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Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War |
'Their whole life is ruined,' wrote Florence Gurney, mother to Ivor, in the 1920s. 'They ought … to be treated honourably.' Peter Barham attempts to do exactly that in his meticulously documented account of the psychiatric casualties of the Great War and the care system in which they found themselves adrift.
I feel as if I've been mingling with the cast list of a great angry play, a collection of distressed, disempowered, dismissed, disbelieved individuals whose lives were borrowed, turned inside out and returned, mangled, to them with as little help as the country could get away with. Among the sceptical, scheming providers of pensions, a few stars shine, officials or medics who could see through the madness to the person inside; but for the most part, this is a story of shocking, snatching scheming and manipulation to ensure that the state parted with as little money as possible.
Yet here is such great injustice, for one of Peter Barham's conclusions about his rag-tag collection of psychotics is that for many of them, a war pension would have been a 'survival kit' to enable the damaged man to claw himself out of the mess of his mind, even if he slid back into it from time to time, and create some sort of a life for himself within his limitations, reconstruct his relationships and enjoy a physical freedom even with a mind which would never be free. And, of course, a diagnosis of mental illness, or a time in an asylum, stuck on a man a stigmatising label which effectively restricted his options for life. No wonder he needed both the money and the well understood, respectable, popular designation of 'shell shock'.
Peter Barham peoples his book with characters who are faithfully brought to life with brief case histories, perhaps supplemented by extracts from medical reports or personal letters, chosen to permit the stifled voices to surface after years buried in bureaucracy or filed in cabinets. As their frustration turns to anger, despair or impotence, the public clamour for equitable treatment for men made mad by war becomes louder until it can be ignored no longer. Numerous indignant, anguished wives or families declare that their loved one was never, ever, mad until he served in the army. One man expresses his fury that he has not received the basic garments to which he is entitled - his drawers - thus revealing how the authorities have infantilised him. Another is recorded as dead after admission to an asylum, denying the truth that he is very much still alive, with children. Broken men write that they are depressed to the point of suicide because they have simply had enough. Fathers are consumed with urgent worry because their mental troubles have deprived their families of a survival income. Indomitable men escape time and again in search of a role in the army rather than a career as a pauper lunatic. Flicking through pages at random reveals a huge intensity of mental suffering, and a parallel stubborn refusal among many of those charged with their care to accept that a man had suffered, not because he was weak or unmanly, but because what had happened to him was unbelievably, intolerably dreadful.
And slyly, in the background, are the official pens writing again and again the excuses and judgments and class-coded assumptions which legitimise a refusal to award a pension, or, in some cases, to snatch it away. Hereditary lunacy. Inferior. Cowardly. Unmanly. Immoral. Decrepit. Feebleminded. Degenerative. Defective. Hopeless.
Some men needed hospitalisation for their own well-being and the safety of their families. Some were plainly too ill or too vulnerable to survive outside an institution. But the overwhelming feeling from 'Forgotten Lunatics' is that if your destination were to be in your own best interests, you needed a rich family, or a strong and determined advocate, or an officer rank. Admitted into a class based, two tier, care system, the ordinary man might as well give up hope. It is to their immense credit that so few of them did.
I have a few reservations. The significance of so many quotations from Ulysses eluded me. I disliked the jacket photograph, which appeared at first sight to be a mad ex-soldier perched crazily in a tree, but turned out to be a picture of volunteer training. And throughout the book I felt persistent discomfort at the continual use of the words lunatic or imbecile to describe the psychiatrically wounded. I wished that, like the army eventually was forced to, he had felt the need to recast his language.
That aside, I read this poignant book with an angry heart, primarily for the human beings whose fate he recounts, but also for the truth that even now, we have a way to go in accepting mental illness as an uninvited destiny which may throw up obstacles as pervasive as being adrift in a terrifying maze, and responding with both compassion and a map.
© Gwyneth M. Roberts November, 2004
Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War
is published by Yale University Press
Hard Covers
464 pages, many photographs, colour and black-and-white
ISBN: 0-300-10379-4
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