁgured popular and med-

ical notions about memory. In 1915, the British psychiatrist Charles

Myers introduced the term ‘‘shell shock’’ to describe a set of dis-

abling injuries su√ered by men at the front. The medical history of

this term has been ably explored; less well documented is the way the

appearance of thousands of men with psychological injuries has

come to frame what we now term ‘‘traumatic memory.’’ Shell-

shocked soldiers were the ﬁrst carriers of post-traumatic stress

disorder in the twentieth century. To appreciate how we, nearly a

century later, understand the memories of those who survive over-

whelming violence, we must return to the Great War and to the

history and representation of shell shock. Those representations

took many forms—medical, poetic, ﬁctional, visual. We need to

attend to them all to be able to comprehend why this phenomenon,

arising in the 1914–18 conﬂict, has come to symbolize traumatic

injury and traumatic memory throughout the twentieth century.

Shell Shock

First, what did the term mean to those who saw it during the Great

War and after? Shell shock is a condition in which the link between

an individual’s memory and his identity is severed. A set of un-

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 53

assimilable images and experiences, arising from war service, either

in combat or near it, radically disturbs the narrative, the life story, of

individuals, the stories people tell themselves and others about their

lives. Through such stories, we know who we are, or at least we think

we do.

∞

Shell shock undermines that orientation, that point of refer-

ence from which an individual’s sense of self unfolds. His integrity,

in the sense of his having an integral personality, one with a then and

a now which ﬂowed together, becomes uncertain because of what he

has felt and seen and what he continues to feel and see. In many cases

the visual imagination is central to this condition. Before the eyes of

a shell-shocked man were images frequently of an uncanny, life-

threatening, and terrifying kind, and they endure. Their meaning,

that is, their location alongside other images and experiences, is

unclear or bizarre. These visualized or felt traces of war experience

can tend to live a life of their own, a life at times so vivid and

powerful as to eclipse all others. They can paralyze; in extreme cases,

they can kill. Suicide is the ultimate escape from them.

Fortunately, most of the men who fought did not su√er from this

condition, and most of those who did were able to ﬁnd a way to live

with it or move beyond it. Their recovery was independent of most

medical care, since the pathways of causality in this area of neuro-

psychology were unknown and patterns of care were unsettled and

highly subjective. Many doctors made informed guesses, but the

initial presumption of a purely organic cause of psychological dis-

turbances had to be discarded over time. What would replace the

initial, purely physical model of psychiatric illness was an open ques-

tion; it remains open today.

Whatever the state of medical knowledge, physicians still had a

task to do. They had thousands of psychologically damaged soldiers

to care for. By 1917, perhaps one quarter of all men sent down the

line in British forces were unﬁt because of psychological stress of one

kind or another. The breakdown rate was no lower in the German

54 war and remembrance

and Austrian armies, but the recovery rate of such men was higher,

in part because of the assembly-line treatment of these men. Recov-

ery rates of 90 percent were reported,

≤

but surely these results simply

meant that damaged men were declared healthy, then sent back to

the front, where they broke down again. Shell shock was the same in

all armies, though medical nomenclature and policy di√ered be-

tween and among them.

≥

In every army doctors did what they could,

mostly through listening, caring, and counseling. In this way they

played a real, though sometimes minor, role in the rehabilitation of

these men. When discharged, shell-shocked men found much less

sympathy from war pension o≈cials, whose job primarily was to

reduce the charge on the public purse rather than to meet the state’s

obligation to men su√ering war-related injury.

∂

Self help, cama-

raderie, and family support were the most common path to recovery

for those not severely disabled.

Whatever the degree of disability they su√ered, and however

they were cared for, the presence in towns and villages, in cities and

on the land, of thousands of shell-shocked men raises important

issues for our understanding of the aftermath of war, and of the way

the Great War conﬁgured di√erent notions of memory at the time.

Thinking about the term and the men whose lives it describes o√ers

a framework within which to claim yet again that the survivors of

the Great War constituted a ‘‘generation of memory.’’ In this case the

memories in question were disabling, disturbing, unassimilable.

In the later twentieth century, this form of troubled remem-

brance has been reconﬁgured in di√erent ways, as combat fatigue or

post-traumatic stress disorder. But all discussions of the notion of

traumatic memory sooner or later return to the scene of the crime,

the site of combat in which the term ‘‘shell shock’’ was invented and

circulated.

In this chapter, I want to o√er a number of reﬂections on shell

shock. Contemporaries had enormous trouble in comprehending a

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 55

set of conditions which did not ﬁt normative categories of behavior

under ﬁre. At one pole of rectitude stood duty and stoical endur-

ance. At the other stood deceit—feigned psychological injury. There

were many good examples of both. But between the two was a vast

array of men whose condition barred them from duty through no

fault of their own, and through no e√ort to deceive. The predica-

ment of these men and those who treated them is at the heart of the

history of shell shock.

Embodied Memory

One way to open this discussion is to visualize it (ﬁgs. 1–3). Early in

the war, army physicians began to handle cases of psychological

breakdown, paralysis, and disturbingly uncontrolled physical be-

havior among men who had been in combat. From these cases, C. S.

