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

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60 war and remembrance

Shell-shocked men were not the only people hard to face in the

postwar world. The gueules cassées, or disﬁgured men, were there

too. So were the amputees and those with prosthetic arms and legs.

Otto Dix painted them on street corners in Germany, or playing

cards in a harsh satiric reconﬁguration of Cezanne’s Cardplayers of

1893–96.

My fundamental point is that these men challenged contempo-

rary understandings of memory. The images these men had in their

minds did not fade when they left the ﬁeld of battle. Conventional

notions of masculinity or stoicism did not hold when men of un-

questionable courage broke down under the weight of their memo-

ries. Those who saw these medical training ﬁlms were viewing mem-

ories which had taken over the lives of the men who had them. These

people were walking arguments against the view that demobilization

came to an end when the last serving soldier in a combat unit left the

service. Mental illness—as much as physical disabilities—told an-

other story, one which lingered.

There is a third concentric circle we need to examine—beyond

the su√erers and their comrades. What do we see when we gaze at

these images? We see men who su√er; men like us. We see their

embodied memory, and link it to what we think we know about war

and its aftermath. How this happens is a complicated and lengthy

story, but my guess is that for several generations, in some countries

and not in others, such images have been fundamental in establish-

ing what Samuel Hynes calls a ‘‘war-in-the-head,’’ mental furniture

about war and what it does to people. It challenges our understand-

ing of what memory is.

It is important to note the culturally di√erentiated nature of this

argument. In Britain (but not to the same degree or in the same way

in France or Germany), as a result of stories, poems, and especially

images, successive generations have inherited a set of icons or meta-

phors about the war. Shell shock is one such metaphor. Metaphors

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 61

are always open to interpretation. But they have truths in them to

which their survival attests. One of them is that battle does not end

when the ﬁring stops; it goes on in the minds of many of those who

returned intact, or apparently unscathed, and in the su√ering of

those whose memories are embodied, enacted, repeated, performed.

Memory and Identities

I have tried to suggest that the phenomenon of shell shock raised

fundamental questions about the linkage between memory and

identity. This subject has a vast literature in the ﬁeld of cognitive

psychology.

∞∞

What historians of the Great War can contribute to

this discussion is documentary evidence as to how in the past this

link was broken in some cases and fortiﬁed in others in particular by

the telling of stories, the creation of narratives, which may have

helped some men to withstand memories of combat. There can be

no ﬁrm rules applied to this process, which varied according to a

host of factors related to a soldier’s age, education, profession, tem-

perament, the nature and duration of the particular ordeal he had to

endure, as well as the speed and kind of medical care and other

assistance he received when injured. Physical injury had psychologi-

cal sequelae, a complication which almost certainly makes all statis-

tics about the number of men who su√ered from something like

shell shock a serious underestimate. What we can rely on, though,

are contemporary representations of shell shock. I will try in a hand-

ful of cases to illustrate this subject, both with respect to those who

su√ered disabling psychological injury and to those who apparently

did not. In both cases, we can o√er some documentation about the

ways soldiers represented or explained terrifying experiences to

themselves and to those around them. When such accounts were

made to ﬁt into a life history, into the story of a man who had a

before- and an after-the-war, then the pathways from memory to

62 war and remembrance

identity and back again remained intact. When the images and feel-

ings did not ﬁt, when they continued to have no location in a sol-

dier’s sense of who he was and where he was, then a kind of disorien-

tation, lasting for varying periods of time, was inevitable. Why this

complex framing of memories in a broader temporal context suc-

ceeded in some cases and not in others is, of course, impossible to

explain. Healing has its mysteries too, and even when we admit the

obscurity of its workings, we should never lose sight of its power.

In this context, I would like to o√er some instances of these

narrative arts of healing before turning to those men whose dis-

abilities (and stories) were of an entirely di√erent order. Once more,

I am interested in what Hynes has called ‘‘the soldiers’ tale,’’

∞≤

rather

than the particular mix of factors which led some to resume their

lives and others to be unable to do so. Then I would like to relate

some of the broader questions about the signiﬁcance of the phe-

nomenon of shell shock to our discussion of conﬁgurations of

memory in the century of total war.

