Teachers’ Forum

The collective memory of shellshock

Between the post-World War One usage to describe the worst destructive effects of trench fighting, and the present day usage to describe the effects of an unpleasant emotional surprise or physical fatigue, there is a history of ‘shellshock’ as it is recalled through the 20^th century. The memory of shellshock has three sources. First is the changing practice and theory of psychological medicine, which shapes ideas of ‘madness’, and ‘trauma’. Second is the negotiation of the condition during wartime by doctors, patients, politicians and the public, which places the Army’s need for manpower against the individual need for self-preservation in open competition. Third is the cultural tradition of remembering which is made visible in memoir and novel, poem and film, after the Armistice. These sources continually overlap and interact, so that the meanings we ascribe to shellshock today are difficult to disentangle from the shifting concepts of psychological medicine, the urgencies of wartime medicine or military discipline, and the build-up of associations as the memory of the Great War has served various causes.

In considering recent film representations of shellshock then, we are examining a particular instance of Britain’s past as it has come to be understood after several intervening generations, particularly in literature and memoirs. The major feature films of the 1980s and 1990s to feature shellshock are all literary adaptations that both build on the collective memory of the Great War and reinterpret it for a late 20^th century audience. That collective memory dates back to the interwar years, when shellshock acquired its associations with the disillusion and betrayal of the war generation; then between 1945 and 1989 it was as a mirror in which to address concerns with class, pacifism and democracy; finally there has been a revival of interest in the subject in the 1990s focussed on trauma, male identity and justice. Tracing the memory of shellshock then, and examining the sources of its present day image in film, gives the opportunity for a case study in the development of one particular British cultural tradition, and for an insight into the contemporary preoccupations of British society.

What I would like to do today is trace the sources of one particular representation of shellshock in Gilles MacKinnon’s 1997 film Regeneration.

Craiglockhart: 1917

The film is an adaptation of Pat Barker’s novel of the same name, and the first part of her award-winning and best-selling First World War trilogy published between 1991 and 1995. But the plot of Regeneration goes back much further to a well known episode during the war itself: the meeting and friendship between two English war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, at Craiglockhart Special Hospital for Officers, just outside Edinburgh, during the summer of 1917. This meeting has acquired a highly charged symbolic significance for a number of reasons. First, Craiglockhart was a hospital for shellshocked officers: men whose experience of combat on the Western Front had severely traumatised them resulting in such varied symptoms as memory loss, blindness or limb paralysis. It was a condition that caused officers particular anguish because they felt that it carried a stigma of madness or cowardice or both, and that it was a threat to social position and reputation; it was also a condition that came to represent the suffering and horror of the war as it was later understood. Second, Siegfried Sassoon was at Craiglockhart not because of any mental condition, but because he had written a letter of protest against the conduct of the war and was faced with the prospect of either a court-martial or some time in a ‘Special’ Hospital. Again, the idea that Sassoon was labelled out of his mind to protest against the war, and then placed in a hospital with soldiers traumatised by participation in that very same war has a powerful irony; and irony is the dominant literary mode of remembrance from the late 1920s. Third, Wilfred Owen’s presence adds to this historic literary meeting the association between shellshock, sensitive artistic temperament, and disillusion with combat as represented in Owen’s poems. The war poetry of both Sassoon and Owen was taught in British schools from the 1960s onwards and has provided recent generations with their most powerful images of that war, made more tragic by the death of Owen in the last week of fighting in 1918.

Craiglockhart has special appeal as a setting for a film about the Great War then. It allows the audience an insight into the destruction of the war without having to witness it directly as in, say, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); into the work of W. H. R. Rivers, the doctor who took charge of Sassoon’s case, and is also given the imaginary case of Billy Prior too; and into the creative dialogue between Sassoon and Owen as they discuss poetry in the appropriate setting of a psychiatric hospital.

