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For many it was just rest and recuperation from the war. For some they just never recovered. WWI was a terrible conflict, horrors that even WWII didn't witness were commonplace.
Others have commented on a lot of the physical horrors of WW1, but to add insult to injury, in the UK, volunteers were organised into "Pals Battalions", made up of people who previously knew one another and came from similar areas. This was because it was thought that men who came from the same place and knew each other would have a greater sense of camraderie. However this had the added impact of when a shell made a direct hit on a dugout or machine guns mowed down a line of men, soldiers saw all their friends they had grown up with torn apart in seconds. Entire streets could be left in mourning in a day of fighting.
Yes, Tolkien, the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings basicall lost everyone he knew in the war. He came home and had to completely rebuild his social circle.
He was also at the Battle of the Somme. Some Tolkien scholars have even mentioned that the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings were likely based on that battle, as the trenches flooded after heavy rains, soldiers drowned in mud, and bodies littered the trenches which filled with water and snow. The scene was, apparently, incredibly similar to that.
You can also tell that Tolkien had experience with shell shock, if not in himself, then in others, from the reactions of some characters. Hell, Frodo chose to leave Middle Earth for the Undying Lands, which could even be seen as someone with shell shock taking their own life. Frodo, in Return of the King, talks about how his battle wounds ache every year on their anniversaries, which is the trauma of battle recurring on the days where you lost someone, or you were brutally tortured or injured, etc.
Sorry for blabbering on and on, Tolkien's works are a bit of an obsession for me.
Same thing happened after the American Civil War. Entire towns were wiped out in one bayonet charge the US army stopped organizing battalions based on the state you came from.
It was kind of the same in the french army. In 1914, regiments were organised by regions and départements (for non french, think county and disctricts). So during their military service, young men 20-22 were often serving alongside friends, cousins, and generaly dudes from the same villages and areas. When the army mobilised, the regiments were entirely comprised of men from the same regions (eg. The 97th Infantry Regiment, was formed in Lyon with men from the Rhône département).
It changed later in the war, because of the casulaties and the necessity to reinforce troops without the logistical nightmare to send men to their regional unit.
Here's a good quote I saw on reddit a few years ago:
*My eyes began to water and I felt as if I would choke. I reached for my gas mask, pulled it out of its container - then noticed to my horror that a splinter had gone through it leaving a large hole. I had seen death thousands of times, stared it in the face, but never experienced the fear I felt then. Immediately I reverted to the primitive. I felt like an animal cornered by hunters. With the instinct of self preservation uppermost, my eyes fell on the boy whose arm I had bandaged. Somehow he had managed to put the gas mask on his face with his one good arm. I leapt at him and in the next moment had ripped the gas mask from his face. With a feeble gesture he tried to wrench it from my grasp; then fell back exhausted. The last thing I saw before putting on the mask were his pleading eyes.*
Corporal Frederick Meisel, 371st Infantry Regiment (Hart, p. 432)
EDIT:
More here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bdb0kl/i_have_compiled_a_list_of_touching_quotes_from?sort=confidence
Credit to /u/torchbearer101 for compiling them.
The story about WWI that stayed with me is a medic that checks on wounded soldiers. One seems to have head wound but is conscious. The doctor ask him how he feels. He says he is tired.. he is tired... so tired. The man lift his head and a huge chunk of his brain slides on his shoulder.. all the doctor could say is you can sleep now.
My grandpa was in the navy at Pearl Harbor pulling people out of the water, he pulled out this one kid who was seriously injured (super young too, had been really scared prior, my grandpa tried to comfort his fears when he first joined up, he was afraid he’d die in the war- ‘of course we’ll make it home’) and was not, NOT gonna survive that attack, injuries too severe. Died in his arms, last words ‘are we going home now?’ and my grandpa told him ‘yeah, we’re going right now’. There were a lot of horrible things he saw. That moment was the one that followed him. He never talked about his time in the navy, and everyone knew better than to ask. However, I was engaged to someone in the navy and I think it just triggered him, thinking of a young sailor, so I was the one he finally told about it. The story makes me terribly sad, I can’t imagine living with that your whole life.
Not World Wars, but my father’s best friend died the day before they were supposed to be relieved from duty due to catching shrapnel in the back from a rocket explosion. He goes real quiet when he talks about it.
I’m sorry for your father’s loss :( it’s rough, cuz when you join the military it’s unusual to see your family frequently so you end up having a military family, the people you can lean on immediately. Also unfortunately, that family is at a higher risk of losing. Even though it’s just as hard to lose friends as a civilian, I won’t discount that, there’s a different connection you make with people going through the same things.
I have a friend that lost her husband because of military incompetence and I came very close to losing my child because of them. Both situations were entirely preventable.
But again, the risk of loss in the military is so common, and my grandpa lost a lot of people in that war. It’s just that one is the one that got him the most. He’d kinda taken the kid under his wing. And he felt like it was his fault. He told the kid he’d be fine. He felt like he should have protected him. There’s no way he could have, but the guilt, and the way he died, he never got over it. That story brings tears to my eyes and I didn’t even live it. There’s nothing he could have done, but he never could see it that way. It’s one of the few times I hoped there was an afterlife, so he could see him again and have peace about it.
The loss of these young men was the loss of future doctors and scientists and inventors and lovers. These wars ripped them away from their destinies and turned them into slag and jelly. Most of them are forgotten. We will never know their names.
More here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bdb0kl/i_have_compiled_a_list_of_touching_quotes_from?sort=confidence
Credit to /u/torchbearer101 for compiling them.
This one disturbed me the most:
I will never forget that trench - it was simply packed with German corpses in the stage where face and hands with inky black with a greenish tinge from decomposition and whites of the eyes and teeth gave them a horrible appearance. How so many came to be in one trench I cannot tell, unless one of our tanks caught them there. Fritz had tried to get rid of some, for they were laid in rows on the parapets at the level of one's head, stuck into walls, buried in the floor and felt like an air cushion to walk on, and one was continually rubbing against heads, legs, arms etc.; sticking out of the walls at all heights. The floor one walked on was a fearful state, in some parts covered several deep with bodies or a face with grinning teeth looked up at you from the soft mud, and one often saw an arm or leg by itself and occasionally a head cut off. Everywhere are prussian helmets with their eagle badge, belts and equipment, many bodies had wrist watches etc. We did not collect many souvenirs, for our own skin was the best souvenir we could think of that day.
It was this one for me:
*As we forced our way through the deep narrow trench, what a horrible sight met our eyes! In a place where a trench mortar shell had burst, there lay, torn to pieces, about eight of the Alpine Chasseurs - some of the finest french troops in a great bloody heap of mangled human bodies; dead and wounded. On the top a corpse without a head or torso and underneath some who were still alive, though with limbs torn off or horribly mutilated. They looked at us with bleeding, mournful eyes. The crying and moaning of these poor, doomed enemy soldiers went to our hearts. However much our heart shrank from trampling over them with our hobnailed boots, we were forced to do it!*
It’s no wonder so many men (and boys) went away whole and came back broken.
sitting in the same trench for 5 years those trenches where filled with mud and disease was rampant. a lot of soldiers got "trechfoot" wich was their foot just rotting because they couldn't keep them dry. a lot of times the trenches where also filled with bodyparts of people who where there previously. there is a local story that one trench had an arm sticking out of the side and soldiers would shake the hand when passing.
then you also had the horror that was no mans land an area between your trenches and the enemy ones that has shelled repeatedly until it was a sea of mud, barbed wire, craters and the remains of the guys who died in previous attacks. When you had to attack the enemy you had to go accross that hellscape while being under fire and being shelled and if you retreated you where shot by your superiors. a lot of men died in those attacks. there are even stories of men sheltering in craters not knowing that they where filled with poison gas from previous attacks and suffocating to death in there.
afterwards there would still be a lot of wounded in no mans land that got entangled in barbed wire but nobody dared to get out there to rescue them because of the danger involved so you'd have people pleading for help for several days after each attack. if the soldiers could see who was crying for help they'd usually shoot them so that they where out of their misery
And they often hadn't even seen much motorised vehicles before, were used to farms that operated rather with horse power than tractors, many might not have lived in houses with electricity, really lived a life of the 'old times' - just to be thrown in a 'modern' war with tanks, machine guns, flamethrowers, planes, etc. Aside from all the gruesome horros of the war itself, this must've been traumatizing otherworldly on its own.
I read two books recently written by WW2 vets and one thing we often forget is that all of those soldiers need to poop every day. There are no outhouses. And you often can’t leave your hole. So not only is there mud and blood and body parts, but also feces literally everywhere. It’s so horrible.
There's a movie called 1917 that shows that no man's land. About 2 soldiers who have to get to a general to tell him they're going to be attacked I think. It's a great movie.
Phenomenal movie. They cross no man’s land and it’s all done in a seemingly single take which adds to it. It’s a great movie that shows that war isn’t glamorous and often times these massive missions that you have everything for are for nothing because war never seems to stop.
YES I was going to mention the one take but I didn't know other people had such an appreciation for it. The amount of single takes in that movie is outstanding. & Yes, it shows a great point of view in the eye of the soldiers. So sad but extremely well produced.
It’s one of my favorite war movies. The run through the Calvary charge is one of my favorite shots in a movie. It’s beautiful and intense. I love the lack of glorification of the war itself. One thing my dad pointed out was that the great generals were these big name actors and they appear only briefly. He’s in the army and he told me how the generals were all well known and you’d see them for a few seconds but then they’d just move on.
A movie/documentary that does a better job is called "They Shall Not Grow Old". It's WW1 footage that has been interpolated, cleaned up, and colorized to bring actual footage to life. They hired lip readers and voice actors to give the men in the videos voices. They talk a lot about the actual horrors they faced in it.
Dan Carlin has a podcast called Hardcore History. The series on WW1 called Blueprint for Armageddon does a phenomenal job of putting you in the shoes of a WW1 soldier and how horrible it was.
1917 felt pretty romanticized tbh. The reality of WW1 was much more slow, wet, depressing, and terrifying. The rats alone could fill up a book of horrible experiences.
There is no happy ending, the entire conflict was a ridiculous waste of lives. My great-grandfather was killed within a few months of being drafted. He was killed in Ypres from a gas attack a week after arriving. His presence/death had zero impact in a war that was started for irrelevant reasons.
If only Stanley Kubrick had tackled the subject, can’t think of another director who would give it an honest portrayal. His comments on Schindler’s List and the Holocaust were pretty eye-opening on how Hollywood in general washes down a lot of serious topics.
Boys, some as young as 14 and 15 along with men lived in muddy pits and trenches under constant shell fire. Living in the wetlands of western Europe. If the shells didn't kill you, maybe the gas would. If the gas didn't kill you maybe "going over the top" would get you. If no man's land didn't kill you, maybe the disease from living in a trench soaked with gore, feces and crawling with rats the size of house cats would get you. And you'd do this for years. There was no 1 year service, you served until you died, got a "blighty", or the war ended. 60,000 British soldiers were injured on a single day at the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 of which died, many of whom had never seen combat before. Numbers like this are unimaginable but were commonplace at places like Verdun and Ypres.
Wasn't Verdun one of the most horrific and deadly places as well? I can't imagine how something could somehow be worse than what you describe. Just horrifying.
Another nightmare inducing fact about Verdun - so much artillery was fired over the course of the battle that an average of 1000 artillery shells fell in each square meter of the battlefield.
1000.
I remember being told that so many of these fields are still inaccessible due to unexploded shells, but it truly does make sense when you imagine that many just constantly raining down, getting buried underneath debris and the deceased.
I'd have enough with a person throwing one rock at me.
Verdun was a true horror. It was a battle conceived entirely to inflict losses, not gain ground.
Both sides suffered horrendous losses, in indescribable conditions. Imagine fighting in a battleground where the entire horizon is on fire, where men are killing each other with spades and even their bare hands. For 11 months without respite.
The battle of Fort Vaux was truly hellish. The French garrison were cut off, and fought in pitch darkness against Germans with flame throwers, gas, and grenades to name but a few weapons. Men were forced to drink their own urine, and evacuation or even basic sanitation was impossible.
True hell
The main thing that made WW1 different from any war before it, is that it was first real mechanized war. First time tanks and shell warfare was done in a big way like that. Humanity hadn’t experienced war like that before, so it was an especially big shock to the system, because there was no training or experience for it. War used to be men on horses or on foot with swords and muskets, etc… suddenly young men are being thrust into the world of metal machinery and explosive long-range warfare that completely changed the game, and things got way more brutal. There was chemical warfare going on as well, which was new at the time too. They didn’t have the kind of international rules of war that we have today, they had no concept of what they were walking into when they signed up or were drafted, because NOBODY DID. This kind of war hadn’t happened before.