Soldiers’ Tales: Memories and Identities

Duty, deceit, disorientation, and disability: these terms were inter-

twined with the subject of shell shock from the very beginning of the

war. Disentangling them proved an arduous task. One reason is that

shell shock is a continuum of conditions rather than a stable cate-

gory. In no sense should shell shock be approached as a single entity,

separable from other states of mind we call ‘‘healthy.’’ Most soldiers

who went through signiﬁcant encounters with the enemy during the

war were put under stress which we may ﬁnd di≈cult to imagine.

What is surprising is not that some men broke down, but that so

many did not. I want to tell the story of two of these un-shell-

shocked men before returning to the narratives of men less fortu-

nate than they. I will use both stories to locate shell shock within a

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 63

constellation of narratives of war which brought memories and

identities together.

Cassin

First, duty. Consider the case of René Cassin, later the author of the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He was a soldier of the Great

War. On 12 October 1914, he was severely wounded near St Mihiel. He

was hit in his side, abdomen, and left arm. He knew that a stomach

wound was almost always fatal.

∞≥

Somehow, he got through the night

and was handed over to the French army medical services.

There he was treated with bureaucratic stupidity of the highest

order. I have told this story elsewhere.

∞∂

Cassin could be treated—reg-

ulations insisted—only in the medical facilities of his regiment, which

was six hundred kilometers away. So, his stomach wound unat-

tended, he left on a ten-day journey to meet up with his regiment.

When he arrived and the doctors saw his condition, they decided to

operate immediately—without anesthetic. This too he survived.

The narrative Cassin constructed out of this ordeal was that of a

conventional French patriot and a Jew. The horrors of his experience

were palpable, but somehow he managed to frame his part in it

without doubting that it undermined his own identity. In fact, his

commitment to securing justice for les mutilé de guerre and for their

o√spring formed part of his subsequent career, ﬁrst as a leader of the

veterans’ movement, and then as a founder of the international

human rights movement. What matters in this context is the extent

to which he was able—stoically, powerfully, unmistakably—to bring

his prewar identity and his wartime memories into line.

∞∑

The story of Cassin and his operation is about more than a narra-

tive. It is about su√ering of a kind hard to imagine. So are accounts of

shell shock. Palpable su√ering is at the heart of all these stories, but no

two men reacted to it, or understood it, in the same way.

64 war and remembrance

Céline

The contrasting case I want to present is that of a man who could not

have been more di√erent from Cassin. During the Second World

War, Cassin was one of the leaders of Free France in London, de

Gaulle’s trusted legal adviser and minister in exile. By then, Louis-

Ferdinand Destouches had become a world-famous novelist and

anti-Semite, writing under the pen name of Céline. He was living in

Paris, where he had been born, and said much both before and

during the war about the need to get rid of the Jews. Bagatelles pour

un massacre is the title of his 1937 meditation on this theme.

∞∏

Hitler’s birthday in 1941, he shocked his German hosts (including

Ernst Jünger) by calling them ‘‘pas sérieux’’ about killing the Jews.

He, Céline, a veteran of the trenches, would know what to do if the

task would come to him. He could (perhaps should) have been shot

as a collaborator but hid in Denmark long enough to avoid the

Épuration. He made his return to France when reconciliation was

the theme of the day, received a slap on his wrists for his nastiness,

and died in his bed in 1961.

∞π

What makes it useful to bring the names of Cassin and Céline

together is not the Second but rather the First World War. Nothing

could be more remote from Cassin’s stoical tale of su√ering and

reinforced patriotism than that of Céline. Still Destouches in 1914,

and six years younger than Cassin, the man who later became Céline

was deep in his apprenticeship as a master of misanthropy and

deceit.

He entered the cavalry in 1912 and soon discovered that he hated

the army. When war broke out in 1914, Destouches’s unit moved

east, facing Metz and Nancy, and then moved into German territory.

The cavalry were used to cover the massive French retreat after the

bloody Battle of the Frontiers. Though they didn’t su√er many casu-

alties, they saw them and the detritus of war all around them.

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 65

When this part of the front stabilized in early October, Des-

touches’s unit was sent north and west to Flanders. This time, near

the river Lys, the cavalry were deployed to guard the ﬂanks of the

British Expeditionary Force. By mid-October, they were near Poel-

kappelle on the outskirts of Ypres. There Destouches, sent at night

to ﬁnd another isolated post, was hit in the arm by a ricocheting

bullet. He was evacuated on 26 October. Instead of going to a mili-

tary hospital, the wounded man found his way to a Red Cross am-

bulance, and was treated in one of their hospitals in Hazebrouck.