Memory and War Poets

Just as important as the meeting between Sassoon and Owen however, are the various retellings of their meeting, that come between 1917 and 1997, and particularly the growing association between shellshock, war poets, and postwar disillusionment. Here I want to list three early reassessments that have shaped the memory of shellshock and the Great War, and that influence the depiction of Owen, Sassoon and shellshock in the film version of Regeneration:

1. 1931: Blunden’s Collected Poems

The first retelling I want to mention is the publication of a new edition of Owen’s Collected Poems in 1931. Sassoon edited the original 1920 Collected Poems, sold 730 copies. The 1931 edition, with a biographical preface by another first world war poet, Edmund Blunden, was much more successful. Its publication came after the international success of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front January 1929, which turned the war, as one old soldier put it, into ‘a lending library fashion’. Blunden’s 1931 preface is important because it places Owen’s poems – ordered chronologically - as well as his letters, in an autobiographical framework, thereby strengthening the association between life and art, and helping to make Owen one of the best remembered figures of the war.

2. 1937: Sassoon on ‘shell-shock’

Next, Siegfried Sassoon himself discusses shellshock in his lightly fictionalised autobiography, The George Sherston Trilogy, published in full in 1937:

Shell Shock. How many a brief bombardment had its long delayed after effect in the minds of these survivors, many of whom had looked at their companions and laughed while inferno did its best to destroy them. Not then was the evil hour, but now; now, in the sweating suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis of limbs, in the stammering of dislocated speech. . . . In the name of civilization these soldiers had been martyred, and it remains for civilization to prove that their martyrdom wasn’t a dirty swindle.

Here, Sassoon uses shellshock to describe the abandonment and consequent disillusion that many soldiers felt after the Armistice. This passage is also the source for one scene in Regeneration, which is set in 1917 rather than 1937, where Sassoon also refers to the war as a ‘dirty swindle’ during an argument with W. H. R. Rivers. Again, this is the dominant mode of remembrance, but we might usefully refer at this stage to a less well-known form of war remembrance. In Soldier From the Wars Returning (1965) Charles Carrington, also a veteran of the Great War, stresses how remote the recent views of the war seemed. ‘We veterans of the First [World War]’, he wrote, ‘were so far removed from the correct modes of thought [by the 1960s] as to be relics of antiquity, buried beneath many historical strata.’ Carrington was not viewing the war through the lens of Wilfred Owen’s poetry and autobiography, nor through the bitter disillusion of Sassoon in the 1930s. Rather, he viewed it as a time of comradeship and extraordinary experience; for Carrington then, shellshock has no special significance as a symbol of wartime tragedy.

3. 1946: Sassoon on Owen

Last is my list of reassessments that have shaped the cultural tradition of Great War remembrance is Siegfried’s Journey (1946), Sassoon’s non-fiction memoir of the war in which he returns to Craiglockhart to meditate on his memory of Owen, this time with greater hindsight.

Wilfred’s face will be known to posterity by a photograph taken in uniform, and to some extent disguised by the animal health of army life. It shows him very much as he was when I was with him. He wasn’t a fine-drawn type. There was a full-blooded robustness about him which implied reserves of mental energy and solid ability. Under ordinary conditions it wasn’t a spiritual face. It was of the mould which either coarsens or refines itself in later years. I cannot say that I ever saw what is called ‘a look of genius’ in it. His mouth was resolute and humorous, his eyes long and heavy-lidded, quiescent rather than penetrating. They were somewhat sleepy eyes, kind, shrewd, and seldom lit up from within. They seemed, like much else in his personality, to be instinctively guarding the secret sources of his inward power and integrity. His face – what would it have become? While calling him back in memory I have been haunted by the idea of the unattainable features of those who have died in youth. Borne away from them by the years, we – with our time troubled looks and diminished alertness – have submitted to many a gradual detriment of change. But the young poet of twenty-five years ago remains his word-discovering self. His futureless eyes encounter ours from the faintly smiling portrait, unconscious of the privilege and deprivation of never growing old, conscious of the dramatic illusion of completeness that he is destined to create.