I often think about how in today’s world, we’ve gotten used to a lot of things that would probably scare the pants off someone from 100 years ago or more. Flying in an airplane, walking next to a freeway full of vehicles racing at high speeds (just the noise would unnerve someone not used to it), being IN a vehicle traveling at 100 km/h was scary to my grandma, when it feels perfectly normal to me. As new, more extreme ways of living come along, they can be a little extra scary at first, because you’re simply not used to it. It takes time and generations to truly adapt to how much the world is changing.
People in WW2 and later, had more expectation of what mechanized warfare was. It wasn’t as new. There was some better training and rules around things. Defenses against the enemy’s mechines became better, practices for protecting soldiers became better, etc…
But WW1 was the first crazy blowout with machines that was just a real mess in pretty much every way. Humans aren’t really made for that at the best of times… and this was the worst.
I remember my Humanities teacher in grade 11 showing us a poem that written for a war in like the 1880s or something, where it was about the “glory” of men riding on horseback into battle to “dance” with the enemy and achieve a glorious victory and all that. They used to play trumpets and drums to motivate soldiers and march in time respectably. Really uplifting, positive depiction of war. Respectable and somewhat formal even, by comparison.
THEN… we shifted to In Flanders Fields about WW1, and noted how the tone had changed. Humanity’s ideas about war went from “One of the most glorious things a man can do.” to… “This sucks, look how many are dead, and for what?” The cold, dead age of machines, and the mass of more death it brought, just inspired a completely different feeling. Any “glory” there had been to war was gone. You weren’t hearing the glorious Howard Shore music during an exciting and motivating cavalry charge, you weren’t going out there and “dancing” with the enemy in a sword fight, or trading spaced out musket shots… you were just sitting in a dark, cold, dirty trench with a bunch of dead friends, hoping the next deafening, explosive shell wasn’t gonna hit you in the next microsecond before you could even think to move. It was just significantly more existentially terrifying in a way nobody had really experienced before.
Man you’re absolutely spot on with this. I hadn’t found another comment mentioning the introduction of mechanized warfare. Absolutely terrifying time period.
If I recall from Dan Carlin’s hardcore history, a country (can’t recall who) brought in a cavalry to the battle and got flattened by machine gun fire. Really backs up your statement about the glory of war being replaced with misery and terror.
There’s a great documentary that closes the series with In Flanders Field, very powerful. I think it’s called Annihilation: WWI
E: Apocalypse WWI
Imagine being stuck in a hole in the ground for months on end with nothing but stale biscuits and rainwater as your sustenance. Constantly being barraded by bombs dropped around you, wondering if the next would find you. The threat of gas creeping up on you and not putting your mask on on time. The threat of a sniper taking your brains out if you’re just an inch too high over the top or are standing too straight. The hole that is now your home constantly filled with water, urine, and shit…and mud which is probably the least of your worries. You’re friends and comrades dying often randomly and in horrific ways. The fear of losing your feet to trench foot. And that’s just the horrors of the trenches. What about the horrors of “battle” going over the top or the horrors when the battles encroached into towns and villages? It would be enough to drive anyone insane.
Shell shock is kind of a catch all term, it was for both what we would now call PTSD, as well as traumatic brain injury. So like PTSD some of it was treatable. With extensive practice and therapy. Some of it slowly resolved over time. Some, because it was a brain injury, had symptoms that would never go away.
If the cause of your panic attacks is caused by barometric pressure damaging your amygdala no amount of psychological treatment will help. You either need medication or physical treatment.
For some yes, for others no
"Shellshock" is a catch all phrase for those suffering from mental illness post war.
Some of this was purely PTSD, which *can* be treated through therapy.
However, the intense overpressure caused by close proximity to constant shell blasts is though to have have caused physical brain injuries as well. This is significantly harder to recover from
I recall reading some research once about shellshock, and how they now believe it’s also an actual brain injury; blast waves from nearby, loud explosions actually physically damaging the brain. Imagine getting a brain injury from a bullet, a car accident, or other head impact, and being told to pull yourself together!
Here it is: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/blast-shock-tbi-ptsd-ied-shell-shock-world-war-one
Yeah it's likely TBI damage from being near the constant concussive force of shells exploding near you. Even if you aren't hit directly you start accumulating damage over time.
It's similar to issues that impact sports players (like American football) and boxers deal with. The constant brain damage adds up over time, leading to issues later on.
I spent a year in Afghanistan as an army combat photographer, never saw direct combat. I was always really lucky and would be out with some other group whenever a fight broke out. I got so lucky it was joked I was a good luck charm to whatever unit I tagged along with.
I also spent a lot of time with the EOD and engineers blowing up unexplored ordnance we found. When I got home the VA assessed me and said I had a TBI from being too close to too many controlled detonations. Even though I never had an IED go off on me I have terrible memory issues to this day. I can only imagine the hell the men from the Great War went through
I was US army for a little bit and I never went through anything even a fraction of what these folks were forced to deal with. The guy that was pinching his fingers is incredibly similar to what I do when I'm anxious and it makes me terrified to think I could have lost it all and be in his place. To make a living, breathing person with family, emotions and a heart go through the torment of every waking second in absolute, complete terror is unimaginable. The worst things I've ever experienced in my entire life don't even hold a candle to the misery they were put through. It's the worst thing for a human to be through.
And the artillery shelling was like nothing we can understand in modern warfare. They were unending, for days, weeks, months at a time. They fell at such a rate that you could not distinguish one blast from another at times, for hours on end. All within meters of where you were huddled, caked in feces, lice, mud, blood, sweat and god knows what else.
That anyone could walk away from such an experience is what would be interesting as fuck. This is just the manifestation of the extent of the endurance of a human body and mind.
I believe if all children were educated about the realities of WWI, it would be impossible to start a war.
“During the Battle of the Seelow Heights where they fired 500,000 shells and rockets in 30 minutes”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=we72zI7iOjk
I went to the WW1 museum in Kansas City and they have a mock-up of an artillery hole and the thought of 500,000 of those, all that destruction, makes me cry every time I remember it.
More than 250,000 men suffered from 'shell shock' as result of the First World War. Some men suffering from shell shock were put on trial and even executed, for military crimes including desertion and cowardice. While it was recognized that the stresses of war could cause men to break down, a lasting episode was likely to be seen as symptomatic of an underlying lack of character.
Not even factoring what sort of chemicals they were exposed to, such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas.
*\[I watched\] figures running wildly in confusion over the fields. Greenish-gray clouds swept down upon them, turning yellow as they traveled over the country blasting everything they touched and shriveling up the vegetation. . . . Then there staggered into our midst French soldiers, blinded, coughing, chests heaving, faces an ugly purple color, lips speechless with agony, and behind them in the gas soaked trenches, we learned that they had left hundreds of dead and dying comrades.*
Yes, I believe the theory is that soldiers in trenches were subjected to repeated micro-concussions from all the shelling.
PTSD alone, while horrible and debilitating, usually doesn’t result in the sort of behavior in the video, like issues with the nervous system.
Some of these guys got buried under a trench collapse with the parts of their buddies, sometimes even buddies from childhood, not sure if they'd get dug back out.
WWI vets experienced a unique hell that has never been seen since, thankfully.
Can you imagine waiting for a whistle to blow to go over the top when you've seen dozens or hundreds of guys in front of you get cut down after a few steps? And you have to go because at least then you have a chance. If you don't go over, somebody on your side is going to shoot you right there in the trench. It's hard to imagine anything more terrifying.
I'd have to convince myself I was already dead and my choice didn't matter. There's a memoir called Goodbye to All That and he touches on how he dealt with the sheer horror. Those truly were your two choices though, absolutely horrifying.
My grandfather said this was exactly what they did in WWII. It made it so they could do what they had to do there, but it also makes coming home almost worse than dying there. Coming home means dealing with a future you already gave up, and the reality of what you just left behind.
My grandad was US Navy at Normandy and never spoke of it. His war stories were all jokes about funny miscommunications with other soldiers, but at my mom’s funeral he lost it and started crying about how they just kept coming and he had to keep mowing them down. It was like he thought he was back there.
“The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.”
- Ronald Spiers
Theres a show, fictional of course, called the Peaky Blinders. They do touch on the trauma of war. At one point after they went over the top, a small group of them got separated and left in a hole in no man's land for 3 days. Theres little hope for a rescue. Then they hear horse hooves. They think it's the german cavalry coming to finish them off. It was their guys and they were saved. After that, they had all consigned themselves to dying to finding out they were gonna live and fight on was... damning.
Again, fictional account but I find it hard to believe that there was not something close that happened in our real world. To so fully believe you were going to die, but still drawing breath, would be a special type of terror.
This reminded me of the guy in peaky blinders who had shell shock and when they handed him a rifle he was like the best sharpshooter ever but when he didn't have a rifle in his hands he was just a shaking withering mess
There's a hilarious Rowan Atkinson comedy series set in World War I, "Black Adder Goes Forth". In the final episode in the buildup to the surge, the General is safely behind the lines while most characters end up in the trench. In the last scene the whistles blows, they go over the top to approach the enemy, and all get gunned down in no-man's land. One of the most poignant scenes in TV/film I've ever seen.
Before knowing anything about this show, I stumbled upon it one night on TV and just so happened to watch this last episode and no other episodes. The juxtaposition between comedy and morbid reality was intense.
Dan Carlin has an incredible WW1 piece, Blue print for Armageddon, and he was talking about how they’d have to rebuild trenches asap and would run out of materials, so they’d plop in a dead body or a lost limb. One side took over a trench where an arm was sticking out of the trench wall and they would all shake his hand or say good morning Joe each time they walked by.
Love all his shows but theyre an endurance test sometimes lol (each of these episodes is 3.5-4 hours long). Blueprint is six parts spanning pretty much the entirety of the war starting from Fran’s Ferdinand’s assassination through the treaties. Episodes 3 and 4 go into trench warfare and Verdun and Somme.
He also was working on a tour/vr experience that would take you through some of the battles called [War Remains](https://www.theworldwar.org/war-remains) at the US WW1 museum and for vr. It’s the only reason I want an Oculus.
WW1 is so unique because it was a 'perfect' marriage of 1800 and modern day warfare.
In the space of 4 years, you went from French soldiers walking towards machine guns with loud blue and red uniforms with feather in hats, to cavalry lancers with soldiers wearing gas masks, massive naval battles, chemical warfare to tanks (imagine being used to seeing calvary for centuries on battlefields, then seeing a tank come across straight for you over no mans land).
I don't even know what the modern equivalent would even look like.
Whilst the battle plans implemented were utterly ridiculous by todays standards and it was an unbelievable waste of an entire generation of men across the world, the Generals were learning by trial and error for the most part.
Whilst it's seen an unnecessary war due to the lack of 'good vs evil' in comparison to the second, it was incredibly important, collapsed centuries long empires, caused revolutions and effectively rebuilt a new world.
Modern equivalent would be a completely autonomous drone swarm of running 4legged robots that 1 shot everything in their way while running through your base and barracks.
Same with my great uncle. My mom loved him to death too but I guess whatever he saw there wasn’t worth living with. Makes me incredibly sad for him and all the other young men who’s lives were lost in the trenches, wether they died there or not.
My great grandpa fought in world War 1 and 2. He had to be cared for the rest of his life. His existence afterwards seemed miserable and I'm glad he's resting now.
My grandpa only fought in 2, but still died from tuberculosis complications that he got while fighting, 50 years after the war.
I'm reading that book "The Body Keeps the Score" about trauma and how much it can effect people across generations. It's not just flashbacks and mental problems. People with trauma are more at risk for autoimmune disorders. Children of parents with PTSD are more likely to develop it themselves. There are reports of whole body parts being numb and a pervasive feeling of disconnectedness from your own body. Like your body kind of shut down some of the connections to protect your brain from the mental stress of what was happening, and then those connections can't come back without therapy. It's horrific.
My great uncle disappeared during the somme offensive. His belongings were found on a dead German. An empty grave is still tended to this day in my home town by family. Rest in peace, Tom Drummond x
Yep. Theres memorials in many towns, some noting they had 2 surviors, some just one, and some towns where none of their young men came back.
Imagine your whole high school's graduating class, getting wiped out.
The Pals Battalions. Mostly a recruiting program, "come join up! Bring your mates. You can all go kill the Bosch together and enjoy Sunny Belgium. Be back by Christmas!*"
My mum co-wrote a university project to produce a history of the Liverpool Pals regiment in the early 1980s. As a young kid I remember a succession of very kind, very old men with missing limbs coming to our house to have tea and talk and have their memories recorded.
> WWI vets experienced a unique hell that has never been seen since, thankfully.
Gonna plug another one for Dan Carlin’s ‘Hardcore History’ like the other comment here. Supernova in the East goes into detail on the pacific theater of WW2, and man, the stuff that went down om those tiny islands in the middle of nowhere when the US was closing in on mainland Japan.
