Winter Jay. Remembering war: the Great War between memory and history in the twentieth century
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70 war and remembrance
regiment, or number.’’
≤≥
Who he was came to him slowly but surely
under hypnosis. Others recovered through their own e√orts of con-
scious retrieval of memories. Another of Rivers’s patients had been
buried alive in a collapsed trench and then wounded as soon as he had
extracted himself. He could not evade insomnia or the battle dreams
which haunted him. Rivers tried to get this man to bring the story to
the surface; repression, he argued, was crippling. Only by narration
could the story be located in a continuum. He realized, of course, that
in some cases, the retrieval of these moments brought the initial
feelings of horror to the surface as well. But he remained convinced
that subliminal memories were worse, since they never let go.
The German neurologist Max Nonne, who treated many such
men in Hamburg, told of one soldier who was totally paralyzed from
the waist down. When he received word that he had been promoted
to lieutenant and had received a decoration, ‘‘he fell forthwith into
. . . convulsions, in the midst of which the hitherto paralyzed legs
worked perfectly well.’’ Here a message about what he had done
enabled him to place his story (and his fears) in a socially sanctioned
narrative. Not all the case histories ended so successfully. Binswan-
ger told of a German soldier whose arm wound appeared to be
unrelated to a generalized tremor, which he tried to hide. Even when
treated and after extended leave, the tremor returned periodically;
his body was remembering something his mind had tried to set
aside.
≤∂
I cite these instances not to make a systematic statement about
shell shock. All I hope to do is to show how physicians were sensitive
to the ways these narratives, these medical histories, circled around
questions of identity and the role of memory in stabilizing or de-
stabilizing. The strain of combat led many men to wonder who they
had been before battle, and who they had become as a result. Few
were fortunate enough to follow Cassin into an unbroken heroic
meta-narrative of stoical heroism. Few were venal (or clever) enough
Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 71
to follow Destouches/Céline into his imaginary condition and his
splenetic contempt for humanity. Most tried their best to survive
between the two, and to retrieve some sense of fit, some way of
squaring memory and identity. Some failed in that e√ort; what is
surprising is that so many others found a way out of the labyrinth,
and, as Southard had hoped, did manage to see the stars again.
One final example may help to illustrate my claim that shell
shock was a condition in which the link between memory and iden-
tity was weakened or severed. Those who su√ered long-term psy-
chological damage as a result of their war service saw action in many
theatres of operation. Many never had to endure artillery fire, which
was initially identified as the source of the trouble, and many such
men did not evidence their disturbances until well after their mili-
tary years were over. Shell shock quickly escaped from its descriptive
origins to become a metaphor, something suggesting the plight of
men who could not come home again, who had lost the threads of
their prewar lives and who could not pick them up again.
The life of one such individual, a celebrated man to be sure, can
make this more general point, of relevance to many, more obscure,
ex-soldiers. T. E. Lawrence, known to posterity as Lawrence of Ara-
bia, was the leader of the Arab revolt of 1916–18. After the war,
Lawrence spent his life in search of a name, an identity which could
bring him peace. He never found it. Perhaps this would have been
his fate, war or no war, but his story is not unique. For many, war
memories were so indelible that they could not be integrated into a
postwar life. For such people, recollections are reenactments, crush-
ing burdens, never losing their grip.
Part of the sense of alienation with which Lawrence had to live
was directly related to his war service; but part derived from his
sense of the betrayal by the British delegation at Versailles in 1919 of
promises made to the Arabs during the war. Parts of the story are
unclear, and likely to remain so. The story, though, is instructive, in
72 war and remembrance
that it shows yet again how memories of wartime injury prepared
the way for a later fragmentation of personal identities.
Some parts of the story are certain. In November 1917 Lawrence
was the British liaison o≈cer between British forces in Egypt and
Palestine and Arab tribes in revolt against Turkey. He was arrested
while in disguise, scouting out the defenses of the Syrian town of
Deraa. He tried to pass himself o√ as a Circassian, but the ruse failed:
fluent Arabic couldn’t hide his European features. He was then se-
verely beaten and raped. Like many victims of rape, Lawrence felt
the violation of his integrity, his physical wholeness, for years after
the war.
≤∑
Some account for his aversion to physical contact of any
kind by reference to this sexual assault. Marriage was unthinkable;
loneliness unavoidable.
