Arms and the Mind
I
THE inquiring finger of Science is poking into every field of human experience. Printers, paper makers, and ink manufacturers are working overtime to put the results into the hands of the reading public, and whether it is the stars we see, the thoughts we think, the foods we eat, or the atoms that make up the tissue of our being, a new book about it has just come off the press and another will be offered us before the apple trees blossom again. In all this welter of scientific exploration nothing is attracting more expert or popular interest than the habits and vagaries of the human mind. Psychiatrists, psychologists, neurologists, are peeping into our inner consciousness. Hopes, dreams, fears, actions, and reactions are coming under their insatiable scrutiny. But with all that has been done and is being done, one field has been consistently overlooked — a field that might yield something of lasting importance in reaching a fuller understanding of human psychology. For want of a better phrase we may term it ‘the psychology of the soldier.’
I say it is a new field so far as present studies go, for the man taken out of civil life and catapulted into a military career is at once subjected to mental strains, emotions, and situations that have no counterpart in times of peace. The physical wounds of the World War gave the surgeon a rare opportunity to add to his knowledge and experience.
The filth incident to that conflict did the same thing for the epidemiologist. The emotions of the Great War might have opened such a door to the psychiatrist, but if he has taken full advantage of it, the fact has not been made apparent to those outside his profession. I do not discount the very able work that is being done for the mental patients in our veterans’ hospitals, or the valuable data that are being drawn from this work. I am thinking now of the normal cases that survived the war with no obvious mental maladjustment, and of what might be learned from a proper study of them.
II
Let us consider a more or less typical case history, and, that we may be sure of our facts, we will take my own. The only peculiar thing about it is that I was thirty-four years old when I enlisted, considerably above the average age of enlistment; but that may give us the advantage of a more mature observation of the phenomena we are to study. Denied admission to the officers’ training camp because of color blindness, I enlisted in the field artillery of the regular army. I was married, but had no children. We lived in Washington, D. C., and my wife took the Civil Service examination and worked in the War Department while I was away.
For the moment we will pass over the emotional strain of the days leading up to my enlistment, with my wife bursting into tears when she first heard me clumping up the stairs in my heavy field shoes. Let us turn rather to the routine of military life which I had to learn at once, and which was lived under the Grim Terror of the conflict we were preparing to enter. If it was my love of national freedom that impelled me to enlist, my first contribution to the cause was the surrender of all personal freedom. I had no voice in the selection of my wearing apparel. I was told when to wear an overcoat and when to leave it off. I was rebuked for leaving a pocket flap unbuttoned. I had no choice in what I ate or when I ate, and I was bound to the rigid and awe-inspiring wheel of ‘military courtesy.’ We are not here concerned with whether this routine was necessary or efficient or silly. What is important is that it made a peculiar and lasting impress on the mental structure of the average young man, who had in his past experience nothing that approached it.
Then came the last farewells, pride striving to conceal fear, and the relief when that emotional peak was passed. The embarkation camp, the rumors and counter-rumors, the frills, the discipline, the embarkation, the shouted curses and whispered prayers, the beauty and terror of the ocean, the debarkation, the strange new land, the discipline, the imminence of action, the long, long ride on the creeping train of funny cars, more drills — and then the grim and dirty business of destruction. No man who lived through such experiences came through them untouched. I do not say he is worse or better because of them, but at least he is different. In fact, there were some instances (I knew personally of only one) where by the time the soldier was ready to go into action he was totally incapacitated by his fears.
Extreme cases of this sort were labeled ‘shell shock.’ I heard a prominent neurologist and member of a university faculty say not long ago that shell shock was the result of a man’s rebellion against the horror of killing his fellow beings. If that is indicative of the understanding of our experts, it is striking evidence of the need for a further look into the psychoses of the soldier. Having heard my full share of shells and suffered my quota of fears, I do not hesitate to say that the learned doctor was wrong. If he were right, there would have been more cases of shell shock in the Civil War than in the World War, for there was more individual combat, more of seeing one’s enemy fall dead by one’s own hand, in the 1860’s than in 1918. I even venture to say that hand-tohand conflicts will seldom or never produce shell shock, for action is the best possible antidote for paralyzing fear.
