‘Shell Shock’, War Hospitals and Cultures of Care

Craiglockhart was one of six hospitals established by the War Office for shell-shocked, or more specifically, for neurasthenic officers.Footnote ¹³ Set up in a former hydropathic clinic, just outside of Edinburgh in a rambling country house, the hospital opened in October 1916 at the height of reported shell shock cases, following the Battle of the Somme.Footnote ¹⁴ The first few months of the hospital's existence were unsettled due to the Army Medical Services’ local director's preference for strict military management and belief that shell shock did not exist, as well as the dismissal of the first commandant for mistreatment of patients.Footnote ¹⁵ But in 1917, the arrivals of William H. Bryce and Rivers from Maghull hospital in Liverpool led to a more stable, sympathetic environment and treatment regime.

Rivers and Brock, unlike most other RAMC doctors, were interested in continental developments in psychiatry. Unusually, the RAMC gave them free reign and time to explore individualized, psychologically based treatments that were unwelcome or impossible at larger hospitals.Footnote ¹⁶ As Young elucidates, Craiglockhart's ‘sunny rooms and therapeutic conversations were a world apart from the electrical room at the National Hospital’.Footnote ¹⁷ Craiglockhart was successful in part because it dealt with only 1,560 officers between October 1916 and February 1919. It was not just a clearing hospital with the aim of returning men to the front quickly, as was the case at other hospitals; rather, its doctors’ goals were to heal patients – to return them to their individual lives so that they could be not only functional and engaged in their present environments, but also healed emotionally.Footnote ¹⁸ But while both Brock and Rivers focused on individuals’ psychological care, the two men's approaches to treatment differed in substantial ways.

Brock advocated ‘activity’ for his patients – a ‘cure by functioning’ treatment or ‘ergotherapy’, to use his terms. He believed the cause of neurasthenia was when the patient's ‘experience of one kind of environment has been so terrific that he is inclined to evade for the future anything savouring of the “environmental” at all’.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, patients became marooned in the present moment and disconnected from his past and future. What could bring ‘people who have been blown up and buried’, feeling ‘more dead than alive’, ‘to get fully alive again’, was purposeful activity. His role as the doctor was to help patients ‘find … their job’ – ‘guiding them to it, keeping them at it and only relinquishing them finally when their interests are sufficiently awakened to ensure that they will now “carry on” of themselves’.Footnote ²⁰ Central within Brock's ideas was physicality. Ergotheraphy was about doing things, and Brock was known for dragging patients up out of bed early for brisk walks, encouraging them to participate in the hospital's many sports and clubs and recommending cold baths and swims.Footnote ²¹ Restoration of patients’ ‘complete mental and moral health’ depended upon not only full participation in the cultural life and activities of Craiglockhart, but also involvement in a ‘suitable milieu’. In The Hydra, in May 1918, he called for patients ‘to take our place as active citizens in the town, the larger community of Edinburgh’ – ‘to face boldly our civic environment … to do each of us his own work in his own way, but to relate it, as far as possible, to the life-work of the region’.Footnote ²²

Brock's re-education and discipline through physicality were manifested through music, as well as through a number of other activities that were included in the ‘cure by functioning’ regime. Music was part of a whole host of ordering activities and ‘brisk amusements’ encouraged during the day to keep the hospital, in the words of Sassoon, ‘elaborately cheerful’.Footnote ²³ The Hydra promoted these activities as therapeutic at a variety of levels – more broadly in general news columns – and more specifically in reports connected with various clubs’ weekly activities, such as in an article about the Badminton Club's admonishment to ‘let the shuttle continue to weave health and strength into our tired muscles’.Footnote ²⁴ Brock even conceptualized writing as physical.Footnote ²⁵ Owen, Brock's patient, very much embraced and benefited from Brock's method, not only through the activities of writing and editing – he edited The Hydra for a time – but also through his involvement with a number of the hospital's clubs and the relationships he formed with people in the Edinburgh community.