≤∏
Severe bouts of depression dogged Lawrence for the rest of his
life. Some occurred before the incident at Deraa, but many more
seemed related to the shame, guilt, and pain of the rape. But such
shadows were but a specific form of a more general inability to
forget. This is what he had in mind when he wrote to Robert Graves
about their failure to get away from the terrors of the war. They
could never say ‘‘Goodbye to all that,’’ in the title of Graves’s later war
memoir; already in 1922, Lawrence wrote Graves: ‘‘What’s the cause
that you, and Siegfried Sassoon, and I . . . can’t get away from the
war? Here are you riddled with thought like any old table-leg with
worms; [Sassoon] yawing about like a ship aback; me . . . finding
squalor and maltreatment the only permitted existence; what’s the
matter with us all? It’s like the malarial bugs in the blood, coming
out months and years after in recurrent attacks.’’
≤π
The second source of Lawrence’s alienation from whom he had
been and what he had done in the war comes from the peace con-
ference of 1919. Lawrence had accompanied King Feisal to France to
take part in the deliberations. But from the beginning, it was appar-
ent that allies in war were now to be reordered as dominant and
Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 73
subordinate peoples. So much for Woodrow Wilson’s principle of
self-determination. The Arabs (like Lawrence himself) were pawns
again, and were to remain so. His sense of humiliation was over-
whelming. Lawrence had been used again; his integrity was once
more broken. Even after a spell in 1921 as adviser on Arab a√airs to
Winston Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, he never lost sight of
the promises broken, the faith not kept.
Here his war experience and his early life came together. He
learned as a teenager that he was illegitimate, as indeed was his
mother. Having ‘‘no name,’’ in the Victorian sense of the term, he
was free to shed the one by which the public knew him. He took a
new name and built a new life, in the Royal Air Force, as Airman
First Class John Hume Ross. It didn’t take long for the press to find
out who he was.
≤∫
The leak put the RAF in a di≈cult position:
Lawrence was a decorated colonel: what the devil was he doing
taking orders from junior o≈cers in the RAF base at Farnbrough?
The solution was simple: Lawrence was discharged.
The search for anonymity was far from over. This time he en-
listed in the tank corps as a private soldier, under the name T. E.
Shaw, found at random in the Army List.
≤Ω
Once more, he went
through the humiliations and rigors of basic training. Once more he
tried to bury himself alive. To one Oxford friend, he confided that
‘‘reason proves there is no hope’’; anyone who hopes does so ‘‘so to
speak, on one leg of our minds’’; ‘‘perhaps,’’ he wondered, ‘‘there’s a
solution to be found in multiple personality.’’
≥≠
Another solution was in speed. He was an aficionado of danger,
and sought it out in many ways. One was on his motorbike. He told
Curtis this: ‘‘When my mood gets too hot and I find myself wander-
ing beyond control I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it at top-speed
through these unfit roads for hour after hour. My nerves are jaded
and gone near dead, so that nothing less than hours of voluntary
danger will prick them into life.’’
≥∞
This was written by the author of
74 war and remembrance
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the classic account of the revolt in the
desert during the Great War. The book was written during 1920–22,
then revised and published in 1926. It became a best-seller in Amer-
ica and in Britain.
The greater the celebrity status, the greater the wish to evade it,
to fade into the background. Every time someone praised him to the
skies, Lawrence shrank further into self-loathing. Why? Because ‘‘I
know the reverse of that medal, and hate its false face so utterly that I
struggle like a trapped rabbit to be it no longer,’’ or at least to ‘‘shun
pleasures,’’ a partial ‘‘alleviation of the necessary penalty of living
on.’’
≥≤
Living on after the war; living on after his rape.
After the tank corps came literary work, followed by reentry into
the Royal Air Force. This time he tested speedboats, and found some
modicum of quiet in the service. He even went so far as to change his
name by deed poll to Shaw.
≥≥
After twelve years in the RAF in Britain
and India, hounded by the press to the end, he tried to find solace in
Devon, in a country house built to his specifications. But journalists
still dogged his steps and stripped him of the tranquility he so des-
perately sought. Lawrence still overshadowed Shaw. On 11 May 1935,
he got on his motorbike and headed down a country road to send a
telegram to another Great War veteran and writer, Henry William-
son. He never sent it: he swerved o√ the road to avoid hitting two
cyclists. They were uninjured. He crashed, su√ered brain damage,
went into a coma, and died on 19 May 1935, aged forty-six.
