On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He had been taken from the battlefields and deposited in the East Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital suffering from ‘shell shock’. He was ‘dead with fright’. In his words, his state of terror was related to witnessing ‘a terrible sight that I shall never forget as long as I live’. He told his mother that
we had strict orders not to take prisoners, no matter if wounded my first job was when I had finished cutting some of their wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of one of their deep dugouts. bleeding badly, and put them out of misery. They cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feeling whatever for us poor chaps.... it makes my head jump to think about it.
There was little to differentiate Arthur Hubbard's letters to his family from those written by hundreds of other terrified privates around the time of the Battle of the Somme. His active military career in the 1st London Scottish regiment, 56th. Division, had lasted just three months, between May and July 1916. In his early letters, he was cheery and reassuring: ‘I am with the best of fellows’, he chirped, and ‘we shall all return back safely together and before this year is through’. However, as he moved closer to the front, and to battle, the tone of his letters began changing. Rain, mud, lice, rats, and ‘very tedious work’ frustrated him. Fear began to ‘eat away’ at him and his comrades. A friend he had been with since the beginning of the war (Isaacs) started to look like ‘an old man.... it is a pity he gets so nervous.’ Arthur began speaking of life at the front as ‘a proper hell... one cannot imagine unless one was here to witness things’ and a new and bitter edge crept into his letters as he imagined his family
sitting around the table about 8.30 enjoying a good breakfast and me miles away in this miserable place which is being and has been blown to hell by the Huns.
He was not the only man trembling under the strain: a few days before the Battle, he described going to the aid of a man who had shot himself in the foot in order to avoid the anticipated slaughter. He admitted to feeling ‘miserable’ but confessed to his sisters that
I don't feel inclined to tell you a pack of lies, if the truth was told a bit more often, I don't suppose the war would be on now, when you land over here, they have got you tight and treat you as they think.
Two days later, Hubbard went over the top. While he managed to fight as far as the fourth line of trenches, by 3.30 that afternoon practically his whole battalion had been wiped out by German artillery. He was buried, dug himself out, and during the subsequent retreat was almost killed by machine gun fire. Within this landscape of horror, he collapsed.
The letter quoted at the beginning of this blog is the only explicit explanation Hubbard gave for why he suffered. Clearly, the extreme terror of nearly being dismembered and slaughtered were the main factors in his breakdown, but his own guilt-ridden aggressiveness in slaughter was given its due weight in his account. For his anxious family, the sudden shift in the way he described the enemy must also have been poignant. Whereas in his previous correspondence, he spoke only of ‘Huns’, when describing face-to-face killing, the three prisoners pleading for their lives became ‘Germans’.
Private Arthur H. Hubbard's fears when in the front-lines were shared by all men who experienced active service. Combat made most men’s ‘head jump’. In the words of the soldier-poet, Shawn O’Leary:
And I –
I mow and gibber like an ape.
But what can say, what do? –
There is no saying and no doing.
By mentally and physically incapacitating men, fear posed a severe threat to the military establishment. During the Second World War, a series of interviews of men in two combat infantry divisions found that only seven per cent claimed that they never felt afraid. Three quarters of men complained of trembling hands, eighty-five per cent were troubled by sweating palms, and eighty-nine per cent tossed sleeplessly in their beds at night.
Military commentators could frequently be heard lamenting the prevalence of fear in their men. In particular, they identified the problem as inextricably linked to the very nature of modern warfare. Commentators during both world wars recognised that what they regarded as the ‘primitive’, ‘inherited’, ‘animalistic’ nature of fear in warfare was simply not compatible with modern conditions of combat. In the words of the authors of Shell Shock and Its Lessons (1919):
In natural fighting, face to face with his antagonist, and armed only with his hands or with some primitive weapon for close fighting, the uppermost instinct in a healthy man would naturally be that of pugnacity, with its accompanying emotion of anger. The effect of every blow would be visible, and the intense excitement aroused in the relatively short contest would tend to obliterate the action of other instincts such as that of flight, with its emotion of fear.
In contrast, trench fighting and artillery barrages created a battlefield in which the foe was invisible, the weapons of war impersonal. And technologically-inspired terror was getting worse. As two prominent psychiatrists in the last year of the Second World War argued,
the calamitous and horrifying situations produced by modern war machines penetrate deeper and more acutely sensitive levels. Destruction is on a larger scale. Scarcely anyone is immune. Speed makes suddenness and unpredictability the rule. The organism must be continuously mobilized and on the alert, which means more continuous stimulation and strain and consequent fatigue than in World War I.