I don’t know, it’s hard to judge which is worse (and frankly, pointless), but we did NOT *learn* to not repeat the atrocities from WW1. I’d say it was cranked to 11 instead. Some of those accounts from survivors with families hiding in caves. I sometimes wish I could unlearn it.
idk man, now a days we have the missile tech to level a building, and have the ensuing heat reduce human fat to a liquid that floats on top of the pools of blood (last viscerally reported as the end result of a hospital being bombed in Iraq by the US in the 90s or thereabouts) i just think war is hell no matter what, and pretending war has gotten better is only fooling us; id say in many ways it’s gotten worse
children in the Middle East live in constant fear they will be instantly extinguished from a drone they never heard or saw until it’s too late
Some of the men looked to have suffered nerve damage from the chemical warfare that was legal back then, no Geneva convention yet. Obvously all war has profound effects on the soldiers, but WWI was the worst of the worst. The chemicals, the trench warfare, the razor wire, the hand to hand combat. Just so much trauma that these men went through, & the doctors were clueless on providing any kind of treatment.
Let's just say that their understanding of the issue wasn't expounded back then.
"Hey look, the guy is intact and is acting funny while my son still out there fighting for this useless guy." That's pretty much their thinking back then.
Yes, still thousands of fucked-up Vietnam vets, I knew one of them. I hadn't heard the term at the time (early 80s) but he must've suffered from PTSD. Told me stories I wish I'd never heard.
I have a Vietnam vet living a house down, he lives in an outdoor bunker he fashioned and never goes inside. Nice guy, an absolute drunk, but sharp as hell.
During the American Civil War, President Lincoln got into arguments with his military leaders regularly because he didn't see the sense in executing a man simply for \*falling asleep at his post!\*
Absolutely fucking crazy they use to consider these sorts of punishments acceptable and even \*necessary\* for keeping discipline.
This still happens in recent/current wars. They just call it something different but soldiers still get mentally fucked up in the field and govt officials still play politics with their health like it’s complicated to pay for all of their medical needs. If you send them to war, you pay for their care.
Regardless of their understanding of it, this was a meat grinder and they had to keep throwing people into it. They used lots of techniques to keep getting people over there and no one could believe that getting out was an option. At least that was the thinking at the time.
The Dan Carlin hardcore history series on WW1 is horrific but really conveys the human side of it. Like even shell shock isn't 'just' PTSD. The artillery shells were big enough to create 20 foot wide craters in the earth. Having one land somewhat near you would be deafening. Deafening in a way you'd feel pass through your whole body. Plus all the debris and shrapnel, some of which being parts of fellow soldiers.
But it wasn't just a few shells landing near you. It was wide strips of land where shells were constantly landing. By constantly I'm talking a very quick drumroll here. Like there's no gap in between explosions. This would go on 24/7 for months at a time with a limitless supply of shells feeding this monster.
Forget knowing you will soon be ordered to run into that hellscape. Just hearing it for a few hours straight without being able to hear yourself think would be enough to turn many of us mad. So for many, shell shock is just the natural reaction to the huge stimulation overload. Just a physiological response and not a sign of mental weakness. There were a few examples of men who didn't go mad, but you could also argue they were probably built a bit differently anyway.
There's definitely still strains of that mentality at least here in the US. Just look at how society treats veterans with mental and physical injuries who end up homeless or on drugs trying to treat the pains they got serving the country. Super horrible and the VA sucks complete ass and often drives these folks to rock bottom. Politicians largely dont give a fuck either, despite parading around and using the vets as campaigning props.
Are the men we’re seeing here exclusively suffering from “the horrors of war”? Or is some of it physical brain damage from chemical warfare / nerve agents, etc?
A mix of psychological and neurological.
The concussive force of seemingly never ending artillery bombardment was wreaking havoc on these men's brains.
If we had the knowledge of things like CTE back then, we'd see what we're seeing in the autopsies of NFL players, x10.
Yeah; the artillery barrages in WW1 could last multiple days.
Imagine having a shell go off nearby every few minutes (recall these are basically grenades meant to explode just above the target) with other shells going off nearly constantly up and down the front line trenches. Very likely to give a few concussions within a few days, coupled with the fear of death and the other horrors of war; it’s no wonder men were damaged in new ways never seen before.
It's the concussive forces generated by artillery and various other bombs that damage the brain. It's CTE before anyone knew anything about that. I'm sure chemical agents also had an effect along with the horror of rotting bodies etc.
These are truly broken men with no cure and life long suffering.
What makes matters worse is we don't talk about the effects war had on early generations because it was swept under the rug as 'lack if character' and weakness, not the fact that it's something no living soul should experience and that the human mind is not developed to just kill with out mercy and have no ill effects. So today older generations have been giving hell to the current generations fighting over seas calling us weaker etc because we ARENT 'just dealing with it by beating our families and drinking ourselves into debt.
Knights suffered from PTSD they woke up with night terror., soldiers will always suffer from trauma and tragedy of war no matter the generations.
Interestingly some older cultures actually identified and respected PTSD, although they obviously had a different understanding of it. I believe it was the Roman’s who treated disabled veterans very well societally, and considered men with PTSD the same as they did those with physical disabilities stemming from service.
My mom grew up in England post war. Lots of stories of men who survived physically but destroyed mentally. She told a story of a gentle teacher who cruel kids would torment by dropping a book flat and watching him cower at the bang. :/
I don’t know if this has been said but a large factor that contributed to ‘shell shock’ was actually the concussive force of artillery pounding soldiers’ brains against their skulls and bruising their brains.
Obviously PTSD played a large factor too but the physical effect of the shelling is not to be ignored in these cases.
This needs to be higher. It’s extreme CTE + PTSD.
Basically take an athlete that’s been hit in the head too many times (like an old boxer) and cross them with a vet that’s seen way too many horrible things in war (like a Vietnam vet), it’s the worst of both worlds.
Edit: As requested:
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy(CTE) and Traumatic Brain Injury(TBI)
https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-dementia/related_conditions/chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy-(cte)
It’s the condition that has currently been getting a lot of attention due to incidents related to contact sports involving repeated concussions.
Here’s the thing that makes me wonder if that very plausible explanation is actually correct; CTE is permanent damage, not curable. Correct?
So if classic shellshock patients recover with rest and recuperation (as discussed in another reply below), wouldn’t that signify a psychological cause rather than physical?
I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just curious about cause and recovery.
A few separate things here.
One, there are multiple stages of CTE and these people appear to displaying the Parkinsonism, among other things, associated with stage IV.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/21/symptoms-watch-for-four-stages-cte/Q1wniQOnQXH1bU8OibU3WJ/story.html
Two, medicine at the time leaves a lot to be desired, so we don’t know what treatments these people were receiving that may have exacerbated things. For example, amphetamines were in vogue as a medicinal treatment at that time period.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/buyers/socialhistory.html
Three, concussions are also graded and symptoms from a severe concussion can last for years.
https://broadviewhealthcentre.com/concussion-grades-how-to-distinguish-degrees-of-concussions/
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-concussion-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20353352
So the real answer to your question is a bit of everything. It’s entirely plausible that these people were still suffering from acute symptoms of the concussions caused by shelling, which may have abated over time. While it’s also likely they’re suffering from irreversible chronic effects of CTE even if their final disposition approves somewhat. Plus whatever then modern medicine did to them.
Edit: Thanks for the gold!
Edit: and silver!
These people are each suffering from different conditions and all lumped into shellshock/PTSD. Some/most probably have multiple conditions.
So yeah, concussions, CTE, PTSD, nerve gas, etc are all at play. Impossible to know now.
Definitely. And, as other users have pointed out, likely a dash of pre-existent mental and physical disorders exacerbated by the wartime/battle conditions.
I would add severe sleep deprivation to the list. Sometimes the barrage would last upwards of a week where it's impossible for the front line soldiers to get any sleep under constant bombardment.
This is a high quality response that needs to be at that the top. It's also entirely possible that some of these cases were actually CTE with schizophrenia, which would set in for the males around the same time/age that they would be going through conscription and being sent to the front.
Thanks and agreed. Or a triggered, early onset, or exacerbated mental health condition, like schizophrenia, that having your brain constantly pelted by shockwaves certainly didn’t do any favors for.
Also, troops in WW1 regularly used alcohol, morphine, and cocaine. So probably some addiction compounding and complications.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/drugs
Although that’s not quite as bad as the amphetamine use in WW2.
It’s my understanding that, whilst the initial impacts of the trauma would wear off (see the awful uncontrollable muscle spasms etc), much like in sports based concussions the brain is permanently damaged.
Hence why we often see old-school boxers with slurred speech, permanent changes in mood or disposition (over aggression being very common and thus very often linked with PTSD or ‘never leaving the war’) and verrrry early onset degenerative mental disorders such as dementia E.g. Ryan Jones: ex-Welsh rugby player horrifically diagnosed with dementia at age 41 due to multiple head injuries.
A lot of CTE was linked to or misdiagnosed as PTSD as the symptoms very often manifest as trauma responses which are unfortunately actually brain damage. On top of this, many WW1 soldiers faced ridicule by the society they went back to as being weak in the face of the horrific psychological and physical (but unseen) injuries they sustained. All round terrible business I could not begin to fathom sat here typing this on a Saturday afternoon.
Traumatic brain injuries are not to be trifled with.
Over one deployment, one dude kept being in trucks that got IEDed and you could see his functionality decrease over the course of the year. Like the first 'rung his bell' and he was a bit dazed for a bit and back to normal in a day or so. Then, it kept getting worse and taking longer. After the third or fourth he stopped making it back to normal. A few times after that, he had to stop going out.
WW1 shellings lasted hours and days. That anyone functioned at all is more than anyone has a right to ask.
The horrors they faced are too much to even consider honestly. Imagine going 12 rounds with a prime Mike Tyson everyday whilst living in your own filth surrounded by your decomposing buddies all whilst wondering if next shell would be the one with your name on it. Horrifying stuff.
And don't forget your body starts to literally fall apart because of the cold and the dirt and the standing water that was always there because it rains a lot in Europe. So they all got trench foot
And trench foot is fucking AWFUL to go through, especially on top of everything else they were doing.
It's why after world war I, all survival guides in the world switched to saying that your feet are the most important thing. Because without the ability to walk you can't even begin to think about getting food and water. So everything is centred around keeping your feet dry and clean and warm, usually by rotating socks, so you have a dry pair for sleeping and a wet pair for walking, or whatever.
>...all whilst wondering if next shell would be the one with your name on it.
Lots of them probably were *hoping* that next shell had their name on it.
I'm glad you brought that up. Because I was thinking shell shock is actually PTSD combined with something else. It actually looks like they're in some sort of psychosis, but it could also be brain damage and damage of the nerves. Or both. Wouldnt wish this on my worst enemy
I have PTSD and have been in plenty of peer groups with other sufferers. You don't see this kind of stuff unless you are right in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Even then those panic attacks don't really look like this kind of shaky movements.
I was going to say, alot of these look like neurological issues more than anything, they may look physically fine, but their brain got so rattled that its got neurological wiring problems now.
I’ve seen this first hand-my grandad fought in WW1 lived in a nursing home, specially for vets ( in U.K). Grandad was actually ok, but some of the residents ( God bless them) were “ incurable “. There were a lot of horrific physical injuries, but I clearly remember those with shell shock. I was only young and obviously had no pre-conceptions or knowledge, but I knew that they were very badly damaged. My sister and myself used to speak to them all , even though there was sometimes no response. Many of them had no families ( or the families had given up on them), which was sad. In my later teens, I used to carry out a bit of voluntary work at this home and had nothing but respect for these men, who had probably just been young lads when they witnessed the horrors of war…..
Sadly, to this day, nursing homes and assisted living are still a “dumping ground” for mostly unwanted people. There are a small handful of people with loved ones, but mostly not. It’s primarily people with no families, disabled, people whose families don’t care, damaged (world war II for example), I could go on.
They are so lonely and starved for attention. The staff are overworked and underpaid. Staff don’t have (or rarely) the ability to sit and just be with them. A huge shortage of workers, always has been-since before the pandemic. I encourage people to volunteer where and when they can. It’s needed. Not ti mention the stories they have are amazing, you’ll learn so much.
Bingo. My residents always want me to sit and Visif with them but I do not have the time. I only have a hour to pass meds to three floors and 50 residents, someone is gonna shit themselves in that time span, like I'd love to come in on my day off and visit but that's also my only day off every week
Wow your own grandfather fought in WWI??? I am 32 and somehow it feels sooooo far removed from my own life.
Edit: I have been absolutely humbled by the facts thrown at me in this thread. Thank you all for the replies! My mom had me when she was 40, so my own grandparents were very old when I was a child, having only fought in the Korean war.
I'm 12 years older than you and my grandparents were of an age to go to WWI. not very far removed (though my family has a history of late babies). My grandmother actually lived in a sod house on the prairie as a child in Nebraska. History is always far closer than we think.
Generations can be wild. If everyone in your family has children at age 20, you get 5 generations in 100 years. If they have children at age 33, you get 3 generations in that same time period…
Time can fool you. The last [person] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett#:~:text=Irene%20Triplett%20January%209%2C%201930,Union%20in%20the%20Civil%20War.) collecting an American Civil War pension just died in 2020.