I have a very distinct recollection of lying under enemy shellfire and feeling that I could almost welcome a machine gun or rifle bullet that would ‘kill me clean,’ in preference to a shell that would absolutely obliterate me if it made a direct hit. The great agency of destruction in the World War was the high-explosive shell. Its scream as it arched into the earth, the bone-shaking crash as it exploded, the whir of the jagged fragments as they ripped through everything in their path, the yawning crater of death that marked where the shell had struck — all these built up the terror in the overwrought mind until the point of collapse was reached and passed. Sometimes a morbid imagination carried the victim beyond the breaking point even before he was under fire. My opinion is that most cases of shell shock were caused by the natural horror of total obliteration.
Fear is an emotion associated with shell shock, but something else is necessary besides fear to produce a genuine case of shell shock. I came out of the war with the impression that a man has a definite capacity for fear — that he can get just so scared, and after that, no matter what happens, nothing can scare him any further. If his capacity for fear is below his breaking point, he can carry on no matter what happens. I do not mean to say, however, that this ‘fear capacity’ is constant in any individual. Undue fatigue or strain will sometimes cause a brave man to ‘crack.’
Fear is, of course, contagious, but so is courage. In fact, courage seems to be the more ‘catching’ because we all like to think that we are brave, and even the meanest will struggle to imitate the man of stout heart. During the war I was associated with a number of officers and men whose calm demeanor in danger filled my shaking soul with reverent awe, and when things were hottest I was glad to be near such staunch characters.
There were other emotions than fear that surged within our cootie-bitten breasts overseas. I recall the fatigue more vividly than the fear. Long nights of plodding over muddy roads weighted down with a pack that carried all you had in the world — a suit of underwear, a greasy mess kit, socks, an extra pair of shoes (perhaps), a bundle of letters you had n’t the heart to destroy, a dull razor, a sewing outfit made by loving hands, a pad of Y.M.C.A. paper and some envelopes (soiled), a can of beans, and a souvenir Iron Cross. After you had carried these lares et penates countless weary kilometres, had packed and unpacked them in numerous stables and dugouts, and had used them as a pillow while sleeping in the rain, they seemed to become as much a part of you as your toes and teeth — and all a part of the dirty, dreary, crazy, hopeless life that it seemed always had been and always would be.
Oh, yes, we had our moments. Sometimes the sun would shine warm against a white wall where we could drag away at a cigarette, relaxed in mind and body. There were infrequent pay days and universal gambling, because, when we were up on the line, there was little else to do with our paltry salaries (that is, ‘salt allowance’ of the Roman legionnaires). There were always old stories to tell and new songs to sing, most of them of doubtful morality and humor.
Looking back on it, I am convinced that during these moments we were kidding ourselves; that our conscious actions were prompted by our ‘defensive mechanism,’ in a clever effort to keep our subconscious from discovering to us the sick fear that slept in every soul; not the fear of death itself, but the fear of the suffering each death must entail — a mother bereaved, a wife left widowed, a sweetheart broken-hearted. For we lived in the certain knowledge that the next engagement, and the next and the next, would take their toll of us. We did not dwell on these things, but the subconscious kept them ever at the threshold of our consciousness, and I think all of us who had ‘contact with the enemy’ came out of it a little ‘queer.’
III
It was an incident that happened more than six months after I had heard my last shell and all the agony of fighting was over that showed me how deeply the grisly lessons of the war had been etched into my nervous system. I had spent several months in the Army of Occupation, and shortly after I returned home my wife and I were guests of some very dear friends.
‘They say you soldiers do not want to talk about the war,’ said our hostess after dinner, ‘but I wish you would make an exception of us. Joe and I read so many different things and hear so many conflicting stories that we don’t know what to believe. Won’t you make an exception of us and tell us something about what you saw?'