This is the voice of the war generation ageing, forever unable to forget those who would not grow old, and Owen, because he lost his life, because he wrote so movingly about the war, and because his story struck a chord, becoming the noblest example of suffering and loss, both physical and mental.

The film of Regeneration is notable for its unsentimental view of the war poets. However, working within a tradition of remembrance that has made a cult of Wilfred Owen in particular there is no need to underline the pathos of his situation. That Owen would write his most direct, powerful poems following his meeting with Sassoon, that he would return to France and be killed within a few days of the end of the war, these are facts that almost every member of the audience would bring to a viewing of Regeneration. The film strengthens the view of the Great War put forward by Blunden and Sassoon in the 1930s and 40s however, by concentrating on Owen’s relationship with Sassoon, which is explored in six scenes spaced evenly through the film, and by passages from Owen’s poems – particularly ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which are discussed and read out as the film progresses. By further allusions to ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, and by relating these poems directly to the shellshocked Officers of Craiglockhart, Regeneration establishes a mood of elegy for the men of the war and doubt about the aims of the war that had particular appeal for a 1990s audience.

Shellshock after 1989

There is a complicated history of remembrance of the Great War between 1946 and 1989 that includes the idea of class betrayal by the military leaders of the war during the satire boom of the early 1960s; the use of the Great War example to support the anti-Vietnam war movement; and the growing unease of participants as the war seemed decreasingly like their own experience. However, I would like to jump forward here to the memory of shellshock and the Great War in the 1990s.

The immediate cause for the new revival of interest in the Great War after 1989 was the six-year cycle of remembrance, beginning in September 1989 and ending in August 1995, which marked the passage of five decades since the Second World War. Because the 1914-18 conflict provides the British with their archetypal images of combat, this naturally led back to a reconsideration of the Great War too. Within this cycle fell several other significant dates including the 100^th anniversary of Wilfred Owen’s birth in March 1993 and the 80^th anniversary of the start of the Great War in August 1994. Another source of recent interest the recent interest in shellshock lies in the 1980s.

Most obviously in the appearance of Post-traumatic stress disorder in returning Vietnam soldiers, which after 1980 led other veterans from the WW2, Korea and the Falklands for instance to reclassify themselves as the traumatised victims of combat. Furthermore, feminism begins to reinterpret the idea of trauma, hysteria and the First World War during the 1980s. In particular, Elaine Showalter argues in The Female Malady (1985) that the shellshock cases of the Great War, by showing that men as well as women could become traumatised and hysterical, helped redefine male identity and reassess pre-war ideas of masculine heroism and bravery. The Female Malady is also cited by Pat Barker as one of her sources for the interpretation of shellshock. Furthermore, both Showalter and Barker write within a tradition of women commenting on shellshock that dates back to Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). One final strand of thought that fed into the reassessment of shellshock in the 1990s was growing public awareness of the connection between traumatic events and mental disorders. With the recognition of PTSD by the American Psychological Association in 1980 not only Vietnam veterans, but the traumatised survivors of earthquake, plane crash, childhood sexual abuse and war were now officially given a medical condition. As Elaine Showalter argued in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997) this has led to an ‘epidemic’ of trauma related illness, and a rediscovery of past instances of such conditions, for example during the Great War. This in turn led to the 1990s campaigns in Britain for the pardon on executed soldiers who should, from a present day perspective, have been recognised as victims of traumatic neurosis, but were instead executed as cowards or deserters.

Craiglockhart: 1997

Gilles MacKinnon’s Regeneration is, then, the latest in a series of depictions of shellshock including wartime medical documentary footage on shellshock made at hospitals during the war, The Return of the Soldier (Alan Bridges, 1982) and Mrs Dalloway (Marleen Gorris, 1997). The feature films especially illustrate the cultural tradition within which the Great War is remembered. It is a tradition, as I have tried to explain, that shifts its ground to answer the preoccupations and tastes of successive generations.


