In the summer of 1917, a pair of British army officers and poets arrived at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinbergh. The hospital was designed to address cases of PTSD — or, as it was called then, neurasthenia or shell-shock. War trauma was nothing new, but trench and chemical warfare had transformed the rules of combat, and the ranks were overwhelmed by a fresh array of horrors. By 1916, the number of British shell-shock victims numbered more than 16,000. Craiglockhart, a leafy, genteel manse that opened in 1880 to serve Edinbergh’s “worried wealthy,” was speedily overwhelmed.
The first officer-poet, Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen, arrived on June 27, shortly after a shell left him unconscious for days. In a letter to his mother, he described the front in Old Testament terms: “It is the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could be contained in one of its crater-holes; the fire of Sodom and Gomorrah could not light a candle to it.” A month later, Second Lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon arrived on the grounds. Well-off and established as writer, he had joined the cavalry in 1915 with enthusiasm and proved his bravery on the front — various feats of selflessness earned him a Military Cross and the nickname Mad Jack. But the horrors of war ground on him. At the Battle of the Somme, he wrote in his diary, “I am looking at a sunlit picture of hell.” He arrived at Craiglockhart transformed and opposed to the war.
Charles Glass’ Soldiers Don’t Go Mad is a chronicle of Craiglockhart’s role in World War I, and the ways that nascent treatments of PTSD and an emerging genre of war poetry emerged from it. Glass, a former ABC News correspondent and prolific war historian, isn’t a poetry scholar or critic, but he delivers a clear picture of how poetry of the war, thanks in part to Owen and Sassoon’s efforts, shifted not just from jingoistic to critical, but also sought out new metaphors for the agonies of the trenches, concerned as much with soldiers’ psyches as their bravery.
The shift was perhaps inevitable; psychiatric treatments for soldiers at the moment Craiglockhart opened weren’t fit-to-purpose. One of the hospital’s lead doctors, Dr. William Halse Rivers, was an unquestionably qualified leader, “a polymath with notable achievements in neurology, clinical psychiatry, medical research, anthropology, and linguistics.” But the terrors that this group of “unblooded wounded” faced hadn’t been seen before, and Rivers and his colleagues were often at a loss to treat it. Rivers’ prior approach to trauma was to recommend that its victim look for a redeeming element of the experience. Confronted with a case of an officer who had been “hurled by a shell blast into the rotting corpse of a German soldier, immersing his face in dead flesh,” a clinical report dryly noted that there was “no redeeming feature” to be found. So the worst cases roamed the grounds in a daze, victims of what Rivers called “erosion” — “the steady loss of the fabric of life under the constant stress of fear, deprivation, and confinement in trenches from which soldiers could not escape.” What calm they could gather was routinely savaged by the firing of the “One O’Clock Gun” at nearby Edinburgh Castle.
[left: Wilfred Owen] Owen, however disturbed he was by his experience on the front, maintained his literary ambitions. Within two months of his arrival at the hospital, he was editing its literary magazine, The Hydra, though it would take some time before he felt comfortable publishing his own work. And he gravitated quickly to Sassoon, who was about to publish his first major poetry collection, The Old Huntsman. Sassoon initially mentored Owen, but in short order they became peers. Each had developed a brand of war poetry that chastened the jingoists, lamented the carnage, and tartly captured the jittery, disrupted minds of the soldier. “That passing-bells for those who die as cattle?” Owen wrote in “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” “Only the monstrous anger of the gas.” Sassoon, whose protests of the war had been well-publicized, tempering the response of the brass who wanted to court-martial him, took aim at blithe support for the war in “Suicide in the Trenches”:
You smug-face crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Sassoon was the known poet whose work found its way to England’s literary elite. Virginia Woolf admired The Old Huntsman, and you can sense her inventing Mrs. Dalloway’s shellshocked Septimus Smith amid her praise of it: “What Mr. Sassoon has felt to be the most sordid and horrible experience in the world he makes us feel to be so in a measure which no other poet of the war has achieved.” Still, it was Owen who wrote the immortal poem of World War I, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” encapsulating the multiple registers of the new war poem with a rare sharpness. It was a vision of war violence (“Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time”). It is a glimpse into a shattered mind (“watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin”). And its closing lines fiercely mocked of hollow patriotism in the Latin adage about how “sweet and fitting” it was to die for one’s country.
[left: Siegfried Sassoon] A stronger book might have better squared up what Owen and Sassoon’s work and friendship meant for the poetry that followed. Their era all but demolished the poem in praise of war — what followed would always strive to capture the inner and outer status of the soldier, and frame him as a helpless creature. A poem like Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner” seems a direct descendant of Owen’s and Sassoon’s work; Alan Hollinghurst’s 2011 novel, The Stranger’s Child, is among other things a tribute to Owen and the long shadow of his generation’s poetry.
But though Glass doesn’t move his perspective long past the end of the war, the heft of Soldiers Don’t Go Mad demonstrates how powerful two writers with a shared sensibility can be, even in a short period of time. “I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall sing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze,” Owen wrote Sassoon after the two left Craiglockhart: Owen was killed in battle in France just a week before the Armistice; Sassoon pursued a successful career as a novelist and poet before he died in 1967. There’s no accounting for the randomness of it, as both poets knew. But it ended. Craiglockhart War Hospital closed and became a convent. The One O’Clock Gun fires to this day.
[Published by Penguin Press on June 6, 2023, 352 pages, $29.00 hardback.]