A broken life, and an unusual one undoubtedly, but one which
described much about the profound di≈culties of living with mem-
ories of war. Lawrence, the maverick, the individualist, the artist
who had created his own persona, constantly sought to escape the
romantic legend he embodied. The memories of the dark side of the
war, of his own traumatic past, exploded the legend he refused to
embody. Instead he became a wanderer, a man who shed identities
like a chameleon.
Shell Shock, Memory, and Identity 75
Was he a∆icted with what we now call ‘‘traumatic memory’’?
Perhaps. Would he have performed his multiple identities without
the war? Perhaps. But his story does throw light on the central issues
of this chapter. Lawrence was much closer to Cassin than to Céline
in his commitment to the cause, but the rape Lawrence endured may
have made it impossible for him to bring wartime memories and
postwar identities together. This is what shell shock is all about.
Conclusion
One way in which to frame the history of shell shock is to examine
the phenomenon as a kind of syntax about the war, an ordering of
stories and events elaborated by men who served. In this narrative,
some men never demobilized; they were frozen in time, not out of
choice, but out of injury, internal injury known only to them. The
su√ering of these men, so resistant to medical treatment, was both a
reminder and a reproach. It disrupted heroic narratives of the war,
and challenged conventional interpretations of its meaning. It made
everyone—patriots as well as ordinary onlookers—uncomfortable.
Shell shock placed alongside one line of temporality, in which there
was antebellum and postbellum, another sense of time, what some
scholars call ‘‘traumatic time.’’
≥∂
It is circular or fixed rather than
linear. Here the clock doesn’t move in a familiar way; at times its
hands are set at a particular moment in wartime, a moment which
may fade away, or may return, unintentionally triggered by a seem-
ingly innocuous set of circumstances. When that happens, a past
identity hijacks or obliterates present identity; and the war resumes
again.
This kind of arrested demobilization is embedded in ‘‘traumatic
memory,’’ and much of the way we understand the concept today,
and its relevance to the victims of current conflicts, rests on a
reading of this aspect of the history of the Great War.
≥∑
That this
76 war and remembrance
phenomenon is only part of the legacy of the war needs emphasis.
The subject of ‘‘traumatic memory’’ is of fundamental importance,
but it must not replicate its referent and eclipse other narratives of
war. The years after the Armistice were a time when competing and
contradictory narratives were elaborated, at times by di√erent peo-
ple, at times by the same person, at di√erent stages of his or her life.
Duty, deceit, and disturbance were there in abundance. The messy,
unstable, unsettled character of demobilization derives from this
war of narratives, a war which has gone on and on, and still can be
heard now, nearly a century after the Great War began. By bequeath-
ing to us these narratives of imprisoning memories, of broken iden-
tities and of identities restored, the survivors of the Great War fash-
ioned themselves as central figures in the first, though not the only,
‘‘generation of memory’’ in the twentieth century.
Part Two
Practices of Remembrance
chapter 3
All Quiet on the Eastern Front
Photography and Remembrance
The power of photography to act as a trigger of memory is familiar
to us all. Family albums are filled with scenes enabling us to conjure
up a now-vanished world of encounters and gestures, which, taken
together, describe the stories families tell about themselves. Much of
this rhetoric is nostalgic, and tends to o√er a sepia-tinged view of
the past.
But what of photography of another kind, that produced by
soldiers in wartime? Here too the camera captures incidents in life
histories, though the moments preserved form part of a highly un-
usual set of personal encounters. In many cases, the exotic and the
bizarre attract photographers in uniform, men and women who
never dreamed that they would be armed and uniformed tourists in
very foreign lands.
No one knows how many collections of photographs still exist
which arose out of the photographer’s military service. The number
must be legion, and it would be foolish to try to develop a typology
of this collection of memory banks. What matters is to appreciate
the significance of photography as o√ering a bridge between history
and memory.
And a very problematic bridge it is. Today the phenomenon of
fraudulent photography abounds, due to the ease with which digitized
images are changed. But a century ago, the notion of photography as a