In other words, mechanised terror, extreme mobility, vastly more efficient killing machines, omnipresent danger, and unpredictability sparked intense panic in everyone.
In such threatening environments, the fear response -- honed through the centuries by ‘flight or fight’ instincts -- was utterly frustrated. As the chief neurologist at Netley hospital explained:
the [physiological] changes which accompany fear and anger are entirely useless if the emotions are not followed by the associated instinctual activity. So fixed, however, is the primitive association of anger with fight and fear with flight, that when the natural sequels of these emotions are restrained, they continue to give rise to suprarenal and probably thyroid activity. Thus the ceaseless fear felt by the constitutionally timid when exposed to the horrors of war results in constant over-secretion of the suprarenal and thyroid glands, the physiological results of which are not followed by the muscular activity of flight for which they are the preparation. The unexpended energy may be so extreme that the soldier is incapacitated by it.
The great theorists of the emotions concurred with this view. For instance, according to the eminent surgeon and psychologist, G. M. Criles in The Origin and Nature of Emotions (1915) ‘the effect of the stimulus of fear upon the body when unaccompanied by physical activity is more injurious than is an actual physical contest which result in fatigue without gross physical injury.’ He reminded his readers that the physiological effects of fear would actually injure the body if they were not accompanied by action.
This blocking of elemental responses to fear (‘fight or flight’) was believed to be a main cause of combat fatigue and anxiety neuroses. If soldiers could not fight or otherwise engage in ‘manipulative activity’, and were not permitted to flee, they responded by becoming profoundly anxious -- an emotion which was crippling. The absence of any outlet for aggressive tendencies put soldiers at risk of psychological disorders, argued numerous military psychiatrists. It was found that non-combatants within the military suffered the highest level of psychological breakdown because the pacific nature of their jobs brought them little satisfaction. During the Arakan campaign, a psychiatric report noted that ‘people accommodate themselves better to the more natural strain of hunting and being hunted than they do to the strain of heavy shelling and bombing.’ Modern warfare offered many men ‘little personal satisfaction’, little scope for personalised killing. As the psychologist, John T. MacCurdy put it at the conclusion of the First World War: in past conflicts, men exposed themselves to the risk of death, but they were
compensated [for it] by the excitement of more active operations, the more frequent possibility of giving some satisfaction in active hand to hand fighting, where they might feel the joy of personal prowess.
Soldiers became demoralised and ‘quite incapable of developing any excitement’ once they recognised that ‘all individuality in the struggle was lost’. From that time, they could ‘gain no satisfaction in killing one or many of the enemy.’ The modern soldier was pitted against anonymous agents and his aggression was also incognito. Human emotions could not cope with that.
From the point of view of senior military advisers, this physiological crisis was exacerbated by a cognitive problem: too many modern soldiers were educated, and thus resistant to ‘primitive conversions’ (that is, the ability to deflect the emotionally-devastating effects of fear by converting them into physical symptoms) and rationalisations. Man was the ‘most cowardly… of all animals’, insisted Captain LeRoy Eltinge in his Notes on Lectures on Psychology of War (1918). Throughout the century, military commentators looked back with nostalgia to the time when men allegedly went into battle with ‘vacant minds’, incapable of ‘measur[ing] their chances of survival’. By the middle of the First World War, even officers were no longer ‘socialised warriors’ who had experienced long periods of military training at Sandhurst or West Point. They could not be depended upon to ‘act promptly on sound lines in unexpected situations’. As Field Marshall Earl Wavell lamented in 1945: ‘the old soldier was tough, the modern type usually has to be toughened.’ Indeed, the ‘threshold of fear’ had been falling, at least since Agincourt, argued Lord Moran in The Lancet on 17 June 1950. This was a theme in the main military journals as late as 1976 when the Army Quarterly and Defence Journal lamented the passing of the ‘armies of the pre-1914 era’. According to this analysis, prior to the First World War, men were of
stronger fibre… less influenced by cultural and soft social conditions and often lacked the faculty for deep thought which drew no picture of danger or feeling of fear. It might be said that such men possessed a natural courage, which really was a courage of insensibility to danger.