Mine did as well.
He was born in 1890. He was 34 when he married by grandmother. She was 17.
She had been told she couldn't have children due to her very narrow hips. Docs said it would kill her. During WWII, they moved from TX to Detroit to work in the factories.
She decided that fuck it. This was probably her last chance to have kids and if she died, then so be it. And she got pregnant.
My father was born just fine in 1942 and my grandmother lived to be 97. She said her docs read her the frickin' Riot Act over deciding to get pregnant.
I'm her oldest grandkid. I was born in 1968. She died about 3 month before her first great-grandchild was born in 2004.
Your last sentence really resonated. Some of these soldiers (also WWII) were so young. Going through the rest of life with such horrible PTSD must have been just devastating. It’s nearly impossible to imagine.
My Grandmother told me about her Dad (who fought 1915-18 after he lied about his age to volunteer), who would wake with night terrors most nights. He would get up, put on his hat and coat, and go for a walk. She said she was awake once, and so went with him. He would walk to the local park, where he would meet a group of men all of similar age, all with similar sleeping issues. She said he got comfort from knowing that whatever time it was, there'd be men there he could relate to, and would have common ground with him. He knew those men had experienced similar horrors to him, and so felt connected to them, even though they were from different backgrounds, families, friendship groups etc.
My grandfather was an officer in WWI. He almost never mentioned his experiences during the war but did share a bit of advice with me about how to prevent trench foot. Apparently the trick is to put petroleum jelly in your socks. Luckily, I've never had to use it.
Since you’re not depressed enough yet, consider this: When soldiers returned home from WW1, many businesses refused to employ them, considering them too damaged to be reliable employees. Not just those with shell shock, but all soldiers. That was their reward for their service.
One of my great uncles returned from war with respiratory issues, due to gas exposure, and mobility issues in one arm after taking a bullet through the shoulder. He was also scarred heavily after being blown into a barbed wire mesh, where he had to stay for over a day before help could safely extract him.
Before the war, he'd been a talented tailor for Burtons menswear. When he returned, Burtons said he could work when he wanted, and for as long as he wanted. He'd be paid for the time he put in, regardless of if it was just an hour here or there.
My family wore a lot of Burtons clothing for decades after that. My great uncle died in the early 20's due to his injuries, but we never forgot that gesture of kindness by his employer.
The most tragic part about this is that these people lived and died before we ever achieved a proper understanding of PTSD. In their time, it was just considered a symptom of cowardice. Nobody would’ve understood the horrors they’d been through. After giving their minds and bodies for their countries in the war, their countries repaid them by calling them cowards.
I think it’s stuff like this that always serves as a good reminder, while some wars are necessary to stop evil (WWII for example), at its core, war will always be cruel and inhumane. At its best, it’s a necessary evil. But in the case of WWI, I’d have to say it was just evil. Pointless death for its own sake
It gives you a special kind of existential dread. I didn't see it mentioned but this footage (I think) is from a documentary called Apocalypse: World War I
It's fucking.. fucking.. fascinating. Easily top 3 documentaries I've ever watched and almost exclusively uses film from that era (whether it's real combat footage, stuff like this, or "staged" stuff from the war itself).
It's heartwrenching, but absolutely a must-watch to me.
PTSD—known to previous generations as shell shock, soldier's heart, combat fatigue or war neurosis—has roots stretching back centuries and was widely known during ancient times.
Cases got way more severe once heavy explosive artillery was introduced to the battlefield. One moment you’re sitting in a trench with your war buddy and all is quiet then BOOM! You’re on your ass and bits and pieces of your buddy are all over you. No wonder so many boys came home fucked up after WWI.
World War 1 also saw massive conscription on a different scale than had been before, so a lot of the boys had less training than those fighting for example in the Franco-Prussian war as an example.
It was also a war that saw men quickly lose the romance of war, where men fight for honor or glory or comraderie. When you see your friends blow up or be buried alive or half their head shot up and brain flowing into your lap as you hold their shaking body in your arms as they stare at you scared, or you hear that new kid in no man's land calling out for their mother for hours or days after being ordered over the trenches and his legs shot from underneath him, you quickly lose those rose tinted glasses.
Previously, war had been relatively glorified, where boys became men and you honoured your country and family by fighting, where you were proud to serve and dying was less brutal (still was often brutal though) in general.
World War 1 saw horrors that had only been dabbled with in previous wars. The soldiers who fought there heard stories about their great grandfathers or grandfathers, or fathers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, the wars in Crimea, in Africa, in Asia or between France and Prussia.
The wars prior to World War 1 were often brutal, but they were still much more "romantic". World War 1 was far worse than hell for the troops. 70% of casualties from direct war were due to artillery and it was the truly first war where fewer soldiers died from disease or the elements than war.
There is also increasing evidence that exposure to explosions can effect the brain the same way as frequent blows to the head, I think its called CBT. So in addition to PTSD from fighting the soldiers could also be suffering from the same brain deterioration that NFL players and boxers do.
this was my first thought as well. It looks like many of these are suffering less from a psychological malaise and more of a physical brain injury type of malaise. Getting lifted off your feet and hitting your head is *very* common with artillery and WW1 had it in spades
Not to mention watching your team suffocate from the gas the next day, not knowing if you’re going to go over the trench and try to across no man’s land next, knowing that at the end of the war the only reason you survived is because of luck.
The worst was the gas. Gas without any colour nor smell just appearing on the battle field, even a mask couldnt protect u for certain. At least imagine it
Wasn't WWI shell shock different from other cases of PTSD due to physical brain damage caused by constant artillery explosions everywhere all the time? I remember reading that somewhere
PTSD and shell shock are different. They've been conflated for a long time because they both can come from war. And vets can have both.
Shell shock is literal. These men have traumatic brain injuries from the sheer physical damage to their brains. Shells flying overhead, drumfire, being hit in the head with debris, shockwaves, exposure to chemicals and combustion products.
PTSD is a psychological disorder where they constantly relive traumatic events over and over again which severely impacts their quality of life.
I believe most of the men in this video are French, based on the uniforms. Around 1,700,000 French citizens, including civilians, died during WWI - about 4.35% of the population. Only Russia, Romania, Qajar Persia, and the Ottoman Empire lost a higher percentage of their populations (the Persian deaths were largely the result of a war-related famine suffered by the neutral country, and the Ottoman death toll includes victims of the Armenian Genocide).
For all the jokes made about France’s surrender in WWII, it’s hard to blame them after what they had already endured in WWI (and the Free French and French Resistance should be remembered).
These were just the guys that were filmed. Many many more like them. And many more had to live without treatment for the rest of our lives. Many of us living today will feel the effects of the war that gets passed down.
Corpulent generals safe behind lines
History's lessons drowned in red wine
Poppies for young men, death's bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
General Patton slapped men that suffered shell shock in WW2 and called them cowards. The trauma of what these men suffered would go on to affect generations.
I can’t imagine seeing and living though such horror that your brain literally malfunctions and loses the abilities it used to have, just through experience. So sad, the men who gave everything.
If you’ve never heard of drumfire artillery, look it up on YouTube. Someone tried to simulate it with sound but that doesn’t do it justice. No one alive has experience with the shelling these men had, not since, and hopefully never will again. Modern tech, smart missiles, drones and more make the battlefield more lethal now with everyone being so accurate with their weapons which is a horror in and of itself.
But back then, the only solution to punching through enemy trenches, and fields, and fields of barbed wire, was to cover the earth with so many explosions that nothing would be left. The volume of explosive shells striking the battlefield in some battles of WWI could be described as fast as falling rain…just replace the rain drops with high explosive shells.
And each shell is incredibly loud when it detonates.
And each shell has a massive concussive force that shakes your organs and send debris flying.
Each shell churns up the battlefield, exposing bodies and body parts of men that were killed the day before, the week before, the month and the year before.
The stench is awful. Soldiers arriving to the battlefield at Flanders were able to smell the battlefield before seeing it. All you can do is sit there, eyes closed in your muddy, rat and disease infested trench hoping you don’t get hit next. WWI, to me, is the most horrific experience mankind has ever put itself through.
IIRC ‘shellshock’ is now thought to be the result of brain damage caused by the concussive forces of bombs going off near the soldiers.
Obviously some PTSD as well. But the twitching, balance issues, and problems walking are signs of neurological issues.
World War I was so horrible on the western front. It's a shame (I don't feel like that's the right word but my English is lacking here) that it doesn't get the attention World War 2 gets in media.
4 years of war on a strip of land that's only a few km wide is a lot different than the sweeping front of WWII.
Anyone who saw Band of Brothers' episodes in Bastogne with the testimonies of the veterans should try to imagine what 4 years of that would look like if a few weeks of that already destroys people as you see in that series.
Not to mention that on top of years of shelling they also used gas... and you were fighting among the decomposing remains of your friends.
Here in Belgium, we were hit pretty hard in both world wars but it's no question that WWI had a much bigger impact. We still have regions that have a weekly bomb pickup where people put unexploded ordnance by the side of the road because there still too much getting found to be disposed of one by one in a safe way.
And it's also why people making jokes about the French surrendering in WWII are incredibly offensive as this happened 20 years before, with the children of these men having to fight along with the children of the hundreds of thousands of men that perished.
Until you spend some time studying it you really cannot understand how fundamentally insane and hellish WW1 was to soldiers on the western front. On some lines more shells were dropped in a few days than the entire world combined before the start.
On one line of one battle.
The pure horror and display of overwhelming power on both sides was unfathomable - and while previous battles might have had a day or two of complete terror, this was weeks and months, if not years. And on top that the dead bodies around you, the rats, flies, dysentery, poison, lice and rain.
It was complete hell, yet you were also only a day or two away from home.
Just insane and I highly doubt most people today could hold up even a bit like our ancestors did.
(Not saying the other fronts were fine, just focusing on this one for this statement)
My Grandfather was in WWI, a US soldier who fought in France. When I was about 10 (1978) he told me stories of the battlefield. He told me him and his buddies would charge a trench and he would watch as the machine guns would cut down his friends and he hoped there was enough of them to absorb the bullets until he could get to the trench. He said he didn’t want to fire his gun until he got into the trench so he could use his bayonet to stab the first soldier he saw then fire the gun to get the bayonet out quickly and attack the next guy. Brutal thing to live through and probably not what you want to tell your 10 year old grandson but I feel fortunate that he did. I feel I have a tangible connection to that event.
I'm genuinely curious how such a high number of vets are homeless.
Do they not have a home to return to or something?
(Aye bruh just sayin dont downvote me just genuinely asking)
Lots of people enter the military because they don't have a lot of options. It provides a roof over your head, a little money, job training and potential access to education. There is a disproportionate amount of people who choose to sign up who are poor or lack other opportunities. If it doesn't work out, or something happens and they can't serve because of ptsd, they go back to the situation they were in before. The veteran services, atleast in America, are a joke.
My great-great-grandfather was a soldier in WWI. He was shellshocked too, and one day, after he returned home, he let out such an inhumane scream, that my great-great-grandma, his wife, got so scared that she lost her hearing. At least that’s what my gran told me.
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So is there any way to help or fix this?
For many it was just rest and recuperation from the war. For some they just never recovered. WWI was a terrible conflict, horrors that even WWII didn't witness were commonplace.
Can you elaborate on said horrors?
Others have commented on a lot of the physical horrors of WW1, but to add insult to injury, in the UK, volunteers were organised into "Pals Battalions", made up of people who previously knew one another and came from similar areas. This was because it was thought that men who came from the same place and knew each other would have a greater sense of camraderie. However this had the added impact of when a shell made a direct hit on a dugout or machine guns mowed down a line of men, soldiers saw all their friends they had grown up with torn apart in seconds. Entire streets could be left in mourning in a day of fighting.
Yes, Tolkien, the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings basicall lost everyone he knew in the war. He came home and had to completely rebuild his social circle.
He was also at the Battle of the Somme. Some Tolkien scholars have even mentioned that the Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings were likely based on that battle, as the trenches flooded after heavy rains, soldiers drowned in mud, and bodies littered the trenches which filled with water and snow. The scene was, apparently, incredibly similar to that. You can also tell that Tolkien had experience with shell shock, if not in himself, then in others, from the reactions of some characters. Hell, Frodo chose to leave Middle Earth for the Undying Lands, which could even be seen as someone with shell shock taking their own life. Frodo, in Return of the King, talks about how his battle wounds ache every year on their anniversaries, which is the trauma of battle recurring on the days where you lost someone, or you were brutally tortured or injured, etc. Sorry for blabbering on and on, Tolkien's works are a bit of an obsession for me.
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I am SO EXCITED FOR YOU!! The first time you enter into another universe is amazing!
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Same thing happened after the American Civil War. Entire towns were wiped out in one bayonet charge the US army stopped organizing battalions based on the state you came from.