Filming Shellshock: Remembrance of the Great War in the 1990s by Peter Leese

The collective memory of shellshock Between the post-World War One usage to describe the worst destructive effects of trench fighting, and the present day usage to describe the effects of an unpleasant emotional surprise or physical fatigue, there is a history of ‘shellshock’ as it is recalled through the 20^th century. The memory of shellshock has three sources. First is the changing practice and theory of psychological medicine, which shapes ideas of ‘madness’, and ‘trauma’. Second is the negotiation of the condition during wartime by doctors, patients, politicians and the public, which places the Army’s need for manpower against the individual need for self-preservation in open competition. Third is the cultural tradition of remembering which is made visible in memoir and novel, poem and film, after the Armistice. These sources continually overlap and interact, so that the meanings we ascribe to shellshock today are difficult to disentangle from the shifting concepts of psychological medicine, the urgencies of wartime medicine or military discipline, and the build-up of associations as the memory of the Great War has served various causes. In considering recent film representations of shellshock then, we are examining a particular instance of Britain’s past as it has come to be understood after several intervening generations, particularly in literature and memoirs. The major feature films of the 1980s and 1990s to feature shellshock are all literary adaptations that both build on the collective memory of the Great War and reinterpret it for a late 20^th century audience. That collective memory dates back to the interwar years, when shellshock acquired its associations with the disillusion and betrayal of the war generation; then between 1945 and 1989 it was as a mirror in which to address concerns with class, pacifism and democracy; finally there has been a revival of interest in the subject in the 1990s focussed on trauma, male identity and justice. Tracing the memory of shellshock then, and examining the sources of its present day image in film, gives the opportunity for a case study in the development of one particular British cultural tradition, and for an insight into the contemporary preoccupations of British society. What I would like to do today is trace the sources of one particular representation of shellshock in Gilles MacKinnon’s 1997 film Regeneration. Craiglockhart: 1917 The film is an adaptation of Pat Barker’s novel of the same name, and the first part of her award-winning and best-selling First World War trilogy published between 1991 and 1995. But the plot of Regeneration goes back much further to a well known episode during the war itself: the meeting and friendship between two English war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, at Craiglockhart Special Hospital for Officers, just outside Edinburgh, during the summer of 1917. This meeting has acquired a highly charged symbolic significance for a number of reasons. First, Craiglockhart was a hospital for shellshocked officers: men whose experience of combat on the Western Front had severely traumatised them resulting in such varied symptoms as memory loss, blindness or limb paralysis. It was a condition that caused officers particular anguish because they felt that it carried a stigma of madness or cowardice or both, and that it was a threat to social position and reputation; it was also a condition that came to represent the suffering and horror of the war as it was later understood. Second, Siegfried Sassoon was at Craiglockhart not because of any mental condition, but because he had written a letter of protest against the conduct of the war and was faced with the prospect of either a court-martial or some time in a ‘Special’ Hospital. Again, the idea that Sassoon was labelled out of his mind to protest against the war, and then placed in a hospital with soldiers traumatised by participation in that very same war has a powerful irony; and irony is the dominant literary mode of remembrance from the late 1920s. Third, Wilfred Owen’s presence adds to this historic literary meeting the association between shellshock, sensitive artistic temperament, and disillusion with combat as represented in Owen’s poems. The war poetry of both Sassoon and Owen was taught in British schools from the 1960s onwards and has provided recent generations with their most powerful images of that war, made more tragic by the death of Owen in the last week of fighting in 1918. Craiglockhart has special appeal as a setting for a film about the Great War then. It allows the audience an insight into the destruction of the war without having to witness it directly as in, say, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); into the work of W. H. R. Rivers, the doctor who took charge of Sassoon’s case, and is also given the imaginary case of Billy Prior too; and into the creative dialogue between Sassoon and Owen as they discuss poetry in the appropriate setting of a psychiatric hospital. Memory and War Poets Just as important as the meeting between Sassoon and Owen however, are the various retellings of their meeting, that come between 1917 and 1997, and particularly the growing association between shellshock, war poets, and postwar disillusionment. Here I want to list three early reassessments that have shaped the memory of shellshock and the Great War, and that influence the depiction of Owen, Sassoon and shellshock in the film version of Regeneration: 1. 