The article went on to deplore the greater value placed on life, claiming that while men’s bodies had deteriorated, ‘Trotskyism and pacifism’ had grown. Men of ‘natural courage’ -- that is, men who simply responded to the dictates of their instincts -- were regarded as rare beings indeed after 1915.
As a result, fear rendered many servicemen ‘combat ineffective’. Fear produced epidemics of diarrhoea, as in the soldiers immediately prior to the landing on Iwo Jima. Frightened soldiers often escaped into ‘dyspeptic invalidism’ or suffered chronic gastrointestinal problems. Fear disturbed the functioning of their nervous systems. In the words of D. K. Henderson in an article entitled ‘The Significance of Fear’, published in the 1941 issue of the Edinburgh Medical Journal:
the normal peristaltic movement of the stomach ceases, food lies like a dead weight, the bowels are constipated, palpitation occurs, the blood pressure is raised…. Such conditions may lead to organic bodily disorders which cannot be cured by the drugs of the physician or the knife of the surgeon, unless the emotional factors are also treated.
However, it was the psychological effects of fear that caused most concern. Overall, one quarter of all British discharges during the 1914-18 war and between 20 and 30 per cent during the 1939-45 war were labelled ‘psychiatric casualties’. For each person, suffering was unique: every headache was harboured within a separate, hidden sector of a particular unconscious; each flashback was peopled with different, recognisable landscapes and demons; each sleepless man tossed to a very personal rhythm. The type of killing could dictate the nature of the turmoil. Soldiers who had bayoneted men in the face developed hysterical tics of their own facial muscles: stomach cramps seized men who knifed their foes in the abdomen. Snipers lost their sight. Combatants typically suffered uncontrollable diarrhoea. Terrifying nightmares of being unable to withdraw bayonets from the enemies' bodies persisted long after the slaughter. The dreams might occur ‘right in the middle of an ordinary conversation’ when ‘the face of a Boche that I have bayoneted, with its horrible gurgle and grimace, comes sharply into view’, an infantry captain complained. An inability to eat, or sleep, after the slaughter was common. During the Second World War, a twenty-three year old infantryman took emotional refuge in conversion hysteria after stabbing to death a man with his bayonet: ‘that bothered me’, he stammered, ‘my father taught me never to kill.’ Also during this conflict, William Manchester adopted a language invoking ‘disgust and self-hatred’ to describe his experience of killing a Japanese soldier. ‘I sobbed’, he recalled, muttering ‘I'm sorry’:
Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies.
Nightmares did not always occur during the war. First World War soldiers like Rowland Luther did not suffer until after the armistice when (he admitted) he ‘cracked-up’ and found himself unable to eat, deliriously re-living his experiences of combat.The difficulties many combatants experienced in coming to terms with the fact of having killed another human-being led some influential officers – including powerful men such as Colonel S. L. A. Marshall, author of Men Against Fire (1947) – to argue that ‘fear of killing’ was actually a more common cause of battle fatigue than ‘fear of dying’.
Sending soldiers who were prone to terror states into battle could jeopardise the entire military project. Fear was a most dangerous emotion. It inhibited aggression, disrupted the disciplined ‘social unit’, and over-rode more positive emotions such as loyalty to comrades. Under the spell of fear, soldiers either shot their rifles wildly or found that their hands shook so much that they could not load them. Indeed, it was argued that outbreaks of fear did the greatest damage to military morale. It was even more dangerous than mortal physical wounds, which at least might arouse the survivors to renewed acts of aggression against the enemy. In contrast, people who witnessed their comrades give way to terror were often rendered ‘ineffective’ themselves. Fear was always described as a ‘virus’. In the words of an article in the United States Armed Forces Medical Journal in 1953, ‘Like infectious agents, fear may be contagious, but it spreads more rapidly than they because there is little or no incubation period’ and, unlike viruses, ‘fear cannot confer an immunity on its victims’. It was a most insidious germ.
From the point of view of the military hierarchy, it was important that the ability of men to cope in immensely fearful situations was accurately evaluated. Increasingly, one of the most influential codes employed by the military was psychology. As John T. MacCurdy, psychology lecturer at Cornell University Medical School, stated in the preface to his The Psychology of War (1917):
The conduct of modern warfare demands the co-operation of practically every science. Engineering, chemistry, bacteriology and agriculture are all needed. Even the sanctity of home is invaded, and domestic economy regulated. But beyond all the sciences stands the human factor, infinitely the most important of all. On the behaviour of the private in the trenches, the officer in his dug-out, the mechanic at his lathe, and the woman in the kitchen depends the victory.