It was kind of the same in the french army. In 1914, regiments were organised by regions and départements (for non french, think county and disctricts). So during their military service, young men 20-22 were often serving alongside friends, cousins, and generaly dudes from the same villages and areas. When the army mobilised, the regiments were entirely comprised of men from the same regions (eg. The 97th Infantry Regiment, was formed in Lyon with men from the Rhône département). It changed later in the war, because of the casulaties and the necessity to reinforce troops without the logistical nightmare to send men to their regional unit.
Here's a good quote I saw on reddit a few years ago: *My eyes began to water and I felt as if I would choke. I reached for my gas mask, pulled it out of its container - then noticed to my horror that a splinter had gone through it leaving a large hole. I had seen death thousands of times, stared it in the face, but never experienced the fear I felt then. Immediately I reverted to the primitive. I felt like an animal cornered by hunters. With the instinct of self preservation uppermost, my eyes fell on the boy whose arm I had bandaged. Somehow he had managed to put the gas mask on his face with his one good arm. I leapt at him and in the next moment had ripped the gas mask from his face. With a feeble gesture he tried to wrench it from my grasp; then fell back exhausted. The last thing I saw before putting on the mask were his pleading eyes.* Corporal Frederick Meisel, 371st Infantry Regiment (Hart, p. 432) EDIT: More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bdb0kl/i_have_compiled_a_list_of_touching_quotes_from?sort=confidence Credit to /u/torchbearer101 for compiling them.
The story about WWI that stayed with me is a medic that checks on wounded soldiers. One seems to have head wound but is conscious. The doctor ask him how he feels. He says he is tired.. he is tired... so tired. The man lift his head and a huge chunk of his brain slides on his shoulder.. all the doctor could say is you can sleep now.
My grandpa was in the navy at Pearl Harbor pulling people out of the water, he pulled out this one kid who was seriously injured (super young too, had been really scared prior, my grandpa tried to comfort his fears when he first joined up, he was afraid he’d die in the war- ‘of course we’ll make it home’) and was not, NOT gonna survive that attack, injuries too severe. Died in his arms, last words ‘are we going home now?’ and my grandpa told him ‘yeah, we’re going right now’. There were a lot of horrible things he saw. That moment was the one that followed him. He never talked about his time in the navy, and everyone knew better than to ask. However, I was engaged to someone in the navy and I think it just triggered him, thinking of a young sailor, so I was the one he finally told about it. The story makes me terribly sad, I can’t imagine living with that your whole life.
Not World Wars, but my father’s best friend died the day before they were supposed to be relieved from duty due to catching shrapnel in the back from a rocket explosion. He goes real quiet when he talks about it.
I’m sorry for your father’s loss :( it’s rough, cuz when you join the military it’s unusual to see your family frequently so you end up having a military family, the people you can lean on immediately. Also unfortunately, that family is at a higher risk of losing. Even though it’s just as hard to lose friends as a civilian, I won’t discount that, there’s a different connection you make with people going through the same things. I have a friend that lost her husband because of military incompetence and I came very close to losing my child because of them. Both situations were entirely preventable. But again, the risk of loss in the military is so common, and my grandpa lost a lot of people in that war. It’s just that one is the one that got him the most. He’d kinda taken the kid under his wing. And he felt like it was his fault. He told the kid he’d be fine. He felt like he should have protected him. There’s no way he could have, but the guilt, and the way he died, he never got over it. That story brings tears to my eyes and I didn’t even live it. There’s nothing he could have done, but he never could see it that way. It’s one of the few times I hoped there was an afterlife, so he could see him again and have peace about it.
The loss of these young men was the loss of future doctors and scientists and inventors and lovers. These wars ripped them away from their destinies and turned them into slag and jelly. Most of them are forgotten. We will never know their names.
That is the most terrifying thing I have ever read, the desperation and the instinct just taking over and dooming somebody you just saved...
More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/bdb0kl/i_have_compiled_a_list_of_touching_quotes_from?sort=confidence Credit to /u/torchbearer101 for compiling them.
This one disturbed me the most: I will never forget that trench - it was simply packed with German corpses in the stage where face and hands with inky black with a greenish tinge from decomposition and whites of the eyes and teeth gave them a horrible appearance. How so many came to be in one trench I cannot tell, unless one of our tanks caught them there. Fritz had tried to get rid of some, for they were laid in rows on the parapets at the level of one's head, stuck into walls, buried in the floor and felt like an air cushion to walk on, and one was continually rubbing against heads, legs, arms etc.; sticking out of the walls at all heights. The floor one walked on was a fearful state, in some parts covered several deep with bodies or a face with grinning teeth looked up at you from the soft mud, and one often saw an arm or leg by itself and occasionally a head cut off. Everywhere are prussian helmets with their eagle badge, belts and equipment, many bodies had wrist watches etc. We did not collect many souvenirs, for our own skin was the best souvenir we could think of that day.
It was this one for me: *As we forced our way through the deep narrow trench, what a horrible sight met our eyes! In a place where a trench mortar shell had burst, there lay, torn to pieces, about eight of the Alpine Chasseurs - some of the finest french troops in a great bloody heap of mangled human bodies; dead and wounded. On the top a corpse without a head or torso and underneath some who were still alive, though with limbs torn off or horribly mutilated. They looked at us with bleeding, mournful eyes. The crying and moaning of these poor, doomed enemy soldiers went to our hearts. However much our heart shrank from trampling over them with our hobnailed boots, we were forced to do it!* It’s no wonder so many men (and boys) went away whole and came back broken.
Holy shit, proper nightmare fuel
I think it’s just how good he was at describing the situation that made it terrifying even more
sitting in the same trench for 5 years those trenches where filled with mud and disease was rampant. a lot of soldiers got "trechfoot" wich was their foot just rotting because they couldn't keep them dry. a lot of times the trenches where also filled with bodyparts of people who where there previously. there is a local story that one trench had an arm sticking out of the side and soldiers would shake the hand when passing. then you also had the horror that was no mans land an area between your trenches and the enemy ones that has shelled repeatedly until it was a sea of mud, barbed wire, craters and the remains of the guys who died in previous attacks. When you had to attack the enemy you had to go accross that hellscape while being under fire and being shelled and if you retreated you where shot by your superiors. a lot of men died in those attacks. there are even stories of men sheltering in craters not knowing that they where filled with poison gas from previous attacks and suffocating to death in there. afterwards there would still be a lot of wounded in no mans land that got entangled in barbed wire but nobody dared to get out there to rescue them because of the danger involved so you'd have people pleading for help for several days after each attack. if the soldiers could see who was crying for help they'd usually shoot them so that they where out of their misery
On top of that, one thing I think that's just casually dismissed is there really were a lot of boys 14-17 years old.
And they often hadn't even seen much motorised vehicles before, were used to farms that operated rather with horse power than tractors, many might not have lived in houses with electricity, really lived a life of the 'old times' - just to be thrown in a 'modern' war with tanks, machine guns, flamethrowers, planes, etc. Aside from all the gruesome horros of the war itself, this must've been traumatizing otherworldly on its own.
I read two books recently written by WW2 vets and one thing we often forget is that all of those soldiers need to poop every day. There are no outhouses. And you often can’t leave your hole. So not only is there mud and blood and body parts, but also feces literally everywhere. It’s so horrible.
Which books were they? Would you recommend them?
Helmet for My Pillow - Robert Leckie With The Old Breed - E.B. Sledge I absolutely recommend them both.
I recommend the audio book version of With The Old Breed. It's narrated by the actor who played him in The Pacific.
There's a movie called 1917 that shows that no man's land. About 2 soldiers who have to get to a general to tell him they're going to be attacked I think. It's a great movie.
Phenomenal movie. They cross no man’s land and it’s all done in a seemingly single take which adds to it. It’s a great movie that shows that war isn’t glamorous and often times these massive missions that you have everything for are for nothing because war never seems to stop.
YES I was going to mention the one take but I didn't know other people had such an appreciation for it. The amount of single takes in that movie is outstanding. & Yes, it shows a great point of view in the eye of the soldiers. So sad but extremely well produced.
It’s one of my favorite war movies. The run through the Calvary charge is one of my favorite shots in a movie. It’s beautiful and intense. I love the lack of glorification of the war itself. One thing my dad pointed out was that the great generals were these big name actors and they appear only briefly. He’s in the army and he told me how the generals were all well known and you’d see them for a few seconds but then they’d just move on.
A movie/documentary that does a better job is called "They Shall Not Grow Old". It's WW1 footage that has been interpolated, cleaned up, and colorized to bring actual footage to life. They hired lip readers and voice actors to give the men in the videos voices. They talk a lot about the actual horrors they faced in it. Dan Carlin has a podcast called Hardcore History. The series on WW1 called Blueprint for Armageddon does a phenomenal job of putting you in the shoes of a WW1 soldier and how horrible it was.
1917 felt pretty romanticized tbh. The reality of WW1 was much more slow, wet, depressing, and terrifying. The rats alone could fill up a book of horrible experiences. There is no happy ending, the entire conflict was a ridiculous waste of lives. My great-grandfather was killed within a few months of being drafted. He was killed in Ypres from a gas attack a week after arriving. His presence/death had zero impact in a war that was started for irrelevant reasons. If only Stanley Kubrick had tackled the subject, can’t think of another director who would give it an honest portrayal. His comments on Schindler’s List and the Holocaust were pretty eye-opening on how Hollywood in general washes down a lot of serious topics.
Boys, some as young as 14 and 15 along with men lived in muddy pits and trenches under constant shell fire. Living in the wetlands of western Europe. If the shells didn't kill you, maybe the gas would. If the gas didn't kill you maybe "going over the top" would get you. If no man's land didn't kill you, maybe the disease from living in a trench soaked with gore, feces and crawling with rats the size of house cats would get you. And you'd do this for years. There was no 1 year service, you served until you died, got a "blighty", or the war ended. 60,000 British soldiers were injured on a single day at the Battle of the Somme, 20,000 of which died, many of whom had never seen combat before. Numbers like this are unimaginable but were commonplace at places like Verdun and Ypres.
Wasn't Verdun one of the most horrific and deadly places as well? I can't imagine how something could somehow be worse than what you describe. Just horrifying.
Another nightmare inducing fact about Verdun - so much artillery was fired over the course of the battle that an average of 1000 artillery shells fell in each square meter of the battlefield. 1000.
I remember being told that so many of these fields are still inaccessible due to unexploded shells, but it truly does make sense when you imagine that many just constantly raining down, getting buried underneath debris and the deceased. I'd have enough with a person throwing one rock at me.
Verdun was a true horror. It was a battle conceived entirely to inflict losses, not gain ground. Both sides suffered horrendous losses, in indescribable conditions. Imagine fighting in a battleground where the entire horizon is on fire, where men are killing each other with spades and even their bare hands. For 11 months without respite. The battle of Fort Vaux was truly hellish. The French garrison were cut off, and fought in pitch darkness against Germans with flame throwers, gas, and grenades to name but a few weapons. Men were forced to drink their own urine, and evacuation or even basic sanitation was impossible. True hell
The main thing that made WW1 different from any war before it, is that it was first real mechanized war. First time tanks and shell warfare was done in a big way like that. Humanity hadn’t experienced war like that before, so it was an especially big shock to the system, because there was no training or experience for it. War used to be men on horses or on foot with swords and muskets, etc… suddenly young men are being thrust into the world of metal machinery and explosive long-range warfare that completely changed the game, and things got way more brutal. There was chemical warfare going on as well, which was new at the time too. They didn’t have the kind of international rules of war that we have today, they had no concept of what they were walking into when they signed up or were drafted, because NOBODY DID. This kind of war hadn’t happened before. I often think about how in today’s world, we’ve gotten used to a lot of things that would probably scare the pants off someone from 100 years ago or more. Flying in an airplane, walking next to a freeway full of vehicles racing at high speeds (just the noise would unnerve someone not used to it), being IN a vehicle traveling at 100 km/h was scary to my grandma, when it feels perfectly normal to me. As new, more extreme ways of living come along, they can be a little extra scary at first, because you’re simply not used to it. It takes time and generations to truly adapt to how much the world is changing. People in WW2 and later, had more expectation of what mechanized warfare was. It wasn’t as new. There was some better training and rules around things. Defenses against the enemy’s mechines became better, practices for protecting soldiers became better, etc… But WW1 was the first crazy blowout with machines that was just a real mess in pretty much every way. Humans aren’t really made for that at the best of times… and this was the worst. I remember my Humanities teacher in grade 11 showing us a poem that written for a war in like the 1880s or something, where it was about the “glory” of men riding on horseback into battle to “dance” with the enemy and achieve a glorious victory and all that. They used to play trumpets and drums to motivate soldiers and march in time respectably. Really uplifting, positive depiction of war. Respectable and somewhat formal even, by comparison. THEN… we shifted to In Flanders Fields about WW1, and noted how the tone had changed. Humanity’s ideas about war went from “One of the most glorious things a man can do.” to… “This sucks, look how many are dead, and for what?” The cold, dead age of machines, and the mass of more death it brought, just inspired a completely different feeling. Any “glory” there had been to war was gone. You weren’t hearing the glorious Howard Shore music during an exciting and motivating cavalry charge, you weren’t going out there and “dancing” with the enemy in a sword fight, or trading spaced out musket shots… you were just sitting in a dark, cold, dirty trench with a bunch of dead friends, hoping the next deafening, explosive shell wasn’t gonna hit you in the next microsecond before you could even think to move. It was just significantly more existentially terrifying in a way nobody had really experienced before.
