'Playing the Game to the Army': The Royal Army Medical Corps, Shell Shock and the Great War

摘要

The image of the shell shocked soldier now dominates both popular and academic accounts of the First World War in Britain. In Jay Winter's words, shell shock has become a metaphor for the war itself. The cultural prominence of the shell shocked soldier has been reinforced by the long term popularity of the war poets, the literature of disillusionment and countless memoirs and biographies. Moreover, the literature of the Great War has now developed a history of its own, and the meeting between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart has become the subject of contemporary film and literature, so that the Great War has become inextricably linked with both mental illness and disillusionment. There is also a political angle to this modern memory, and a recent public campaign to grant retrospective pardons to men sentenced to death during the Great War was based largely on the belief that these men may well have been suffering from unrecognised mental trauma.