Myers and others coined the term ‘‘shell shock,’’ assuming that some

physical damage like concussion arose from exposure to artillery ﬁre

and the like.

∑

Though these physicians were later to distance them-

selves from this nomenclature, it stuck.

∏

It is important to try to see

the phenomenon with their eyes. What was it that these physicians

saw? We know something about this question from physician train-

ing ﬁlms made in the war. The disturbing character of these images,

I believe, lay both in the body of the su√erer and in the gaze of the

onlooker. Together they (and we) share embodied memory.

In al-

most every instance, the conversion of emotional states to physical

ones is apparent. The involuntary movement of the jaw of a man

who had bayoneted another locates the incident in his own body.

His body is telling the story of what he had done. There are war

stories too in the unsuccessful e√orts of a man trying to stand up or

in the tremors of the man whose walking is not under control, and

whose walk has a curious resemblance to Charlie Chaplin’s. More of

that below. We can simply ask, where had their legs taken them?

56 war and remembrance

Fig. 1. Shell-shocked British soldier in rehabilitation to regain the use of his

limbs. (KCET, Los Angeles)

Their bodies bore the traces of combat. There is embodied memory

too in the case of a man who responds to nothing other than the

word ‘‘bomb,’’ which (when heard) sends him scurrying under the

bed; and in the terriﬁed response of a French soldier triggered by

the sight of an o≈cer’s hat. These soldiers have internalized mem-

ory; it is inside them, and when touched, their bodies respond as if

they were sprung coils.

Here we can see and feel one kind of embodied memory. It is

written on the men who fought, or inscribed in them in a way which

is not subject to their direct or premeditated control. In all instances,

images and memories seem to live both imbedded in these people

and curiously detached from them; memory itself, or images of

overwhelming events, appear to be free-ﬂoating powerful agents

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 57

Fig. 2. Shell-shocked French soldier relearning the use of his legs. (KCET, Los

Angeles)

which somehow control the jaw of a man, or his leg, or all his

movements.

In e√ect, these men’s bodies perform something about their war

experience. As we shall consider in the conclusion to this book, shell

shock is a theater of memory out of control. The bodies of these

soldiers hold traces of memory; they are speaking to us, though not

in a way which we usually encounter. Here stories become ﬂesh;

physical movements occur without end or direction, or there is no

movement at all.

If memories tell us who we are, then what did these powerful

memory traces of combat tell these men about who they were? These

images, feelings, and memories didn’t ﬁt; they could not be interpo-

lated in a story of before and after. They challenged and sometimes

even fragmented identity, and one of the fragments overwhelmed all

58 war and remembrance

Fig. 3. Shell-shocked French soldier recovering the use of his limbs with the aid

of electric-shock treatment. (KCET, Los Angeles)

others. It is this kind of frozen moment which we see in these im-

ages; a few gestures concentrate those events and memories of them.

Sometimes soldiers (with or without the aid of physicians) could

specify what these memories were. It may have been an incident in

combat; at other times, crucial events were more di≈cult to locate.

But in all these cases, bodies seem to remember something, they

engage in a kind of unwitting reenactment

∫

which tended to defy

both verbal expression and the urge to forget.

I want to turn now to the second sense of embodied memory,

that related to those who viewed these images, or who saw these men

or thousands like them. The ﬁlms of these images were made to train

physicians how to treat psychologically damaged soldiers. Most

army doctors were at a loss as to how to help these men; Freud was

similarly puzzled and uncertain.

Ω

We know that other physicians—

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 59

the Austrian physician and future Nobel prize winner Julius Wagner-

Jauregg, for instance—used electroconvulsive shock treatment to

discourage malingering. In Figure 3 we see a rare photograph of the

use of electricity to stimulate recalcitrant muscles to help do their

job, and to help a man clearly struggling to walk again. No malinger-

ing here. We know that other physicians used electroconvulsive

shock treatment in even more radical ways, though these celebrated

cases were exceptional.

∞≠

What were the lessons learned by the origi-

nal viewers of these images, the medical men whose job it was to try

to make them better? It is hard to say precisely; such evidence as we

have indicates that these images were used to help separate the ma-

lingerer from the legitimate su√erer of shell shock. The movements

of these men are not conjured up; the men can’t repeat them on

request, because they are automatic or uncontrolled. Charlie Chap-

lin can walk with an awkward gait, and make us feel he is about to

fall; everyone knows it is an act, he can start it or stop it at will; but

these men are not acting. Wartime ﬁlm footage was there to better

enable physicians to tell who was really sick and who was simply

trying it on. How to separate the two was a virtually impossible task,

but visual evidence was there to help.

The therapeutic context was only one site where such images

appeared. Other soldiers saw such men, and so did civilians, when

the soldiers were sent back from casualty clearing stations to base

hospitals or home, or when they returned to the front and broke

down again, a far from uncommon occurrence. These injured men

were there, an integral part of the community of soldiers, not so

much a nation as a brotherhood, the ‘‘génération de feu,’’ ‘‘ceux de

’14.’’ And yet their illnesses were so odd, so frightening, that their

presence was always a problem. The stigma of mental illness did not

vanish just because it was registered in the service of one’s country.

To see such men was to encounter a side of war no one wanted to

confront.