Abstract
Shell shock has long been a popular topic. Indeed, it is a subject that historians never seem to tire of writing about. There are too many to name, but Peter Leese and Ben Shephard are two of the more recent examples. Perhaps it is, as Reid contends, that ‘shell-shocked men were uniquely unable to forget the war and all its traumas’ (p. 8) which has made shell shock such an enduring subject for historical research. However, Reid goes beyond the treatment regimes and hospital stays and assesses the shell-shocked men’s place in the wider cultural and social realm after the war, more in the style of historians Ana Carden-Coyne, Beth Linker, and Heather Perry.
From the outset, Reid endeavours to construct shell shock within a cultural framework. She argues that there were a number of reasons why the condition became a marker in the period following the war which stemmed from pre-existing attitudes toward mental weakness, the terminology of ‘shell shock’ itself, and the regimes that were established for those with the condition. The book avoids military hospitals for those with shell shock: instead it concentrates on the role of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and its role in the treatment of shell shock closer to the front line. On the whole, the RAMC comes off badly, as Reid asserts that medical treatment for those with shell shock was inconsistent and informal. This, in turn, created a particular style of rhetoric and a popular view of those with the condition during and especially after the war. Reid notes that ‘the rhetoric of victory and of medical success sat uneasily alongside large numbers of mentally damaged veterans, and so the wartime marginalization of shell shock began to be interpreted as either neglect or cruelty’ (p. 69).
Reid then goes on to explore the conception of shell-shocked men throughout the 1920s within the system of state support. She notes that within the limited system of support available for veterans in particular, the treatment of shell-shocked men became even more welded to injustice. The official Committee of Enquiry into Shell-Shock report, published in 1922, and the war pensions system, in which men with shell shock were supported, were unable to suppress the sense of injustice felt by the public on behalf of the psychologically damaged veterans.
A significant proportion of the book concentrates on the work of the Ex-Services’ Welfare Society (ESWS), which was established specifically to deal with ex-servicemen suffering from psychological damage from their war service. Reid details the ESWS’s problematic relationship with the system of state support. Indeed, the ESWS’s endeavour to highlight some of the sufferings of the shell-shocked men meant they lost the support of the mainstream veterans’ charities, such as the British Legion, and government departments, such as the Ministry of Pensions. By the late 1920s the ESWS had altered its stance, and instead of attempting reforms to asylums it concentrated on the development of homes and employment schemes for the men. The establishment of work programmes and in particular companies such as Thermega, where men with shell shock manufactured electric blankets, demonstrated the role reversal from needy broken man to that of masculine provider.
Reid rightly claims that, for the most part, the histories of what happened after the war to those with mental breakdown have been the most seriously marginalized. She argues that there has been more interest in the stories of the dead, particularly those who were shot for cowardice, than those that managed to take up their lives again after their treatment. Reid also notes that, despite the sympathy that existed in the minds of the public and charitable endeavour after the war, the voices of shell-shocked men were effectively silenced by those that represented and cared for them. In the broadest sense, this book reconsiders the First World War and questions the prevailing view that it was an unnecessary and pointless conflict.
An initial criticism of a work such as this might be a tendency to reflect that there is little to say on shell shock that has not already been said. However, a compelling reason to read Broken Men is that at last here is a book that for the most part removes the shell-shocked men from the environment of the hospital and lunatic asylum, and instead situates them where most of them ended up – for better or worse – reunited with the people and the society that they left behind when they went off to fight.