General Matthew B. Ridgway agreed. In his article ‘Man – The Vital Weapon’ (1955), he argued that
Despite the remarkable developments in military technology, despite the weapons which have vastly expanded our striking power, it is still a basic truth that the only absolute weapon is man. Upon his determination, his courage, his stamina, and his skill rests the issue of victory or defeat in war.
It is important to note that it is impossible to categorically separate out the front-line employment of disciplining regimes drawn from psychology from their civilian counterparts. As a profession and institution, psychology both predated the First World War and drew immense strength from it. It is easy to forget that, as late as 1917, the American Psychology Association had only 336 members. The influence of psychology was out of all proportion to its professional membership. While First World War military manuals rarely mentioned psychological factors, post-war manuals are saturated with such references. Indeed, military psychology got its start through a ‘fortuitous event’ on 6 April 1917 when a meeting of experimental psychologists at Harvard University discussing how psychology might contribute to the defence effort was interrupted by the ‘grave announcement’ that ‘our country has just entered the conflict. In the words of a participant:
Then and there, Dr. Yerkes [President of the American Psychological Association] and a small group of forward-looking psychologists suspended the regular convention meeting and put in motion most energetically a series of actions including letters that same day to members of the Council of the American Psychology Association and to the National Research Council outlining what psychology could do for the national defense effort.
As I show in Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (1996), psychology as a distinctive profession developed as a direct result of its wartime deployment. In the immediate post-First World War period, the disciplines of military psychology were rapidly employed within industry. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the influence begins to turn in the opposite direction, with industrial psychology directly influencing military practice rather than the other way around. As Lieutenant Colonel Wood admitted in his article ‘Man Management’ (1956) ‘We in the Army have evolved several tests which have been frankly adapted from industry and by which we try to get from the stream of employable men those more likely to make a success of the Army’.
Why did the military require psychology in the first place? Part of the answer to this question lies in the changing nature of military service. This was made explicit in a ‘Directorate of Army Psychiatry Technical Memorandum No. 2’, dated June 1942. It noted the difficulties of training the modern man into combat effectiveness, because they were ‘infected’ by civilian, pacifist propaganda. In its words:
During the last 20 years, the mind of the nation has been filled with misleading information and propaganda which has exaggerated the horrors and dangers of war. Most of us, therefore, had a false picture of it as so overwhelmingly terrifying that to some recruits the only logical attitude seems to be escape. It is the purpose of training to remove this attitude by helping each man to learn for himself that this inner mental picture is overdrawn.
The author went on to advise against shocking the new recruits. Instead, they must be ‘conditioned’ slowly to the fog and noise of battle. As he put it,
Each man’s mental picture of war should become one of attack with a reasonable chance of success; and the film-built image of shot and shell to right and left, of dead and dying comrades, of gas, flame-throwers and high explosives; of tanks in every coppice and of a sky dark with dive-bombers, must be debunked.
Most importantly, the vast technologies of modern warfare from 1914 had brought combat to everyone’s doorstep. Armies now numbered in the millions rather than the tens of thousands, and the military was forced to justify itself to entire populations. As I have argued in An Intimate History of Killing (1999), there were things that could be done to small numbers of Regular soldiers which had to be explicitly justified once applied to huge cohorts of volunteers and conscripts. The frustration-aggression formula of the psychologist John Dollard and others – which implied that by increasing frustration, aggressive behaviours could be fostered – was used to legitimate many of the more sadistic aspects of Basic Training. The language of ‘transference’ and ‘displacement’ replaced cruder military words, without necessitating any change in the behaviour of instructors. Military officers consciously, and un-ashamedly adopted the language of psychology to justify treating civilian soldiers in a convenient military manner. The result was a shift from coercive regimes to manipulative ones; the creation of a civilian army in which military controls more closely resemble civilians ones.