The Hydra explicitly links activities of the cure-by-functioning treatment with fighting the mythical creature of the Hydra. Indeed, the community at Craiglockhart understood the mythical many-headed beast as emblematic of the many heads of neurasthenia symptoms; when one head is lopped off (or one symptom treated), another pops up in its place.Footnote ²⁶ The magazine's cover after November 1917, the start of the second series, reflects this idea, picturing a shell shock victim blasted up towards the Craiglockhart building and grounds. High above a barren battlefield in a cloud of smoke, the soldier struggles with the Hydra beast. The illustration also suggests that this battle is happening in the victim's head: two nurses stand on either side of him, with their feet on the ground, but they are exaggeratedly tall, looking up to the patient as he battles the Hydra (see Fig. 2.)

Fig. 2

Cover of The Hydra, 2nd series, no. 1, November 1917, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, Scotland, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, The Wilfred Owen Archive, The English Faculty Library, University of Oxford

Individual articles in The Hydra also probe this metaphor of the Hydra beast, suggesting that each activity within the ‘cure by functioning’ regime was a means of cutting off a head or alleviating a symptom. For example, one anonymous patient writes he had ‘been asked to crush one of the heads of the Hydro [sic] with some stories’.Footnote ²⁷ Music was part of these activities, while music's abilities to aid shell-shocked soldiers in battle – both real and psychological – was also a trope in literary writings in the magazine, as I will discuss below.

While Brock focused on the physical, Rivers emphasized the psychological in his treatment philosophy. His approach was Freudian in conception – both in his interrogation of the unconscious and repressed traumatic memories, and in his encouragement of his neurasthenic patients not only to explore their memories and dreams, but also to share their thoughts about these openly in talk therapy sessions. Eric Leed, in his seminal study of shell shock, labels this treatment regime the ‘analytic cure’ or ‘talking cure’Footnote ²⁸. Rivers was one of the first doctors to understand shell shock as related to traumatic memory, rather than the more common view early in the war that shell shock was a result of the physical bombardment of shells that ‘shocked’ the nervous system.Footnote ²⁹

Unlike Freud, who emphasized the unconscious's part in creating traumatic symptoms, Rivers located the repression of traumatic memory within the conscious mind; the patient repressed memories willingly because he found them distressful.Footnote ³⁰ According to Young, Rivers believed that

Repressing traumatic memories because they were upsetting was countertherapeutic, Rivers argued. Rather,

Like Freud, Rivers also found answers in dreams, but in the case of his neurasthenic patients, he argued against Freud's idea that dreams are wish fulfilments; rather, for Rivers, they ‘function to perpetuate [a] high level of anxiety’.Footnote ³³ He studied patients’ accounts of repetitive nightmares, noting closely when they became less frequent, and how and when patients had them. Moreover, he noted how narration of traumatic experience changed over time, particularly when narration started to become more positive in tone, which he believed indicated a patient's improvement. Like Owen with Brock, Sassoon formed a close friendship with Rivers and openly acknowledged the supreme care he felt he had received from him.Footnote ³⁴

At Craiglockhart, while patients may have been assigned to either Brock or Rivers, the general therapeutic routine of the hospital encouraged both approaches simultaneously. Rivers's patients participated in many activities available at the hospital because of Brock's ideas. And Brock's patients, while busy with their various activities, also probed and narrated their memories, both in talk therapy sessions with Rivers and in written form. In reality, the two approaches fit together well, and by all accounts, did so successfully. As Maureen Huws, daughter of John Burns, who was treated at Craiglockhart in 1917 by Rivers, recalled in an oral interview:

Notably, Huws also notes her father's musical abilities on the piano, fiddle and drums, exclaiming, ‘I'm sure while he was here at Craiglockhart, he would've played, he would've entertained’. Music is therefore a lens through which we can see Brock's and Rivers's contemporary ideas about trauma and recovery interact and play out, particularly via somatic and psychological representations of music in The Hydra's narratives.

The Hydra as Witness: ‘Orgies of Amusement’ and the Soundscape of ‘Functioning’ at Craiglockhart

As Sassoon described later of ‘Slateford War Hospital’, the pseudonym he used for Craiglockhart in his memoirs, ‘entertainments’ were a regular part of life at the famous military hospital. Every issue of The Hydra presents reviews of musical performances, which appeared most often in the recurring column ‘Concerts’. But as Sassoon suggests, music at Craiglockhart was more than just distraction and entertainment; it helped the most ‘serious cases’ to avoid ‘being sent downstairs’, where those who were most ill were treated, and thus it was linked to patients’ recovery.

