Broken and mad

In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers who had no physical injury were displaying a wide range of alarming symptoms. Some appeared to be completely dazed or were shaking uncontrollably, others had lost their sense of taste or smell, or were suffering from blindness, mutism and various kinds of paralysis. It was not until February 1915 that the term ‘shell shock’ first appeared in print, in the Lancet. It was originally intended to describe a physical condition in which the brain had been damaged by the percussive effects of high explosives, but was subsequently adopted to describe many different forms of battle trauma.

Unsurprisingly, the incidence of shell shock rose dramatically during the battle of the Somme. According to the Official History of the Medical Services, 16,138 battle casualties suffered in France between July and December 1916 were ascribed to shell shock. Taylor Downing suggests that this was a serious underestimate of the true figures, but even so it was over four times the number of similar casualties in the previous six months and ten times more than those in the same months in 1915. Military commanders feared that shell shock had become an ‘epidemic’, and were very suspicious of a condition that in their opinion was difficult to differentiate from sheer funk.

One way in which the army dealt with shell shock was to re-categorise it. Victims who had suffered from the explosive shock of a nearby shell were classed as ‘Shell Shock W’, which meant that they were a ‘real’ casualty, ‘wounded as a result of enemy action’; those deemed to be experiencing ‘some kind of hysterical response, a temporary breakdown of the nerves’, were classed as ‘Shell Shock S’ (for ‘Sick’), which meant that they did not figure in the casualty lists.