Bullet fragments were still in his arm. Destouches refused morphine

or an anesthetic, fearing amputation. A civilian doctor removed the

bullet without anesthetic and sutured the wound.

From his Red Cross hospital, he proceeded to the military hospi-

tal in Paris at Val-de-Grâce. There he was awarded the Military

Medal. His exploits were immortalized in the patriotic journal L’Il-

lustré national. In its issue of November 1914 it saluted Destouches,

of the 12th Cavalry Regiment, who had ‘‘spontaneously volunteered

. . . to deliver an order under heavy ﬁre. After having delivered the

order, he was seriously wounded on returning from his mission.’’

The truth was more mundane: he had not volunteered; he had been

hit accidentally, and then wandered around in the darkness.

That was the full extent of his active military service, but Des-

touches invented an entirely di√erent set of events. He was, he

proudly asserted, a victim of shell shock. There is absolutely no

evidence to support this claim. He simply made it up. He liked to

show o√ a photograph of himself and some other soldiers at Val de

Grâce, where he was wearing a cloth secured under his chin and

covering his head. Treatment for shell shock, was how he described

it. The reality was that he su√ered from a toothache.

∞∫

What a perfect

incarnation of the army’s worst fears! A man who was prone to

violent denunciations of the authorities, women, Africans, Jews,

just about anybody, hid behind shell shock as the reason for his

66 war and remembrance

‘‘delirium of words.’’ What a marvelous cover for whatever toxic

pollution he chose to exude.

Ironically, Destouches, a man who reveled in ﬁlth, sought out a

home after the war in the medical profession. But he really hit the

jackpot in 1932 when his war novel Voyage au bout de la nuit was

published. It is an astonishing tale, a barroom rant of two old sol-

diers, based on the story one of them tells about the war, about his

brush with shell shock, and an unlikely postwar career as the direc-

tor of a lunatic asylum. Céline himself conjured up the tale that his

(fabricated) experience of shell shock in the war was the source of

this novel, now a classic of twentieth-century French literature. Its

truth value is of no great interest, since war novels are never docu-

mentary, even though they may pretend to be so. What is intriguing

is the way Céline deﬁned shell shock in his novel as a convenient

cover for malingering and misanthropy.

Cassin and Céline: in their words we have the two poles of story-

telling about war service. At one extreme was Cassin’s endurance,

with no apparent psychological damage; this was the ideal of all

armies. At the other was Céline’s malingering, fake psychological

injury, and a mockery of the real su√ering, both physical and emo-

tional, which war service entailed. This was the nightmare of all

armies—to confront masses of men who invented nonexistent ill-

nesses and shirked their share of the burdens of war. The two cases I

have cited are emblematic: one presented courage and fortitude

without psychiatric injury. The other feigned psychiatric injury

without courage. The real victims of shell shock shown in the medi-

cal training ﬁlms are somewhere between the two.

The narratives of Céline and Cassin, though, do share one im-

portant element. In their very di√erent ‘‘soldiers’ tales,’’ both men

were engaged in a kind of self-fashioning. They were young, just

starting out in the world, and aimed at creating a kind of self which

drew their prewar lives, their wartime memories, and their identities

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 67

together. The way they talked about the war was central to who they

were. Their memories of war (even false ones) were built into their

identities.

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity

Point—counterpoint. These two cases are no more than that, but

they do enable us to frame the history of shell shock in terms of

contemporary categories of normative behavior, which Cassin ﬁt to

a tee and against which Céline spent his life in revolt. The men they

became were the product of their own e√orts to locate the war in

their personal narrative.

Shell-shocked men were not so fortunate. In a host of ways, their

stories were disruptive of the linkage between memory and identity.

This approach enables us to see too that shell shock is not one

category but a myriad of cases, in all of which some degree of disori-

entation occurs. For example, Siegfried Sassoon had nightmares of

the dead staring at him in his bed, but his physician, W. H. R. Rivers,

found no evidence of shell shock in what he said, just an ‘‘anti-war

ﬁxation.’’ Was he shaken? Yes; was he shell-shocked? No. Many other

men were similarly on the fringes of this category of disability, which

we must treat as a continuum rather than as a ﬁxed label.