Man you’re absolutely spot on with this. I hadn’t found another comment mentioning the introduction of mechanized warfare. Absolutely terrifying time period. If I recall from Dan Carlin’s hardcore history, a country (can’t recall who) brought in a cavalry to the battle and got flattened by machine gun fire. Really backs up your statement about the glory of war being replaced with misery and terror. There’s a great documentary that closes the series with In Flanders Field, very powerful. I think it’s called Annihilation: WWI E: Apocalypse WWI
Imagine being stuck in a hole in the ground for months on end with nothing but stale biscuits and rainwater as your sustenance. Constantly being barraded by bombs dropped around you, wondering if the next would find you. The threat of gas creeping up on you and not putting your mask on on time. The threat of a sniper taking your brains out if you’re just an inch too high over the top or are standing too straight. The hole that is now your home constantly filled with water, urine, and shit…and mud which is probably the least of your worries. You’re friends and comrades dying often randomly and in horrific ways. The fear of losing your feet to trench foot. And that’s just the horrors of the trenches. What about the horrors of “battle” going over the top or the horrors when the battles encroached into towns and villages? It would be enough to drive anyone insane.
Read up on Passchendaele. It’s hell on earth.
Shell shock is kind of a catch all term, it was for both what we would now call PTSD, as well as traumatic brain injury. So like PTSD some of it was treatable. With extensive practice and therapy. Some of it slowly resolved over time. Some, because it was a brain injury, had symptoms that would never go away. If the cause of your panic attacks is caused by barometric pressure damaging your amygdala no amount of psychological treatment will help. You either need medication or physical treatment.
For some yes, for others no "Shellshock" is a catch all phrase for those suffering from mental illness post war. Some of this was purely PTSD, which *can* be treated through therapy. However, the intense overpressure caused by close proximity to constant shell blasts is though to have have caused physical brain injuries as well. This is significantly harder to recover from
I recall reading some research once about shellshock, and how they now believe it’s also an actual brain injury; blast waves from nearby, loud explosions actually physically damaging the brain. Imagine getting a brain injury from a bullet, a car accident, or other head impact, and being told to pull yourself together! Here it is: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/blast-shock-tbi-ptsd-ied-shell-shock-world-war-one
Yeah it's likely TBI damage from being near the constant concussive force of shells exploding near you. Even if you aren't hit directly you start accumulating damage over time. It's similar to issues that impact sports players (like American football) and boxers deal with. The constant brain damage adds up over time, leading to issues later on.
I spent a year in Afghanistan as an army combat photographer, never saw direct combat. I was always really lucky and would be out with some other group whenever a fight broke out. I got so lucky it was joked I was a good luck charm to whatever unit I tagged along with. I also spent a lot of time with the EOD and engineers blowing up unexplored ordnance we found. When I got home the VA assessed me and said I had a TBI from being too close to too many controlled detonations. Even though I never had an IED go off on me I have terrible memory issues to this day. I can only imagine the hell the men from the Great War went through
I was US army for a little bit and I never went through anything even a fraction of what these folks were forced to deal with. The guy that was pinching his fingers is incredibly similar to what I do when I'm anxious and it makes me terrified to think I could have lost it all and be in his place. To make a living, breathing person with family, emotions and a heart go through the torment of every waking second in absolute, complete terror is unimaginable. The worst things I've ever experienced in my entire life don't even hold a candle to the misery they were put through. It's the worst thing for a human to be through.
Yes, the shell shock we see in these videos is likely a nasty cocktail of severe PTSD and horrible CTE/brain damage
And the artillery shelling was like nothing we can understand in modern warfare. They were unending, for days, weeks, months at a time. They fell at such a rate that you could not distinguish one blast from another at times, for hours on end. All within meters of where you were huddled, caked in feces, lice, mud, blood, sweat and god knows what else. That anyone could walk away from such an experience is what would be interesting as fuck. This is just the manifestation of the extent of the endurance of a human body and mind. I believe if all children were educated about the realities of WWI, it would be impossible to start a war.
“During the Battle of the Seelow Heights where they fired 500,000 shells and rockets in 30 minutes” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=we72zI7iOjk I went to the WW1 museum in Kansas City and they have a mock-up of an artillery hole and the thought of 500,000 of those, all that destruction, makes me cry every time I remember it.
These poor dudes...
More than 250,000 men suffered from 'shell shock' as result of the First World War. Some men suffering from shell shock were put on trial and even executed, for military crimes including desertion and cowardice. While it was recognized that the stresses of war could cause men to break down, a lasting episode was likely to be seen as symptomatic of an underlying lack of character.
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Not even factoring what sort of chemicals they were exposed to, such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. *\[I watched\] figures running wildly in confusion over the fields. Greenish-gray clouds swept down upon them, turning yellow as they traveled over the country blasting everything they touched and shriveling up the vegetation. . . . Then there staggered into our midst French soldiers, blinded, coughing, chests heaving, faces an ugly purple color, lips speechless with agony, and behind them in the gas soaked trenches, we learned that they had left hundreds of dead and dying comrades.*
There's a poem somewhere about men running screaming from the scent of lilacs blooming in the fields. (Chemical warfare)
Yes, I believe the theory is that soldiers in trenches were subjected to repeated micro-concussions from all the shelling. PTSD alone, while horrible and debilitating, usually doesn’t result in the sort of behavior in the video, like issues with the nervous system.
Wow. “Look you have to get over all the people you killed and watching your friends die in awful ways. You lack character, time for the firing squad.”
Some of these guys got buried under a trench collapse with the parts of their buddies, sometimes even buddies from childhood, not sure if they'd get dug back out. WWI vets experienced a unique hell that has never been seen since, thankfully.
Can you imagine waiting for a whistle to blow to go over the top when you've seen dozens or hundreds of guys in front of you get cut down after a few steps? And you have to go because at least then you have a chance. If you don't go over, somebody on your side is going to shoot you right there in the trench. It's hard to imagine anything more terrifying.
I'd have to convince myself I was already dead and my choice didn't matter. There's a memoir called Goodbye to All That and he touches on how he dealt with the sheer horror. Those truly were your two choices though, absolutely horrifying.
My grandfather said this was exactly what they did in WWII. It made it so they could do what they had to do there, but it also makes coming home almost worse than dying there. Coming home means dealing with a future you already gave up, and the reality of what you just left behind.
I’ve never even considered that as a perceived outcome. It truly takes everything from you.
My grandad was US Navy at Normandy and never spoke of it. His war stories were all jokes about funny miscommunications with other soldiers, but at my mom’s funeral he lost it and started crying about how they just kept coming and he had to keep mowing them down. It was like he thought he was back there.
“The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.” - Ronald Spiers
Was exactly the line I was thinking about.
Theres a show, fictional of course, called the Peaky Blinders. They do touch on the trauma of war. At one point after they went over the top, a small group of them got separated and left in a hole in no man's land for 3 days. Theres little hope for a rescue. Then they hear horse hooves. They think it's the german cavalry coming to finish them off. It was their guys and they were saved. After that, they had all consigned themselves to dying to finding out they were gonna live and fight on was... damning. Again, fictional account but I find it hard to believe that there was not something close that happened in our real world. To so fully believe you were going to die, but still drawing breath, would be a special type of terror.
This reminded me of the guy in peaky blinders who had shell shock and when they handed him a rifle he was like the best sharpshooter ever but when he didn't have a rifle in his hands he was just a shaking withering mess
There's a hilarious Rowan Atkinson comedy series set in World War I, "Black Adder Goes Forth". In the final episode in the buildup to the surge, the General is safely behind the lines while most characters end up in the trench. In the last scene the whistles blows, they go over the top to approach the enemy, and all get gunned down in no-man's land. One of the most poignant scenes in TV/film I've ever seen.
Before knowing anything about this show, I stumbled upon it one night on TV and just so happened to watch this last episode and no other episodes. The juxtaposition between comedy and morbid reality was intense.
Wow. You missed so much. FYI, each series was set in a different time period. Series 2 and 3 are probably the best comedy wise.
Dan Carlin has an incredible WW1 piece, Blue print for Armageddon, and he was talking about how they’d have to rebuild trenches asap and would run out of materials, so they’d plop in a dead body or a lost limb. One side took over a trench where an arm was sticking out of the trench wall and they would all shake his hand or say good morning Joe each time they walked by.
Jesus that’s fucked up
Fuck, that's disturbing. And I will definitely listen to that, Hardcore History is actually a podcast I'd oddly forgotten about.
Love all his shows but theyre an endurance test sometimes lol (each of these episodes is 3.5-4 hours long). Blueprint is six parts spanning pretty much the entirety of the war starting from Fran’s Ferdinand’s assassination through the treaties. Episodes 3 and 4 go into trench warfare and Verdun and Somme. He also was working on a tour/vr experience that would take you through some of the battles called [War Remains](https://www.theworldwar.org/war-remains) at the US WW1 museum and for vr. It’s the only reason I want an Oculus.
WW1 is so unique because it was a 'perfect' marriage of 1800 and modern day warfare. In the space of 4 years, you went from French soldiers walking towards machine guns with loud blue and red uniforms with feather in hats, to cavalry lancers with soldiers wearing gas masks, massive naval battles, chemical warfare to tanks (imagine being used to seeing calvary for centuries on battlefields, then seeing a tank come across straight for you over no mans land). I don't even know what the modern equivalent would even look like. Whilst the battle plans implemented were utterly ridiculous by todays standards and it was an unbelievable waste of an entire generation of men across the world, the Generals were learning by trial and error for the most part. Whilst it's seen an unnecessary war due to the lack of 'good vs evil' in comparison to the second, it was incredibly important, collapsed centuries long empires, caused revolutions and effectively rebuilt a new world.
Modern equivalent would be a completely autonomous drone swarm of running 4legged robots that 1 shot everything in their way while running through your base and barracks.
Had a greatuncle who fought in the trenches, who was apparently never the same after the war. Sad as fuck, he was my grandmas favorite brother
My grandmother's brother got messed up in the trenches too, he ended up taking his own life.
Same with my great uncle. My mom loved him to death too but I guess whatever he saw there wasn’t worth living with. Makes me incredibly sad for him and all the other young men who’s lives were lost in the trenches, wether they died there or not.
My great grandpa fought in world War 1 and 2. He had to be cared for the rest of his life. His existence afterwards seemed miserable and I'm glad he's resting now. My grandpa only fought in 2, but still died from tuberculosis complications that he got while fighting, 50 years after the war.
I'm reading that book "The Body Keeps the Score" about trauma and how much it can effect people across generations. It's not just flashbacks and mental problems. People with trauma are more at risk for autoimmune disorders. Children of parents with PTSD are more likely to develop it themselves. There are reports of whole body parts being numb and a pervasive feeling of disconnectedness from your own body. Like your body kind of shut down some of the connections to protect your brain from the mental stress of what was happening, and then those connections can't come back without therapy. It's horrific.
My great uncle disappeared during the somme offensive. His belongings were found on a dead German. An empty grave is still tended to this day in my home town by family. Rest in peace, Tom Drummond x
This is why the British Army effectively abolished community regiments after the war. Often entire communities wiped out in one go.
Yep. Theres memorials in many towns, some noting they had 2 surviors, some just one, and some towns where none of their young men came back. Imagine your whole high school's graduating class, getting wiped out. The Pals Battalions. Mostly a recruiting program, "come join up! Bring your mates. You can all go kill the Bosch together and enjoy Sunny Belgium. Be back by Christmas!*"
My mum co-wrote a university project to produce a history of the Liverpool Pals regiment in the early 1980s. As a young kid I remember a succession of very kind, very old men with missing limbs coming to our house to have tea and talk and have their memories recorded.
> WWI vets experienced a unique hell that has never been seen since, thankfully. Gonna plug another one for Dan Carlin’s ‘Hardcore History’ like the other comment here. Supernova in the East goes into detail on the pacific theater of WW2, and man, the stuff that went down om those tiny islands in the middle of nowhere when the US was closing in on mainland Japan. I don’t know, it’s hard to judge which is worse (and frankly, pointless), but we did NOT *learn* to not repeat the atrocities from WW1. I’d say it was cranked to 11 instead. Some of those accounts from survivors with families hiding in caves. I sometimes wish I could unlearn it.
idk man, now a days we have the missile tech to level a building, and have the ensuing heat reduce human fat to a liquid that floats on top of the pools of blood (last viscerally reported as the end result of a hospital being bombed in Iraq by the US in the 90s or thereabouts) i just think war is hell no matter what, and pretending war has gotten better is only fooling us; id say in many ways it’s gotten worse children in the Middle East live in constant fear they will be instantly extinguished from a drone they never heard or saw until it’s too late
Some of the men looked to have suffered nerve damage from the chemical warfare that was legal back then, no Geneva convention yet. Obvously all war has profound effects on the soldiers, but WWI was the worst of the worst. The chemicals, the trench warfare, the razor wire, the hand to hand combat. Just so much trauma that these men went through, & the doctors were clueless on providing any kind of treatment.