Of course, as in civilian society, there remained some disquiet about the use of psychology in the services. As Sir James Grigg advised in a letter to Sir Edward Bridges on 28 October 1942 when addressing the question of whether they should publish a report on the use of psychologists and psychiatrists in the services, ‘the announcement might not only mislead the general public but also cause some alarm and despondency in the Army itself by giving undue emphasis to psychiatric and psychological methods’.
Psychologists tackled what they regarded as such prejudice directly, arguing that they could be effectively employed as engineers catering to the human mechanism. In the words of E. G. Boring and Marjorie Van de Water, authors of the classic Psychology for the Fighting Man (1943), the fighting man was a ‘man-machine unit’. Their book was an attempt to prove to the military that ‘man is a mechanism, that there are laws that govern his actions, that he ought to take that point of view toward human problems in the Army, that psychology is a great thing.’ Psychology for the Fighting Manwas a bid to reassure both their clients (the military and the servicemen) that this relatively new profession of military psychologists could ‘repair’ the scared combatant in the same way that an engineer repaired his machine.
Given this approach, theories about what type of man would constitute the best and most psychologically-stable combatant were regarded as of paramount importance. In the first half of the twentieth century, some of the criteria advanced were absurd to our ears today, such as the idea that red-haired soldiers killed with both ease and passion. Or they were banal: the younger and fitter the man, the more keenly aggressive. Medical officers devised tests to identify men who were ‘accident prone’ because they were said to make the best commandos, as were borstal boys, ex-convicts, and ‘full-blooded Cockneys’. According to others, marriage diminished men's combat effectiveness because the minds of married men were ‘likely to flash back to a picture of a wife left husbandless, children left fatherless -- an involuntary natural thought that can make a man give pause at a critical point in battle.’ Certain occupational groups (miners as opposed to musicians) were also regarded as more psychologically stable. Finally, as we all know, the belief that effective combat soldiers were somehow bred that way was an extremely common one. As one mother admonished her fearful son in the front-lines during 1917: ‘as for you being a coward, well, lad I do know that is utterly impossible, why well you have not that sort of blood in you, now laddie don't think I want to preach to you but this is only what I feel.’
This link between cowardice and combativeness was seen by many commentators to be a key to the ‘problem’ created by the emotions in combat. Many medical officers believed that psychological breakdowns were a form of cowardice. Indeed, some men did fake madness in order to get out of combat. John William Roworth was a veteran malingerer who managed to delay further service during the First World War by pretending to be shell shocked. He described how the medical officer hypnotised him:
I had to tell him every thing I remembered before the barrage. Talking and telling him lies while he wrote every word I spoke, in a book, telling me my complaint of shattered nerves was becoming very prevalent.
Even though such dissemblers were exceptional, it was widely thought that diagnoses like ‘shell shock’ gave ‘fear a respectable name’ and encouraged the ‘weaklings’ to malinger ‘in cold blood’. Regular army officers held the harshest view. As one ‘old stager’ told the neurologist to the 4th Army: ‘if a man lets his comrades down, he ought to be shot. If he's a looney, so much the better!’ Medical officers were deeply conscious that, in the military, psychiatric illness became desirable. The exaggeration of neurotic traits, or the invention of them, could exempt a man from dangerous duties if not from the military services altogether. Attempts to distinguish the malingerer with the neurotic were inconclusive and generally rested upon pragmatic issues of manpower requirements and unit morale.
Furthermore, psychiatrists never tired of implying that the man who collapsed under strain of combat was ‘feminine’. In his classic textbook, War Neuroses (1918), John T. MacCurdy described the suffering of one twenty-year old private. MacCurdy noted that although this soldier had not exhibited ‘neurotic symptoms’ before the war, he still ‘showed a tendency to abnormality in his make-up’. The proof of this lay in the fact that he was
rather tender-hearted and never liked to see animals killed. Socially, he was rather self-conscious, inclined to keep to himself, and he had not been a perfectly normal, mischievous boy, but was rather more virtuous than his companions. He had always been shy with girls and had never thought of getting married.
In other words, ‘normal’ men were psychologically capable of killing because they were tough, did not mind seeing animals killed, were gregarious and mischievous as youth, and were actively heterosexual.