‘Of course I will,’ I answered. ‘I can’t understand all this stuff about soldiers not talking. Certainly there is nothing that I want to keep dark, nor did I have any particularly horrible experience that I am afraid to tell about. This was not much of a war for looks. We never saw long lines of bayonets flashing in the sun, or squadrons of cavalry leading a charge. But here goes.’ Anxious to give my two friends a true picture of the war, I warmed up to a description of the opening of one of the major offensives — the night marches, the rain-drenched camps in the woods, the last letter home, the eve of the attack, the final preparations, the opening of the barrage, and —
As suddenly as if you had hit me with an axe I went all to pieces! Tears coursed down my cheeks, I was shaking from head to foot; in short, I went completely ‘ blah.’ Like a great tidal wave the thought swept over me that I was at home, that the days of weariness and the nights of terror were forever gone, that my wife was again in my arms, that life once more was sweet. And it was more than I could stand. The hostess was all apologies, but I outdid her. Discovering myself in such an emotional mess, I was more surprised and embarrassed than I should have been if I had found myself standing in that living room in my shirt tail. For I certainly had not gone through the war weeping. I swore occasionally on the other side, prayed a little, and cried not at all. But when I ruthlessly tore open the deep recesses of my subconscious, the result was an explosion.
Almost thirteen years have passed since I last heard the whine of hostile bullets and the scream of shells, yet to-day I watch myself when I talk of the war, for I have learned from several subsequent experiences that if I probe too deeply I shall find hysteria. Why? It is, I think, because the stern habits of life at the front were so deeply burned into us and were associated inseparably with our full ‘capacity for fear.’
You may recall that Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front tells how the veterans practised the trick of conserving themselves, while the rookies, who had not learned their grim lessons, died in greater numbers. The first trick you learn at the front is that of throwing yourself flat on the ground the instant (a full second is too long to wait) you hear a shell that will strike near you. Now a shell can be heard a long distance, and the great majority of shells we soldiers heard caused us no apparent alarm, for we could tell that they were going away over our heads, were falling very much short of our position, or were too far to the right or left. Yet I was to learn later that the subconscious mind of each one of us was listening all the time for that shrill scream that told us to fall on our faces instanter, and such constant unconscious alertness may have resulted in peculiarities that still linger with us.
Six days after the Armistice we started the long hard march into Germany. We knew that the war was over and the danger of shells was past. But I saw men cringe and all but flop into the mud on that march when a pebble caught between a brake shoe and the steel tire of a gun carriage and split the air with a screech. Incidentally, this occurrence did not raise the laugh that one would expect. Instead, it seemed to fill us with a momentary rage — a fact which I think would interest the psychiatrist.
Some time after my return to Washington I was watching a sham battle in Maryland, standing on a hillside amid a large crowd and observing a realistic battle scene across the road. Suddenly someone out of sight at the bottom of the hill opened the throttle of his small automobile and the wail of the racing engine rose in a shrill crescendo. I was halfway to the ground before I caught myself, and as I straightened up somewhat sheepishly I saw a stranger near me in the same attitude.
‘You must have heard something like that before,’ I called.
‘I’ve heard plenty like that,’ he said with a grin, ‘and I certainly thought I was back in the war.’
The point I make is that no one else in the crowd heard that engine race. What a profound impression the veteran carries with him, in what a bitter school he must have been trained, are made evident by such instances.
These emotions, common to all who saw combatant service, have no counterpart in civil life. Most men live and die without ever knowing the capacity of their fear or the fibre of their courage. Behind it all is the question: Why does a man go to war? The Second Division, of which my regiment was a unit, went to Europe with some 28,000 men, all of whom had voluntarily entered the service. Why did we do it? What were the motivating influences that prompted each individual to seek out the recruiting officer? I used to cast a speculative eye at my fellow soldiers and ask myself: ‘Why did that man leave his workbench, that one his plough, that one his engine, that one his desk? Why am I here?’
Called on to testify, each one of us would have said something about ‘patriotism,’ ‘love of freedom,’ or ‘duty,’ but the same reasons to-day will probably not hold us in a line thirty minutes to vote on election day, or prevent us from ‘knocking down’ two dollars on our income-tax return.
Do not misunderstand me. I am glad that I left my home to serve under my flag, no matter what the consequences may be or might have been. Furthermore, I will do it again if the need is ever as great and I am able to go. But my action was prompted by some fundamental urge too deep for me to recognize; and my common service as a common soldier left me with peculiarities too involved for me to analyze. I wish a Dr. Menninger or a Dr. Dorsey or a Dr. Sadler would tell me something about myself.