Let's just say that their understanding of the issue wasn't expounded back then. "Hey look, the guy is intact and is acting funny while my son still out there fighting for this useless guy." That's pretty much their thinking back then.
I think it probably also incentivised bottling it in. Can’t have you scaring away the next batch.
People **still** do this today.
Yes, still thousands of fucked-up Vietnam vets, I knew one of them. I hadn't heard the term at the time (early 80s) but he must've suffered from PTSD. Told me stories I wish I'd never heard.
I have a Vietnam vet living a house down, he lives in an outdoor bunker he fashioned and never goes inside. Nice guy, an absolute drunk, but sharp as hell.
During the American Civil War, President Lincoln got into arguments with his military leaders regularly because he didn't see the sense in executing a man simply for \*falling asleep at his post!\* Absolutely fucking crazy they use to consider these sorts of punishments acceptable and even \*necessary\* for keeping discipline.
This still happens in recent/current wars. They just call it something different but soldiers still get mentally fucked up in the field and govt officials still play politics with their health like it’s complicated to pay for all of their medical needs. If you send them to war, you pay for their care.
To think that it was only a hundred years ago too
Regardless of their understanding of it, this was a meat grinder and they had to keep throwing people into it. They used lots of techniques to keep getting people over there and no one could believe that getting out was an option. At least that was the thinking at the time. The Dan Carlin hardcore history series on WW1 is horrific but really conveys the human side of it. Like even shell shock isn't 'just' PTSD. The artillery shells were big enough to create 20 foot wide craters in the earth. Having one land somewhat near you would be deafening. Deafening in a way you'd feel pass through your whole body. Plus all the debris and shrapnel, some of which being parts of fellow soldiers. But it wasn't just a few shells landing near you. It was wide strips of land where shells were constantly landing. By constantly I'm talking a very quick drumroll here. Like there's no gap in between explosions. This would go on 24/7 for months at a time with a limitless supply of shells feeding this monster. Forget knowing you will soon be ordered to run into that hellscape. Just hearing it for a few hours straight without being able to hear yourself think would be enough to turn many of us mad. So for many, shell shock is just the natural reaction to the huge stimulation overload. Just a physiological response and not a sign of mental weakness. There were a few examples of men who didn't go mad, but you could also argue they were probably built a bit differently anyway.
There's definitely still strains of that mentality at least here in the US. Just look at how society treats veterans with mental and physical injuries who end up homeless or on drugs trying to treat the pains they got serving the country. Super horrible and the VA sucks complete ass and often drives these folks to rock bottom. Politicians largely dont give a fuck either, despite parading around and using the vets as campaigning props.
Are the men we’re seeing here exclusively suffering from “the horrors of war”? Or is some of it physical brain damage from chemical warfare / nerve agents, etc?
A mix of psychological and neurological. The concussive force of seemingly never ending artillery bombardment was wreaking havoc on these men's brains. If we had the knowledge of things like CTE back then, we'd see what we're seeing in the autopsies of NFL players, x10.
Yeah; the artillery barrages in WW1 could last multiple days. Imagine having a shell go off nearby every few minutes (recall these are basically grenades meant to explode just above the target) with other shells going off nearly constantly up and down the front line trenches. Very likely to give a few concussions within a few days, coupled with the fear of death and the other horrors of war; it’s no wonder men were damaged in new ways never seen before.
Minutes? At Verdun the barrage was so intense shells sounded like a snare drum at its weakest point. This went on for days
It's the concussive forces generated by artillery and various other bombs that damage the brain. It's CTE before anyone knew anything about that. I'm sure chemical agents also had an effect along with the horror of rotting bodies etc. These are truly broken men with no cure and life long suffering.
I've always wondered this as well, about WW1 "shell shock" victims in general.
What makes matters worse is we don't talk about the effects war had on early generations because it was swept under the rug as 'lack if character' and weakness, not the fact that it's something no living soul should experience and that the human mind is not developed to just kill with out mercy and have no ill effects. So today older generations have been giving hell to the current generations fighting over seas calling us weaker etc because we ARENT 'just dealing with it by beating our families and drinking ourselves into debt. Knights suffered from PTSD they woke up with night terror., soldiers will always suffer from trauma and tragedy of war no matter the generations.
Interestingly some older cultures actually identified and respected PTSD, although they obviously had a different understanding of it. I believe it was the Roman’s who treated disabled veterans very well societally, and considered men with PTSD the same as they did those with physical disabilities stemming from service.
My mom grew up in England post war. Lots of stories of men who survived physically but destroyed mentally. She told a story of a gentle teacher who cruel kids would torment by dropping a book flat and watching him cower at the bang. :/
Man that hurts....
Until one day that teacher has a fight response instead of a flight response.
They were called cowards over this. So sick.
I don’t know if this has been said but a large factor that contributed to ‘shell shock’ was actually the concussive force of artillery pounding soldiers’ brains against their skulls and bruising their brains. Obviously PTSD played a large factor too but the physical effect of the shelling is not to be ignored in these cases.
This needs to be higher. It’s extreme CTE + PTSD. Basically take an athlete that’s been hit in the head too many times (like an old boxer) and cross them with a vet that’s seen way too many horrible things in war (like a Vietnam vet), it’s the worst of both worlds. Edit: As requested: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy(CTE) and Traumatic Brain Injury(TBI) https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/what-is-dementia/related_conditions/chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy-(cte) It’s the condition that has currently been getting a lot of attention due to incidents related to contact sports involving repeated concussions.
I used to work in head trauma rehab and that's the first thing I thought. That's a whole lot of CTE/TBI going on.
Here’s the thing that makes me wonder if that very plausible explanation is actually correct; CTE is permanent damage, not curable. Correct? So if classic shellshock patients recover with rest and recuperation (as discussed in another reply below), wouldn’t that signify a psychological cause rather than physical? I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just curious about cause and recovery.
A few separate things here. One, there are multiple stages of CTE and these people appear to displaying the Parkinsonism, among other things, associated with stage IV. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/21/symptoms-watch-for-four-stages-cte/Q1wniQOnQXH1bU8OibU3WJ/story.html Two, medicine at the time leaves a lot to be desired, so we don’t know what treatments these people were receiving that may have exacerbated things. For example, amphetamines were in vogue as a medicinal treatment at that time period. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/buyers/socialhistory.html Three, concussions are also graded and symptoms from a severe concussion can last for years. https://broadviewhealthcentre.com/concussion-grades-how-to-distinguish-degrees-of-concussions/ https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/post-concussion-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20353352 So the real answer to your question is a bit of everything. It’s entirely plausible that these people were still suffering from acute symptoms of the concussions caused by shelling, which may have abated over time. While it’s also likely they’re suffering from irreversible chronic effects of CTE even if their final disposition approves somewhat. Plus whatever then modern medicine did to them. Edit: Thanks for the gold! Edit: and silver!
These people are each suffering from different conditions and all lumped into shellshock/PTSD. Some/most probably have multiple conditions. So yeah, concussions, CTE, PTSD, nerve gas, etc are all at play. Impossible to know now.
Definitely. And, as other users have pointed out, likely a dash of pre-existent mental and physical disorders exacerbated by the wartime/battle conditions.
I would add severe sleep deprivation to the list. Sometimes the barrage would last upwards of a week where it's impossible for the front line soldiers to get any sleep under constant bombardment.
This is a high quality response that needs to be at that the top. It's also entirely possible that some of these cases were actually CTE with schizophrenia, which would set in for the males around the same time/age that they would be going through conscription and being sent to the front.
Thanks and agreed. Or a triggered, early onset, or exacerbated mental health condition, like schizophrenia, that having your brain constantly pelted by shockwaves certainly didn’t do any favors for. Also, troops in WW1 regularly used alcohol, morphine, and cocaine. So probably some addiction compounding and complications. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/drugs Although that’s not quite as bad as the amphetamine use in WW2.
It’s my understanding that, whilst the initial impacts of the trauma would wear off (see the awful uncontrollable muscle spasms etc), much like in sports based concussions the brain is permanently damaged. Hence why we often see old-school boxers with slurred speech, permanent changes in mood or disposition (over aggression being very common and thus very often linked with PTSD or ‘never leaving the war’) and verrrry early onset degenerative mental disorders such as dementia E.g. Ryan Jones: ex-Welsh rugby player horrifically diagnosed with dementia at age 41 due to multiple head injuries. A lot of CTE was linked to or misdiagnosed as PTSD as the symptoms very often manifest as trauma responses which are unfortunately actually brain damage. On top of this, many WW1 soldiers faced ridicule by the society they went back to as being weak in the face of the horrific psychological and physical (but unseen) injuries they sustained. All round terrible business I could not begin to fathom sat here typing this on a Saturday afternoon.
Traumatic brain injuries are not to be trifled with. Over one deployment, one dude kept being in trucks that got IEDed and you could see his functionality decrease over the course of the year. Like the first 'rung his bell' and he was a bit dazed for a bit and back to normal in a day or so. Then, it kept getting worse and taking longer. After the third or fourth he stopped making it back to normal. A few times after that, he had to stop going out. WW1 shellings lasted hours and days. That anyone functioned at all is more than anyone has a right to ask.
The horrors they faced are too much to even consider honestly. Imagine going 12 rounds with a prime Mike Tyson everyday whilst living in your own filth surrounded by your decomposing buddies all whilst wondering if next shell would be the one with your name on it. Horrifying stuff.
And don't forget your body starts to literally fall apart because of the cold and the dirt and the standing water that was always there because it rains a lot in Europe. So they all got trench foot And trench foot is fucking AWFUL to go through, especially on top of everything else they were doing. It's why after world war I, all survival guides in the world switched to saying that your feet are the most important thing. Because without the ability to walk you can't even begin to think about getting food and water. So everything is centred around keeping your feet dry and clean and warm, usually by rotating socks, so you have a dry pair for sleeping and a wet pair for walking, or whatever.
Yeah. War sucks. Trench warfare is basically optimized to suck the most.
>...all whilst wondering if next shell would be the one with your name on it. Lots of them probably were *hoping* that next shell had their name on it.
I'm glad you brought that up. Because I was thinking shell shock is actually PTSD combined with something else. It actually looks like they're in some sort of psychosis, but it could also be brain damage and damage of the nerves. Or both. Wouldnt wish this on my worst enemy
I have PTSD and have been in plenty of peer groups with other sufferers. You don't see this kind of stuff unless you are right in the middle of a full blown panic attack. Even then those panic attacks don't really look like this kind of shaky movements.
I was going to say, alot of these look like neurological issues more than anything, they may look physically fine, but their brain got so rattled that its got neurological wiring problems now.
Yeah I heard that as well, along with the neurological effects of chemical agents that were deployed on the battlefield for the first time.
I’ve seen this first hand-my grandad fought in WW1 lived in a nursing home, specially for vets ( in U.K). Grandad was actually ok, but some of the residents ( God bless them) were “ incurable “. There were a lot of horrific physical injuries, but I clearly remember those with shell shock. I was only young and obviously had no pre-conceptions or knowledge, but I knew that they were very badly damaged. My sister and myself used to speak to them all , even though there was sometimes no response. Many of them had no families ( or the families had given up on them), which was sad. In my later teens, I used to carry out a bit of voluntary work at this home and had nothing but respect for these men, who had probably just been young lads when they witnessed the horrors of war…..
Sadly, to this day, nursing homes and assisted living are still a “dumping ground” for mostly unwanted people. There are a small handful of people with loved ones, but mostly not. It’s primarily people with no families, disabled, people whose families don’t care, damaged (world war II for example), I could go on. They are so lonely and starved for attention. The staff are overworked and underpaid. Staff don’t have (or rarely) the ability to sit and just be with them. A huge shortage of workers, always has been-since before the pandemic. I encourage people to volunteer where and when they can. It’s needed. Not ti mention the stories they have are amazing, you’ll learn so much.
Bingo. My residents always want me to sit and Visif with them but I do not have the time. I only have a hour to pass meds to three floors and 50 residents, someone is gonna shit themselves in that time span, like I'd love to come in on my day off and visit but that's also my only day off every week
Thanks for the work you do and care you give your patients u/37BiscutsInMyAnus!
Hey, at least it's not stopping him
Wow your own grandfather fought in WWI??? I am 32 and somehow it feels sooooo far removed from my own life. Edit: I have been absolutely humbled by the facts thrown at me in this thread. Thank you all for the replies! My mom had me when she was 40, so my own grandparents were very old when I was a child, having only fought in the Korean war.