By the Second World War, such stereotypes were even more prevalent. ‘Socially and emotionally immature soldiers’ who ‘shrunk from combat with almost feminine despair and indignation’ were disparaged by the highly respected Madison-based psychiatrist Philip S. Wagner in 1946. He contended that their passive ‘insulationism’ was as selfish as Nazi egocentricity. The words Wagner used to describe these men were harsh: they were narcissistic, excessively dependent on mother figures, concerned only with ‘self-pleasure’, and were ‘poseurs’. Worried that such ‘socially and emotionally stunted’ individuals were being rewarded by being excused from combat, he recommended that they be immediately forced back to the battlefields and threatened with disciplinary action should their symptoms reappear. Colonel Amos R. Koontz went even further in an article entitled ‘Psychiatry in the Next War: Shall We Again Waste Manpower?’ (1948). ‘Is it not time’, he rhetorically asked, that
we were considering the application of the principle of eugenics to those men who cannot serve their country in wartime because of some psychiatric condition? Is such men found that there were to be sterilized, would not the cases of ‘nervous fatigue’ and ‘anxiety state’ markedly diminish? Why should such people be allowed to procreate another race of the same ilk while their neighbors are away fighting for their country?
To people who criticised his plan to sterilize men who were too ‘cowardly’ to fight, Koontz reminded them that ‘mental characteristics’ were inherited. ‘Is it not time that our country stopped being soft and abandoned its programme of mollycoddling no-goods?’, he asked. Others blandly observed that the knife could be bypassed altogether: ‘panic may be checked by officers firing on their own men’.
But the armed forces needed to ensure that things did not get that bad. Crucially, how could you tell, in advance whether a man was a coward or effeminate? Military officers needed a ‘science of combativeness’ which would be fast, cheap, and accurate. During the First World War, combat effectiveness seemed to be inscribed on the body itself. A typical sentiment – represented in this instance by the medical officer, Robert William MacKenna was that
Bravery, unless a man be a poltroon, is more naturally expected of a man in splendid physical condition than of a weakling; for the relation and interaction between soul and body is an intimate one.
During the First World War, therefore, potential recruits were subjected to a physical examination in an attempt to weed out men who would be incapable of fighting. However, the grading of recruits into four fitness categories were based as much on perceptions of the relationship between corporeal masculinity and courage as it was on medical principles of ‘healthiness’.
Some commentators did not think that the armed forces had gone far enough in developing a ‘science of combativeness’. For instance, two influential psychologists, Charles Bird and G. Stanley Hall (both of Clark University), independently argued for the adoption by the armed forces of French morphology which divided the human race into four somatic types (abdominal, respiratory, muscular, and cerebral). Men of the ‘muscular type’ -- easily identified by their cubical shaped face and body and strong, well-proportioned limbs – were both physically and psychologically suited to action in the most aggressive front lines. ‘Abdominal-type’ men -- with their truncated pyramid-shaped heads, large digestive apparatus, long fat trunks, short limbs, and small thorax -- should be sent to defensive posts where they would fight, if only for stores. Cavalrymen and pilots should be chosen from respiratory-type men: they could be identified by their large thoraxes and faces that were widest at the nose. The cerebral type we all recognise – they were intellectuals and liable to sudden emotional collapse. As Lieutenant-Colonel A. D. Carbery instructed Medical Officers in recruiting stations: they were to observe the ‘sex characteristics’ of recruits, especially
the development of the genital organs, the distribution of the body hair, especially the contour of the upper margin of the pubic hair, the scalp and the eyebrows, the size of the pelvis and the locality of fat distribution…. males who approach the female type in size of pelvis, hair distribution and fat disposition… make poor soldiers.
Psychological resistance to terror was inscribed on the male physique.
Despite such attempts, the actual experience of war discredited reliance on the individual's body as a signifier of emotional strength. By the Second World War, a new generation of military researchers descended upon training camps, subjecting the emotions to number-crunching, interviewing, and correlating. Two of the most influential of these researchers were Colonel S. L. A. Marshall and Samuel A. Stouffer. They agued that coping with the traumas of combat depended on group rather than individual attributes. Training must therefore utilize psychological principles of group dynamics. Thus, by the Second World War, pride of place was given to personality and, related to this and relegated an even higher status, the nature of the ‘group personality’. The most emotionally-resilient soldier was the man who felt strongly attached to an effective group who would protect him and whose interests were identical to his own. The warrior-hero was now a product of the group, rather than a ‘natural’ hero who embodied the military ideal in his very blood (or guts).
