How Kindness Can Transform Horror into Poetry

Chief among the insights we gain from reading history is that what we read is often relevant to what we are experiencing today. Such is the case with?Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War?by Charles Glass.?

Glass, a former war correspondent for?ABC News, centers his story on Craiglockhart, a health resort turned into a treatment center for British officers suffering “shell shock” in what was then called The Great War.?

Humane Treatment

The treatment offered to the soldiers seems so modern for its time. Its commanding officer focused on helping the residents regain their mental facilities by treating them first as patients rather than soldiers. The commanding officer was physician Major William H. Bryce, a career officer. As Glass writes, "Bryce recoiled at military formality. It was his belief, he wrote, 'there should be little to indicate a hospital regime beyond the few regulations to ensure order.'"

The residents were not required to wear uniforms, including wearing slippers. The men were encouraged to venture into town, Edinburgh, and partake in its offerings, from dining to theater, including meeting family and friends. Socialization was integral to recovery. Fellow psychiatrist Dr. Arthur John Brock believed that the city was “an integral part of the Craiglockhart ‘cure’” and as Glass writes offering “ideal conditions for [the men’s] restoration.”

Two War Poets

Craiglockhart was also the place where two of the best-known war poets, Siegfried Sassoon?and?Wilfred Owen, resided for a time. A third poet, Robert Graves, a friend of Sassoon, also visited. All three men served honorably and with distinction, with Sassoon earning the Military Cross.?

Glass profiles two psychiatrists. Dr. William H.R. Rivers treated Sassoon with what today we would call "talk therapy." Dr. Arthur J. Brock treated Owens with a kind of "work therapy," keeping busy. This initiative led Owen to create and publish a literary journal for Craiglockhart called?The Hydro, a reference to the facility's origin as a hydrotherapy spa.?

Sassoon was confined because he had grown disillusioned with the War and protested it with a letter to the Times of London. While he was suffering from a form of PTSD, he was sent to Craiglockhart to be "cured" of his antipathy toward the War. Owen was severely wounded and ended up in Craiglockhart for more formal treatment.

Sassoon, born into an aristocratic Jewish family, was well-connected and well-known as a poet. Owen, who was middle-class and had not attended university, had yet to publish. At Craiglockhart, and with the help of their psychiatrists, both were able to hone their thinking and craft.?

What we gain from their stories is how their experiences shaped their art and, in turn, shed light on the experience of War in ways that had not yet been told. Britain entered the War on a wave of patriotic fervor. Rupert Brooke, a young poet, was emblematic of his time writing in a heroic vain. He was killed in 1915 before the reality of the slaughter was known. Sassoon turned his pen to the cruelties of a mismanaged war. Here is a sampling from the poem "Base Details."

If I were fierce and bald, and short of breath,

I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base

And speed glum heroes up to the line to death.

[continuing]

“Poor young chap,”?

I’d say – “I used to know his father well.

Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.”

And when the War is done, and youth stone dead,

I'd toddle safely home and die – in bed."

Owen focused on the troops themselves telling their stories. In “Dulce et Decorum Est” – perhaps his most famous poem, he writes of the aftermath of a gas attack.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face…

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

[Translation: How sweet it is to die for one’s country.]

The Aftermath

Sassoon survived the War and continued his literary journey. His friend Robert Graves did the same. [Graves is the author of?I Claudius, the story of the Roman Emperor who was born in the age of Augustus and survived the madness of Caligula to become emperor himself.] Owen was not so fortunate. He was killed on November 7, 1918, four days before the Armistice took effect.

As Glass writes in his introduction, “Had Rivers treated Owen and Brock been responsible for Sassoon, this would have been a different story. Had both young officers been sent to different hospitals, they would not have met, and the poems they wrote would have been vastly different from the masterpieces the world knows.”

Today, PTSD remains a pressing issue for many vets who experienced combat. Lessons learned at a treatment center in Scotland more than a century ago set a foundation for learning the causes of the trauma and how to help those suffering to recover.

First posted on Forbes.com 11.07.2024

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