The writers of the ‘Concerts’ columns, who declared their authorship through pennames, documented myriad musical performances, including the repertoire played and those involved.Footnote ³⁷ A main focus throughout The Hydra's two series runs was on Craiglockhart's in-house orchestra. The orchestra usually played several times during each concert, with solos, duets, recitations and sometimes dramatic skits in between. Lauded from the first issue of The Hydra, ‘the orchestral selections and accompaniments form one of the most delightful parts of our weekly entertainments’.Footnote ³⁸ That Craiglockhart's orchestra comprised soldiers, staff and people from the community was unusual for war hospitals. It was most likely not a full orchestra, and the columns only hint at what instruments were included. For example, on one occasion an author notes that the addition of woodwinds had been welcome.Footnote ³⁹ Women were especially active in the planning and performances.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Hydra mentions the musical contributions of a ‘Miss Ella Moore Grieve’ on a number of occasions. Described as the hospital's pianist, she also played violin, and seems to have been central to the hospital's musical life.Footnote ⁴¹ Besides the patients and hospital staff, civilians from the community attended the weekly Saturday evening concerts; for example, the second issue of The Hydra notes that ‘many ladies were among the audience, a fact that rejoiced our hearts’.Footnote ⁴²

Comparison of The Hydra with other British hospital magazines reveals that the musical world created for officers was different than that which existed for non-ranking soldiers. This split also aligns with contemporary discussions in the press and within YMCA discourse about the best and most effective music for soldiers, a debate that centred on whether popular music or classical music was better for rank-and-file soldiers, the former giving them better enjoyment, with the latter leading to moral uplift.Footnote ⁴³ However, the repertoire and musical practices at Craiglockhart were more varied than in other hospitals. Revue music was performed at Craiglockhart in ways similar to its appearance in general hospitals, but The Hydra's authors make minimal reference to ragtime, sing-along choruses or patriotic and religious songs – all of which made up the majority of repertoire at other hospitals. Instead, the entertainments featured much more classical music, and professional singers were brought in occasionally.Footnote ⁴⁴

Within The Hydra there is a clear bias in favour of classical and older music and against some popular music of the day. The 18 August 1917 column states it is a relief to hear classical music rather than revue music; hearing the orchestra play ‘Chant sans Paroles’, ‘Il Trovatore’ and ‘Ballet Egyptien’ recently were ‘a blessed awakening from the syncope in which modern music is snoring to death’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Some columns even satirise the perceived banality of popular songs. For example, ‘An Open Letter to Sonia Worst’ strings together a series of titles from popular songs, poking fun at all the clichés.Footnote ⁴⁶ Concerts also included early music, such as ‘Bois Epais’ and ‘some other mediaeval songs’ at Bowhill on 4 August 1917.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Hydra reviewers prefer early music to modern popular music, even commenting on the performances through adapting verse contemporary to the music performed. For example, the critic ‘Mustard Seed’, in response to the recent ‘Henry VIII dances and similar fine music – conducted, as usual, by Capt. Williams, and led, as usual, by Miss Grieve’ – ‘crib[bed] a mis-quotation from “Twelfth Night”’:Footnote ⁴⁸

This clever adaptation of the Twelfth Night passage, besides being historically appropriate to the music and indicating both a preference for older music and discontent with the new popular music, also finds fault with the audience members talking during these concerts. ‘Mustard Seed’ wants quiet, focused listening and an aesthetic experience rather than music hall gaiety and chatter. The magazine expresses this desire even more explicitly elsewhere: ‘To the director of our concerts, we submit for his consideration, and necessary action, that the noise occasioned by the entrance of the late comers to our concerts is very disturbing to any music lover. A very beautiful duet given by “Les Bérets Nois” was completely spoilt for us’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This kind of listening was a mid- and late nineteenth-century construction related to classical music cultures and its patrons – specifically, the upper and upper-middle classes in and beyond Britain.