As psychologists had to acknowledge, however, neither the group personality nor the corporeal body was a match for steel. Terror was inescapable. Within the landscape of horror, the moral and emotional survival of combatants depended upon 3 related factors: the retention of the faculty of imagination, the substitution of the individual for the phantom, and the ability to construct myths of agency. In wars where the foe was rarely sighted (less than 0.3% of men killed during the First World War were killed by the bayonet, for instance), emotional stability depended upon combatants using their imagination to ‘see’ the impact of their weapons on other men. The word ‘imagination’ here is not being used in some vague, metaphoric sense: the combatant constructed elaborate, precise, and self-conscious fantasies about the effects of the violent deeds performed by his right hand. The ability to impose a logic upon combat-experiences was of immense importance for the individual’s psychological well-being. What is striking is the extent to which combatants insisted upon emotional relationships and responsibility, despite the distancing effect of technology. Attempts by senior military officers and psychiatrists to minimised (if not eradicated) remorse for killing was not shared by most combat soldiers who tended to regard guilt as an endorsement of their essential goodness and who, in many circumstances, refused to countenance attempts to alleviate the emotional pain attendant upon sincere remorse. In the words of one Marine, if killing was rendered too ‘easy’, men ‘just couldn't take it.’ Paradoxically, soldiers maintained their ability to kill by stressing that they retained a moral faculty. The ‘numbed’ consciences may well belong more to civilians who dispassionately observed the war from a distance and regarded it as irrelevant to their lives: men who actually fought were left to deal with their own tortured consciences struggling to give meaning to the chaos.
Coping with heightened emotional states of terror, anger, and guilt was not only difficult during times of military conflict. Even after the declaration of peace, former combatants struggled to deal with their memories of battle. As the renowned psychologist, Therese Benedek, argued in Insight and Personality Adjustment. A Study of the Psychological Effects of War(1946), in the aftermath of war combatants were reluctant to speak about killing not out of modesty but because they wanted to avoid facing a ‘humiliating memory.’ She continued: ‘With the killing he has to remember the fear he experienced and the threatening depth of his own emotions, so different from what he had been taught all his life.’ While in danger, and in the presence of other men who ‘did as he did’, anxiety about one's brutal actions did not rise to the surface. However, she continued,
when the soldier is released from his group and stands alone among civilians, the memories of the inhuman hatred and humiliating fear which he felt and the recollection of what he did, or felt capable of doing, separates him, like a wall, from civilians. People who do not know about fear and killing appear to the combat soldier like his past world of the Sunday-school. He tries not to take it too seriously, yet it affects him in such a way that his guilt-feelings creep up on him.
And so the shared story about combatants – those who killed – became one of dysfunctional, perhaps dangerous veterans. This rupture between personal memory, inscribed in the minds and on the bodies of every combatant, and the group narrative of that violent happening was based on fear. Fred Dixon had joined the army at the age of eighteen years, and at the age of ninety-six could still recall this estrangement. ‘It was remarkable’, he observed,
How people wanted to forget all about the war. At one interview for a job as a headmaster… two female members of the board who were interviewing me, when told about my war service said, ‘We want to forget all about that’. I was indignant and said, ‘If you can, certainly, but personally I cannot’. The elderly chairman of the board then said, ‘You see, Mr Dixon, whenever a criminal is brought before the magistrates in London he always pleads that he is an ex-serviceman’. My reply was more polite than they deserved, but I told them I was not a criminal and that I was not pleading.
The under-current fear of the ex-serviceman was based upon a latent recognition that he had killed. How could anyone who spilt human blood remain untainted? As one First World War medical orderly observed, human sensibilities were eradicated in the process of being ‘turned into devilish machines to kill and to be killed’. The transformation was even portrayed as being inscribed upon the body: in popular cartoons, veterans yowled the dog-language of militarism, their hands twisted into claws, and their brows sunk to resemble apes. ‘Did you really enjoy killing babies and people?’, snarled passer-bys. Servicemen returned home and found that their families, friends, and acquaintances looked at them warily: ‘they seem to think you might go wild.... Like you’re a freak, likes to kill’, complained one soldier.