1931: Blunden’s Collected Poems The first retelling I want to mention is the publication of a new edition of Owen’s Collected Poems in 1931. Sassoon edited the original 1920 Collected Poems, sold 730 copies. The 1931 edition, with a biographical preface by another first world war poet, Edmund Blunden, was much more successful. Its publication came after the international success of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front January 1929, which turned the war, as one old soldier put it, into ‘a lending library fashion’. Blunden’s 1931 preface is important because it places Owen’s poems – ordered chronologically - as well as his letters, in an autobiographical framework, thereby strengthening the association between life and art, and helping to make Owen one of the best remembered figures of the war. 2. 1937: Sassoon on ‘shell-shock’ Next, Siegfried Sassoon himself discusses shellshock in his lightly fictionalised autobiography, The George Sherston Trilogy, published in full in 1937: Shell Shock. How many a brief bombardment had its long delayed after effect in the minds of these survivors, many of whom had looked at their companions and laughed while inferno did its best to destroy them. Not then was the evil hour, but now; now, in the sweating suffocation of nightmare, in paralysis of limbs, in the stammering of dislocated speech. . . . In the name of civilization these soldiers had been martyred, and it remains for civilization to prove that their martyrdom wasn’t a dirty swindle. Here, Sassoon uses shellshock to describe the abandonment and consequent disillusion that many soldiers felt after the Armistice. This passage is also the source for one scene in Regeneration, which is set in 1917 rather than 1937, where Sassoon also refers to the war as a ‘dirty swindle’ during an argument with W. H. R. Rivers. Again, this is the dominant mode of remembrance, but we might usefully refer at this stage to a less well-known form of war remembrance. In Soldier From the Wars Returning (1965) Charles Carrington, also a veteran of the Great War, stresses how remote the recent views of the war seemed. ‘We veterans of the First [World War]’, he wrote, ‘were so far removed from the correct modes of thought [by the 1960s] as to be relics of antiquity, buried beneath many historical strata.’ Carrington was not viewing the war through the lens of Wilfred Owen’s poetry and autobiography, nor through the bitter disillusion of Sassoon in the 1930s. Rather, he viewed it as a time of comradeship and extraordinary experience; for Carrington then, shellshock has no special significance as a symbol of wartime tragedy. 3. 1946: Sassoon on Owen Last is my list of reassessments that have shaped the cultural tradition of Great War remembrance is Siegfried’s Journey (1946), Sassoon’s non-fiction memoir of the war in which he returns to Craiglockhart to meditate on his memory of Owen, this time with greater hindsight. Wilfred’s face will be known to posterity by a photograph taken in uniform, and to some extent disguised by the animal health of army life. It shows him very much as he was when I was with him. He wasn’t a fine-drawn type. There was a full-blooded robustness about him which implied reserves of mental energy and solid ability. Under ordinary conditions it wasn’t a spiritual face. It was of the mould which either coarsens or refines itself in later years. I cannot say that I ever saw what is called ‘a look of genius’ in it. His mouth was resolute and humorous, his eyes long and heavy-lidded, quiescent rather than penetrating. They were somewhat sleepy eyes, kind, shrewd, and seldom lit up from within. They seemed, like much else in his personality, to be instinctively guarding the secret sources of his inward power and integrity. His face – what would it have become? While calling him back in memory I have been haunted by the idea of the unattainable features of those who have died in youth. Borne away from them by the years, we – with our time troubled looks and diminished alertness – have submitted to many a gradual detriment of change. But the young poet of twenty-five years ago remains his word-discovering self. His futureless eyes encounter ours from the faintly smiling portrait, unconscious of the privilege and deprivation of never growing old, conscious of the dramatic illusion of completeness that he is destined to create. This is the voice of the war generation