∞Ω

Others still were entirely disoriented by what had happened to

them in war. I will now discuss a mere handful of such men, but will

do so with the full recognition that no one instance can stand for the

rest. Once again, the issue of memory and identity helps us see what

ties together these stories and the su√ering they disclose.

One of the most sensitive students of this set of disorders was E. E.

Southard, professor at the Harvard Medical School and director of

the United States Army Neuropsychiatric Training School in Boston

in 1917–18. In 1919 he compiled the most complete and up-to-date

casebook of shell shock cases and treatments from all combatant

68 war and remembrance

armies.

≤≠

His fundamental approach was to refuse to separate those

ailments which were of organic origin from those which were func-

tional. The overlap between the two was considerable. Still, a sub-

stantial number of cases were much more functional than organic.

Shell shock, Southard argued, reﬂects the inability of a person’s mind

to integrate into his life story the sense experience of combat. This

disorientation, which may have physical causes too, converts shell

shock from an event which happened into a condition. The purpose

of medical treatment, Southard argued, was to reverse this process,

and turn a condition into an event which could then be aligned with

other events in a person’s life. This could not be done in all cases, but

it could in many: ‘‘A shock is not a smash, a crush, a breach. A shock

literally shakes. The shaken thing stays, for a time at least. Shaken up

or down, the victim of shock is not at ﬁrst thought of as done for. The

spirit of the language is against the thought of shock as destruction or

even as permanent irritation. . . . Shell-shock . . . is or ought to be, as a

pathological event, reversible.’’

≤∞

Southard’s collection of nearly one thousand case histories is

very instructive in the context of my argument, since it shows how

some physicians operated on the assumption that shell shock had

many sources, but its essence was a kind of cognitive dissonance.

Something didn’t ﬁt in a man’s sense of who he was and where he

was. Southard and others tried to point out how natural, how nor-

mal, it was for men to feel this way in wartime. He understood his

job as a guide, a map reader of dark places, bringing men back to

their senses, back to themselves. It is no accident that he used

phrases from Dante’s Inferno, throughout the book, concluding with

the hope that patients and doctors, like Dante and Virgil, could one

day ‘‘issue out again to see the stars.’’

≤≤

Consider but a few of the case histories he presented in his

pioneering text. His book is a record of su√ering and (to a varying

degree) recovery not just from the results of artillery but from gener-

Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 69

alized fear and exhaustion. Strain could break a man’s sense of self

like a matchstick. De Massary and du Sonich reported the case of a

French soldier who was captured in Belgium in 1914, and then suc-

ceeded ‘‘under great strain in escaping.’’ He endured heavy bom-

bardment at Verdun, during which time he was bowled over and

buried alive temporarily. By January 1916 he had to be evacuated

from the front due to depression and exhaustion. After convales-

cence, he returned to the front, but soon developed involuntary

movements, which made him appear to ‘‘dance.’’ Slowly, he regained

control of his body. What he had seen and endured was simply too

much for any man; his body rebelled, it moved to its own rhythms.

Once out of the line, and after a period of rest, he returned ‘‘to

himself.’’ Another French soldier under their care was sure that the

Germans were kind and the French cruel; he forgot which side he

was on. This reversal of loyalties also faded over time.

The French physicians Mairet and Piéron reported on the case of

a shell-shocked soldier, aged forty, who woke up in a hospital in

Tunis with the feeling that he had been ‘‘born again.’’ In time, he

became depressed ‘‘due to despair at not being able to know who he

was’’ and what he was doing. Nine months later, his old memories

came back suddenly, with a gap of about twenty-ﬁve days following

the explosion which had incapacitated him in the ﬁrst place. With

this caesura, this soldier resumed his life and returned to the front.

Gilles reported on the case of another French soldier who endured

the Battle of the Marne phlegmatically, but a week later, on the

Aisne, he was paralyzed by dreams of the horrors he had seen. At

those moments he lost track of where he was. We do not know the

outcome of his treatment.

This kind of repressed imagery in the memories of shell-shocked

men was noted repeatedly by Rivers in his account of work in Craig-

lockhart and elsewhere. An army private he treated had been found

‘‘wandering in a village, in shirt and socks, unable to give name,