In the process of attempting to both reconcile their civilian and combatant ‘selves’, and to communicate their experiences to family and friends back home, combatants increasingly assimilated the disciplining languages of psychology. This can be seen more powerfully in discussions of the emotional effects of war. The languages of psychology had a profound effect on how emotions were actually experienced and recalled. As I argue in ‘Fear and Anxiety: Writing About Emotion in Modern History’, published in History Workshop Journal in 2003, fear possesses its own narrative. To be understood, individuals communicating their fears need to conform to certain narrative structures, including genre, syntax, form, order, and vocabulary. In other words, the act of speaking (or writing) one’s fear changes the sensation of fear. Emotional utterances or acts have a ‘unique capacity to alter what they ‘refer’ to or what they ‘represent’’. Thus, servicemen during the First World War tended to use the language of instincts to describe their emotions in war. This language was drawn from evolutionary notions about emotions arising out of universal instincts such as self-preservation, curiosity, pugnacity, self-assertion, self-abasement, parental love, and revulsion. As William James put it in Principles of Psychology (1905), ‘every stimulus that excites an instinct excites an emotion as well’. These instincts were inherited ‘from the brutes’ and could not be avoided. In popular accounts of fear in wartime, this was the language adopted. Thus, fear and panic in combat involved the feeling of being ‘taken over’ by ‘primitive blood-lust’, only returning to their ‘real selves’ afterwards. In a typical account from the First World War, Charles Stewart Alexander described his emotions in combat as a heady mixture of ‘fiendish joy’ and terror, arising out of being suddenly overwhelmed by ‘primitive instincts’. In the terror of combat, men reverted to their animalistic inheritance.
This language began changing after 1939 and was dramatically different by the 1960s when the fashionably self-conscious, psychoanalytical style of war memoirs encouraged a more detailed, more individual, and more confessional rendering of reminiscences and battle stories. Popular Freudianism resulted in an increase in sexual metaphors to describe the fear engendered by combat – most typically the description of fear in combat as inciting an ‘ache as profound as the ache of orgasm’. In other words, during the earlier period, the language of instincts was the language of fear. By the 1960s, the language employed was that of psychoanalysis, the language of anxiety.
The problem of causation cannot be avoided nevertheless. Did the shift in the nature of war (factors such as greater distance between enemies, and the killing of civilians) lead to increased anxiety, or did changes in the labels with which men could ‘make sense’ of what was going on around them change the way they ‘actually experienced’ combat? The answer is ‘both’, but historians have proved better at analysing the former than the latter. In historical time, many things actually do (or do not) ‘happen’, but the very act of narrating changes and formulates the ‘experience’. After all, from the moment of action (in this case, combat), the event that excited emotion entered into imagination and language, to be interpreted, elaborated, structured and re-structured. As the Vietnam story-teller Tim O'Brien, wrote in The Things They Carried (1990):
it's difficult to separate what happened to what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed.... And then afterwards, when you go to tell about it, there's always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
The act of narrating emotions – to oneself as much as to others – is dependent upon the ordering mechanisms of grammar, plot, and genre. To the extent that these mechanism are historical, the way emotions are experienced have a history. The very narratives within which combatants were able to phrase and thus mould their experiences were profoundly influenced by psychological disciplines of the self. This aspect may have proved the most powerful legacy of the psychology profession’s ‘war-work’.
To conclude, fear states did not only threaten the entire warring enterprise – it also represented a major blow to the gender identity of the combatant. The experience of incapacitating fear showed the soldier to be ‘less of a man’. Physicians often found themselves having to convince men who were suffering from ‘shell shock’ that their infliction was emotional rather than physical. In the words of one doctor working with British soldiers overseas during First World War, some of his patients suffering from shell shock ‘insisted that they had not been in the least afraid, but that their condition was due to some physical cause which they could not explain’. He pointed out that
The only way to cure such men was to convince them by quiet reasoning that they really had been frightened out of their wits, and then to point out to them that everyone was horribly afraid, but that brave men did not give way under stress.
They had to ‘resolve to control themselves and play their part’. But, as this physician admitted, although most were able to return to the fight, the majority would eventually break down again. He was referring to men like Arthur Hubbard, with whom I started this blog. We don’t know what happened to Arthur: the last letter on record announced his itinerary for returning home: he planned to arrive at Vauxhill at four o'clock, catch the tram outside, and change at Streatham Library. Destination: 159 Links Road, Mitcham Lane, Streatham Vale, London. We can only hope that, like most combatants, he too returned to his family and friends and proceeded to create a more pleasant (and more consoling) life.
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