Indeed, concerts at Craiglockhart took on more ‘seriousness’ and ‘ambitiousness’ for its officer patients than the ‘swinging’, ‘ebbing and flowing’ entertainments for the non-ranking soldiers at other hospitals like Longleat.Footnote ⁵⁰ This more ‘sophisticated’ music was thought to be not only more appropriate for the class of these men, but also more appropriate for cultivating the kind of masculinity associated with a neurasthenia diagnosis. Given the long-held beliefs that women and hysteria were linked, working-class men, and particularly private soldiers suffering from trauma, were largely feminized through assumptions that they were malingering or hysterical.Footnote ⁵¹ To be neurasthenic implied not just shell shock, but, more significantly, a kind of refined kind of shell shock. Doctors understood it to be due partly from the strain of being responsible for subordinates in harsh conditions, thus aligning neurasthenia with upper-class masculinity, stoicism and class superiority.

Even the title of the column – ‘Concerts’ – in The Hydra insinuates this distinction from music columns in other hospital magazines, which usually used the term ‘Entertainments’. From its very first issue, The Hydra attempted to set itself apart, proclaiming that while the magazine would accept original contributions from ‘anyone, whether patients in the hospital or staff’, its aim was to be ‘ambitious’: ‘We want to maintain as high a tone as possible, and may as well state here that we do not intend to incorporate any of those features which depend for their interest on rumour and speculation’.Footnote ⁵² Thus, from the start, the magazine implied that its readership and contributors – officers – should be distinguished from other hospital magazines in terms of both content and tone. While other magazines tended to be comical and gossipy, The Hydra had serious artistic and philosophical interests, and frequently alluded to the classics, art and literature. The first issue of the second series in November 1917 reiterates this desire to be highbrow, with the editor noting that he ‘hopes to have one article in each issue dealing with literary, historical, or scientific research’.Footnote ⁵³

The composition and performance of new musical material for performance added to the ethos of high culture that The Hydra advocated. The Hydra reports proudly on premieres of new pieces. For example, the above-mentioned ‘Miss Ella Moore Grieve’ composed a march titled ‘The Hydra’ dedicated to the hospital, which the group ‘Les Bérets Noirs’ performed on a programme with ‘no less than fifteen [pieces that] were new and unrehearsed, and were specially written for Craiglockhart War Hospital’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Sometimes soldiers and staff added new verses to pre-existing music, even Rivers did this on one occasion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, this musical creativity was part of a larger culture of artistic creation at the hospital, from short stories to poetry, which I will explore in the next section.Footnote ⁵⁶

The routine required to prepare for concerts – the daily practice and weekly orchestra rehearsals needed to play difficult music – can also be understood as a way to re-order the body and mind. The physical touch and movement required to play an instrument or bodily engagement to sing fits within Brock's treatment philosophy. Moreover, this kind of music necessitated a physicality and movement to a degree greater than that played at other hospitals. The Hydra's documentation of a conflict in July 1917 over the space, time and priority given for music rehearsal over badminton – badminton was often ousted from their space three or four times per week’ for music rehearsals – indicates how regularly the musicians were rehearsing and how central the act of rehearsing and performing were to the cultural life and healing ethos of Craiglockhart.Footnote ⁵⁷

Ideas about the healing benefits of movement were rooted in turn-of-the-century trauma theories of Pierre Janet and Jean-Martin Charcot that emphasized the importance of movement and the body more than Freud's psyche-oriented conceptions of trauma and healing.Footnote ⁵⁸ Observing the importance of bodily movement facilitated by music, Jillian Rogers demonstrates that the performative act of making music, listening to music and feeling the vibrations of musical sound, were all central to how French musicians processed and coped with trauma in the wake of World War I.Footnote ⁵⁹ While most officers and soldiers making and listening to music in hospitals in Britain during the war were likely not aware of these theories from France (and the majority of RAMC doctors treating them were oblivious to or even adamantly resisted such ideas from the continent),Footnote ⁶⁰ many British neurologists nevertheless emphasized trauma's inception in the body.Footnote ⁶¹ This connection to the physical makes sense as many shell-shocked men had traumatic memory written in their bodies – what was then known as embodied trauma. As Winter writes:

Thus, physical activities like regularly playing in the orchestra to reorder the body would in turn reorder the mind. If the body could be reordered through the regular practice of music – especially a kind of music that was not only familiar to the men because of their class backgrounds, but also that involved bodily movement through playing instruments and regular rehearsal – the fragmented identity could be treated and a unified story of before and after could be established.