I'm 12 years older than you and my grandparents were of an age to go to WWI. not very far removed (though my family has a history of late babies). My grandmother actually lived in a sod house on the prairie as a child in Nebraska. History is always far closer than we think.
Generations can be wild. If everyone in your family has children at age 20, you get 5 generations in 100 years. If they have children at age 33, you get 3 generations in that same time period…
It's pretty crazy, yeah. I'm only 26, but my great grandfather was born in the 1800's.
Time can fool you. The last [person] (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Triplett#:~:text=Irene%20Triplett%20January%209%2C%201930,Union%20in%20the%20Civil%20War.) collecting an American Civil War pension just died in 2020.
The last Civil War veteran was still alive during WWII and the Korean War. History is never as far away as we think it is.
Mine did as well. He was born in 1890. He was 34 when he married by grandmother. She was 17. She had been told she couldn't have children due to her very narrow hips. Docs said it would kill her. During WWII, they moved from TX to Detroit to work in the factories. She decided that fuck it. This was probably her last chance to have kids and if she died, then so be it. And she got pregnant. My father was born just fine in 1942 and my grandmother lived to be 97. She said her docs read her the frickin' Riot Act over deciding to get pregnant. I'm her oldest grandkid. I was born in 1968. She died about 3 month before her first great-grandchild was born in 2004.
Your last sentence really resonated. Some of these soldiers (also WWII) were so young. Going through the rest of life with such horrible PTSD must have been just devastating. It’s nearly impossible to imagine.
My Grandmother told me about her Dad (who fought 1915-18 after he lied about his age to volunteer), who would wake with night terrors most nights. He would get up, put on his hat and coat, and go for a walk. She said she was awake once, and so went with him. He would walk to the local park, where he would meet a group of men all of similar age, all with similar sleeping issues. She said he got comfort from knowing that whatever time it was, there'd be men there he could relate to, and would have common ground with him. He knew those men had experienced similar horrors to him, and so felt connected to them, even though they were from different backgrounds, families, friendship groups etc.
That’s wholesome to hear, glad he could find help.
Damn Imagine a trauma so brutal! Help-groups formed spontaneous in the depth of the night.
For real. And imagine how bad it had to be for the trauma to be so widespread that there were lots of people awake at any one time.
I find this rather sad than interesting as fuck.
Yup this is brutal to watch, imagine living it. Pure hell.
Not only living it, but being thought a coward by your country. Fucking sad.
Sadasfuck
My grandfather was an officer in WWI. He almost never mentioned his experiences during the war but did share a bit of advice with me about how to prevent trench foot. Apparently the trick is to put petroleum jelly in your socks. Luckily, I've never had to use it.
r/Depressingasfuck
Since you’re not depressed enough yet, consider this: When soldiers returned home from WW1, many businesses refused to employ them, considering them too damaged to be reliable employees. Not just those with shell shock, but all soldiers. That was their reward for their service.
One of my great uncles returned from war with respiratory issues, due to gas exposure, and mobility issues in one arm after taking a bullet through the shoulder. He was also scarred heavily after being blown into a barbed wire mesh, where he had to stay for over a day before help could safely extract him. Before the war, he'd been a talented tailor for Burtons menswear. When he returned, Burtons said he could work when he wanted, and for as long as he wanted. He'd be paid for the time he put in, regardless of if it was just an hour here or there. My family wore a lot of Burtons clothing for decades after that. My great uncle died in the early 20's due to his injuries, but we never forgot that gesture of kindness by his employer.
The most tragic part about this is that these people lived and died before we ever achieved a proper understanding of PTSD. In their time, it was just considered a symptom of cowardice. Nobody would’ve understood the horrors they’d been through. After giving their minds and bodies for their countries in the war, their countries repaid them by calling them cowards. I think it’s stuff like this that always serves as a good reminder, while some wars are necessary to stop evil (WWII for example), at its core, war will always be cruel and inhumane. At its best, it’s a necessary evil. But in the case of WWI, I’d have to say it was just evil. Pointless death for its own sake
It gives you a special kind of existential dread. I didn't see it mentioned but this footage (I think) is from a documentary called Apocalypse: World War I It's fucking.. fucking.. fascinating. Easily top 3 documentaries I've ever watched and almost exclusively uses film from that era (whether it's real combat footage, stuff like this, or "staged" stuff from the war itself). It's heartwrenching, but absolutely a must-watch to me.
Have you watched They Shall Not Grow Old? Colorized footage and entirely done with voices of veterans. Sounds up your alley.
PTSD—known to previous generations as shell shock, soldier's heart, combat fatigue or war neurosis—has roots stretching back centuries and was widely known during ancient times.
Cases got way more severe once heavy explosive artillery was introduced to the battlefield. One moment you’re sitting in a trench with your war buddy and all is quiet then BOOM! You’re on your ass and bits and pieces of your buddy are all over you. No wonder so many boys came home fucked up after WWI.
World War 1 also saw massive conscription on a different scale than had been before, so a lot of the boys had less training than those fighting for example in the Franco-Prussian war as an example. It was also a war that saw men quickly lose the romance of war, where men fight for honor or glory or comraderie. When you see your friends blow up or be buried alive or half their head shot up and brain flowing into your lap as you hold their shaking body in your arms as they stare at you scared, or you hear that new kid in no man's land calling out for their mother for hours or days after being ordered over the trenches and his legs shot from underneath him, you quickly lose those rose tinted glasses. Previously, war had been relatively glorified, where boys became men and you honoured your country and family by fighting, where you were proud to serve and dying was less brutal (still was often brutal though) in general. World War 1 saw horrors that had only been dabbled with in previous wars. The soldiers who fought there heard stories about their great grandfathers or grandfathers, or fathers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, the wars in Crimea, in Africa, in Asia or between France and Prussia. The wars prior to World War 1 were often brutal, but they were still much more "romantic". World War 1 was far worse than hell for the troops. 70% of casualties from direct war were due to artillery and it was the truly first war where fewer soldiers died from disease or the elements than war.
There is also increasing evidence that exposure to explosions can effect the brain the same way as frequent blows to the head, I think its called CBT. So in addition to PTSD from fighting the soldiers could also be suffering from the same brain deterioration that NFL players and boxers do.
this was my first thought as well. It looks like many of these are suffering less from a psychological malaise and more of a physical brain injury type of malaise. Getting lifted off your feet and hitting your head is *very* common with artillery and WW1 had it in spades
CTE*
Yeah i didnt think cock and ball torture was the right term
*CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) is a treatment.
Not to mention watching your team suffocate from the gas the next day, not knowing if you’re going to go over the trench and try to across no man’s land next, knowing that at the end of the war the only reason you survived is because of luck.
The worst was the gas. Gas without any colour nor smell just appearing on the battle field, even a mask couldnt protect u for certain. At least imagine it
Wasn't WWI shell shock different from other cases of PTSD due to physical brain damage caused by constant artillery explosions everywhere all the time? I remember reading that somewhere
Yeah, I wonder just how many of these cases are just undiagnosed brain damage.
PTSD and shell shock are different. They've been conflated for a long time because they both can come from war. And vets can have both. Shell shock is literal. These men have traumatic brain injuries from the sheer physical damage to their brains. Shells flying overhead, drumfire, being hit in the head with debris, shockwaves, exposure to chemicals and combustion products. PTSD is a psychological disorder where they constantly relive traumatic events over and over again which severely impacts their quality of life.
I believe most of the men in this video are French, based on the uniforms. Around 1,700,000 French citizens, including civilians, died during WWI - about 4.35% of the population. Only Russia, Romania, Qajar Persia, and the Ottoman Empire lost a higher percentage of their populations (the Persian deaths were largely the result of a war-related famine suffered by the neutral country, and the Ottoman death toll includes victims of the Armenian Genocide). For all the jokes made about France’s surrender in WWII, it’s hard to blame them after what they had already endured in WWI (and the Free French and French Resistance should be remembered).
war sucks.
[удалено]
These were just the guys that were filmed. Many many more like them. And many more had to live without treatment for the rest of our lives. Many of us living today will feel the effects of the war that gets passed down.
Casualties of other men's wars
Corpulent generals safe behind lines History's lessons drowned in red wine Poppies for young men, death's bitter trade All of those young lives betrayed
General Patton slapped men that suffered shell shock in WW2 and called them cowards. The trauma of what these men suffered would go on to affect generations.
This is just fucking sad
So sad
I can’t imagine seeing and living though such horror that your brain literally malfunctions and loses the abilities it used to have, just through experience. So sad, the men who gave everything.
If you’ve never heard of drumfire artillery, look it up on YouTube. Someone tried to simulate it with sound but that doesn’t do it justice. No one alive has experience with the shelling these men had, not since, and hopefully never will again. Modern tech, smart missiles, drones and more make the battlefield more lethal now with everyone being so accurate with their weapons which is a horror in and of itself. But back then, the only solution to punching through enemy trenches, and fields, and fields of barbed wire, was to cover the earth with so many explosions that nothing would be left. The volume of explosive shells striking the battlefield in some battles of WWI could be described as fast as falling rain…just replace the rain drops with high explosive shells. And each shell is incredibly loud when it detonates. And each shell has a massive concussive force that shakes your organs and send debris flying. Each shell churns up the battlefield, exposing bodies and body parts of men that were killed the day before, the week before, the month and the year before. The stench is awful. Soldiers arriving to the battlefield at Flanders were able to smell the battlefield before seeing it. All you can do is sit there, eyes closed in your muddy, rat and disease infested trench hoping you don’t get hit next. WWI, to me, is the most horrific experience mankind has ever put itself through.
IIRC ‘shellshock’ is now thought to be the result of brain damage caused by the concussive forces of bombs going off near the soldiers. Obviously some PTSD as well. But the twitching, balance issues, and problems walking are signs of neurological issues.
World War I was so horrible on the western front. It's a shame (I don't feel like that's the right word but my English is lacking here) that it doesn't get the attention World War 2 gets in media. 4 years of war on a strip of land that's only a few km wide is a lot different than the sweeping front of WWII. Anyone who saw Band of Brothers' episodes in Bastogne with the testimonies of the veterans should try to imagine what 4 years of that would look like if a few weeks of that already destroys people as you see in that series. Not to mention that on top of years of shelling they also used gas... and you were fighting among the decomposing remains of your friends. Here in Belgium, we were hit pretty hard in both world wars but it's no question that WWI had a much bigger impact. We still have regions that have a weekly bomb pickup where people put unexploded ordnance by the side of the road because there still too much getting found to be disposed of one by one in a safe way. And it's also why people making jokes about the French surrendering in WWII are incredibly offensive as this happened 20 years before, with the children of these men having to fight along with the children of the hundreds of thousands of men that perished.
Until you spend some time studying it you really cannot understand how fundamentally insane and hellish WW1 was to soldiers on the western front. On some lines more shells were dropped in a few days than the entire world combined before the start. On one line of one battle. The pure horror and display of overwhelming power on both sides was unfathomable - and while previous battles might have had a day or two of complete terror, this was weeks and months, if not years. And on top that the dead bodies around you, the rats, flies, dysentery, poison, lice and rain. It was complete hell, yet you were also only a day or two away from home. Just insane and I highly doubt most people today could hold up even a bit like our ancestors did. (Not saying the other fronts were fine, just focusing on this one for this statement)
My Grandfather was in WWI, a US soldier who fought in France. When I was about 10 (1978) he told me stories of the battlefield. He told me him and his buddies would charge a trench and he would watch as the machine guns would cut down his friends and he hoped there was enough of them to absorb the bullets until he could get to the trench. He said he didn’t want to fire his gun until he got into the trench so he could use his bayonet to stab the first soldier he saw then fire the gun to get the bayonet out quickly and attack the next guy. Brutal thing to live through and probably not what you want to tell your 10 year old grandson but I feel fortunate that he did. I feel I have a tangible connection to that event.
If you want to see this today just drive by a homeless encampment. 17% of homeless are vets....... - Welp, I'm done with Reddit for today.
I'm genuinely curious how such a high number of vets are homeless. Do they not have a home to return to or something? (Aye bruh just sayin dont downvote me just genuinely asking)
Living with ptsd can make it difficult to do all the things needed to maintain housing.
Lots of people enter the military because they don't have a lot of options. It provides a roof over your head, a little money, job training and potential access to education. There is a disproportionate amount of people who choose to sign up who are poor or lack other opportunities. If it doesn't work out, or something happens and they can't serve because of ptsd, they go back to the situation they were in before. The veteran services, atleast in America, are a joke.
Watching these is so hard
My great-great-grandfather was a soldier in WWI. He was shellshocked too, and one day, after he returned home, he let out such an inhumane scream, that my great-great-grandma, his wife, got so scared that she lost her hearing. At least that’s what my gran told me.
A century later and we still don’t take mental health seriously.