ageing, forever unable to forget those who would not grow old, and Owen, because he lost his life, because he wrote so movingly about the war, and because his story struck a chord, becoming the noblest example of suffering and loss, both physical and mental. The film of Regeneration is notable for its unsentimental view of the war poets. However, working within a tradition of remembrance that has made a cult of Wilfred Owen in particular there is no need to underline the pathos of his situation. That Owen would write his most direct, powerful poems following his meeting with Sassoon, that he would return to France and be killed within a few days of the end of the war, these are facts that almost every member of the audience would bring to a viewing of Regeneration. The film strengthens the view of the Great War put forward by Blunden and Sassoon in the 1930s and 40s however, by concentrating on Owen’s relationship with Sassoon, which is explored in six scenes spaced evenly through the film, and by passages from Owen’s poems – particularly ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, which are discussed and read out as the film progresses. By further allusions to ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, and by relating these poems directly to the shellshocked Officers of Craiglockhart, Regeneration establishes a mood of elegy for the men of the war and doubt about the aims of the war that had particular appeal for a 1990s audience. Shellshock after 1989 There is a complicated history of remembrance of the Great War between 1946 and 1989 that includes the idea of class betrayal by the military leaders of the war during the satire boom of the early 1960s; the use of the Great War example to support the anti-Vietnam war movement; and the growing unease of participants as the war seemed decreasingly like their own experience. However, I would like to jump forward here to the memory of shellshock and the Great War in the 1990s. The immediate cause for the new revival of interest in the Great War after 1989 was the six-year cycle of remembrance, beginning in September 1989 and ending in August 1995, which marked the passage of five decades since the Second World War. Because the 1914-18 conflict provides the British with their archetypal images of combat, this naturally led back to a reconsideration of the Great War too. Within this cycle fell several other significant dates including the 100^th anniversary of Wilfred Owen’s birth in March 1993 and the 80^th anniversary of the start of the Great War in August 1994. Another source of recent interest the recent interest in shellshock lies in the 1980s. Most obviously in the appearance of Post-traumatic stress disorder in returning Vietnam soldiers, which after 1980 led other veterans from the WW2, Korea and the Falklands for instance to reclassify themselves as the traumatised victims of combat. Furthermore, feminism begins to reinterpret the idea of trauma, hysteria and the First World War during the 1980s. In particular, Elaine Showalter argues in The Female Malady (1985) that the shellshock cases of the Great War, by showing that men as well as women could become traumatised and hysterical, helped redefine male identity and reassess pre-war ideas of masculine heroism and bravery. The Female Malady is also cited by Pat Barker as one of her sources for the interpretation of shellshock. Furthermore, both Showalter and Barker write within a tradition of women commenting on shellshock that dates back to Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). One final strand of thought that fed into the reassessment of shellshock in the 1990s was growing public awareness of the connection between traumatic events and mental disorders. With the recognition of PTSD by the American Psychological Association in 1980 not only Vietnam veterans, but the traumatised survivors of earthquake, plane crash, childhood sexual abuse and war were now officially given a medical condition. As Elaine Showalter argued in Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (1997) this has led to an ‘epidemic’ of trauma related illness, and a rediscovery of past instances of such conditions, for example during the Great War. This in turn led to the 1990s campaigns in Britain for the pardon on executed soldiers who should, from a present day perspective, have been recognised as victims of traumatic neurosis, but were instead executed as cowards or deserters. Craiglockhart: 1997 Gilles MacKinnon’s Regeneration is, then, the latest in a series of depictions of shellshock including wartime medical documentary footage on shellshock made at hospitals during the war, The Return of the Soldier (Alan Bridges, 1982) and Mrs Dalloway (Marleen Gorris, 1997). The feature films especially illustrate the cultural tradition within which the Great War is remembered. It is a tradition, as I have tried to explain, that shifts its ground to answer the preoccupations and tastes of successive generations.