Advertising within The Hydra echoes Brock's cure-by-functioning philosophy, indicating that local shops were eager to capitalize on the activities Craiglockhart patients engaged in. The magazine carries advertisements for not only music shops where patients could purchase sheet music, instruments, violin strings, and gramophones, but also camera, stationery and sport shops, which advertised tennis and golf equipment. Officers’ visits and purchases to local shops were so frequent that a map of the shops with advertisements in the issue began to be included, starting with the second issue.Footnote ⁶³ Advertisements centred around therapy were also present, as in ones for special lenses for sensitive, damaged and recovering eyes. These advertisements demonstrate that Brock's ‘cure by functioning’ regime was central to all aspects of the hospital and its outputs.

Soldiers sometimes parody these ‘cure by functioning’ activities in The Hydra. Meredith Martin notes a ‘tension between attraction and repulsion to [the] neurological ordering’ in The Hydra. ‘Patients were both aware and suspicious of the artificiality of re-education through forms of physical, mental, and social ordering, and at the same time were relieved and essentially “cured”, from the many symptoms of neurasthenia by the structures that those therapies provided.’Footnote ⁶⁴ This tension between suspicion and belief makes its way into music-related material, in which ideas about musical activity curing men are mocked and exaggerated. For example, the ‘Concerts’ column in the 26 May 1917 issue states that a Mr Clark ‘gave us a little topical song, written by himself. It's a funny thing what shell shock will do for a man. These orgies of amusement’ turned ‘howling idiots into talented men’.Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘Thoughts on the Human Body’, in the 9 June 1917 issue, also mocks this view of using movement and music to retrain the rank-and-file soldier's mind. Here a soldier, identified as ‘Cockney’, argues that the ‘human body [is] the highest expression of beauty’. He links education to improvement in bodily movement: the better the education, the abler the person is able to make his body a ‘temple of the Holy Ghost’, a vessel of truth and the divine. ‘Wise thoughts should produce graceful actions; happy thoughts, rapid movements; and so on, until our bodies are the beautifully expressive works of divine art they were intended to be.’ Concluding the column is a hymn titled ‘The Incarnate Word’, that ‘Cockney’ asks readers in favour of his view to all sing. In the hymn, singing and music join the uneducated mind – this ‘ignorance enchained’ in the cockney, uncivilised mind – so that the singing body can reach the divine. This representation of music as a vehicle for transcending trauma will underpin the next section.

The Hydra as Testimony: ‘Unearthly Music’ and the Soundscapes of Traumatic Memory at Craiglockhart

In the poem ‘Secret Music’, written in the midst of fighting in France, Sassoon, one of Craiglockhart's patients, points to music's power to help him cope with the horrors of war. But unlike the actual physical activity of music making and listening described in the previous section, for Sassoon the healing power of music is internal; it is in the mind. Sassoon confesses that he ‘keep[s] such music in [his] brain’ – the memory of music – to find relief from ‘pain’: music is ‘beauty’ in the midst of ‘hell’. Sassoon adopted this conceptualization of music to describe his process of coping with traumatic experience. It also appears as a trope in patients’ poems and prose in The Hydra, which reflect the innovative ‘talking cure’ and scriptographic therapy administered by Rivers, and can be understood, I contend, as ‘testimony’.

Modern trauma clinicians and theorists use the term ‘testimony’ to describe the act of converting traumatic memories into words. Many believe testimony to be therapeutic because it places trauma – which often seems frozen in time – in the past and restores to the afflicted a sense of control, both control of one's life and over flashbacks and nightmares.Footnote ⁶⁷ Rather than presenting the past in a comprehensive, complete account, traumatized people most often convey this past in fragments through a discursive process.Footnote ⁶⁸ As a communicative and healing process, testimony also depends on it being heard by another.Footnote ⁶⁹

Shoshana Felman asserts that testimony has become a literary and discursive ‘mode par excellence of our relation to events of our times’ – of our ‘relation to the traumas of contemporary history: the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Nuclear Bomb, and other war atrocities’.Footnote ⁷⁰ It has ‘become pervasive in almost every kind of writing’, so much so ‘that our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony’. But we can see beginnings of this discursive mode earlier, arguably beginning with the myriad verbal responses to trauma in World War I – the first war in which the majority of men and women were literate and that upper-class men (and highly-educated) served in the army,Footnote ⁷¹ thus making for a large population that could actually put to pen and paper the trauma they had experienced.Footnote ⁷² We can link modern ideas about ‘testimony’ – as both a therapeutic and narrative process – with Rivers's ‘talking cure’ and ‘scriptopgraphy’. Indeed, ‘testimony’ as a concept is rooted in turn-of-the century therapeutic theorizing by Freud, whom Rivers followed in some respects, in that patients were encouraged to verbalize their traumatic experiences and to openly share memories. Thus, I argue that narratives of shell-shocked men during the war set in motion the concept of testimony as process of healing and as an artistic trope, that has come to define the modern era.

These modern formulations of testimony and their relation to trauma can be applied to literary texts of the past, as Dominick LaCapra and Katherine Astbury have demonstrated.Footnote ⁷³ And much closer to The Hydra in time and place, Virginia Woolf's novels can also be conceptualized as testimony, as Suzette A. Henke has shown.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed traumatic memory has informed and shaped a diversity of narrative types related to the First World War – from those of the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway to those by women in mourning on the home front.Footnote ⁷⁵ My own work elsewhere on women's written memorials and collections of the war show that such narratives not only illuminate the inventive and poignant ways in which people responded to trauma, but also reveal an autobiographical framing of testimony along gender and class lines.Footnote ⁷⁶ Understanding music's representation in trauma testimonies such as these has many advantages: in narrative, we can still rely on the specifics of language, the basis of therapy historically. But as Maria Cizmic argues, ‘an attention to music opens up a consideration of other modes of expression beyond the linguistic’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Although there is literary content in each Hydra issue that I would classify as testimony, certainly this practice of scriptotherapy was not taken up by all. Not all patients were willing to write for the magazine, as the editorial in the second issue makes clear.Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, the editors encouraged patients on multiple occasions to try their hands at writing. It is understandable, though, that many would not have wanted to write; no doubt they feared harsh criticism and were anxious about their writing abilities, especially given the high standard set by Sassoon and Owen. More significantly, talking about feelings and being vulnerable publicly was outside the usual experience of upper-class British men.Footnote ⁷⁹ Stoicism was the norm for this generation, and irony, sarcasm and humour came far more naturally to most. It is no surprise, then, that contributors most often wrote anonymously in the magazine, including for the ‘Concerts’ column. Interestingly, in these narratives, authors turned to music as a way to express unarticulated feelings and to verbalise trauma in less directly emotional ways.

A number of writers in The Hydra associate music with a happier, pre-war time, and these memories, conveyed as testimony, often intertwine with analogies to bodily movement and physical sensation. Although these writings on the past might seem to be just about happy memories of life before the war, narrating pre-war memories and relationships was a way to come to terms with traumatic experiences.Footnote ⁸⁰ As Winter writes, ‘the strain of combat led many men to wonder who they had been before battle, and who they had become as a result’. Herman says as much, but from a clinical angle, stating that ‘reconstructing of the trauma story begins with a review of the patient's life before the trauma and the circumstances that led up to the event’.Footnote ⁸¹ Drawing on Herman, Astbury demonstrates how we can understand this representation of pre-war memory within literary narratives, specifically in the way novelists early on in the French Revolution utilized pastoral themes and tropes.Footnote ⁸² In British war literature and art music composition, we see a similar use of the pastoral to represent home and an idealized past, for example in Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, the examples Fussell, Hynes and Winter discuss in their books, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony.Footnote ⁸³ Understanding the turn to the pastoral and the past in such narratives, as this review of life before the traumatic event, is important because it is an initial stage in the trauma recovery process. And allusions to music are sometimes key in communicating what this past was like, or at least how writers reframe this past in light of traumatic experience and the present.

Unsurprisingly, a number of these representations focus on pre-war romantic interests. In the poem ‘Waiting’, the narrator misses a sweetheart from whom he has recently parted. Alone in Edinburgh now, he feels glum, like ‘an object of scorn or of pity’.Footnote ⁸⁴ At the end of each verse, he imagines his love's return. He identifies her with sound – her ‘voice in my ear still mingles / a voice reposeful and clear’ (along with a ‘hot kiss on my lips [that] still tingles’). With her gone, ‘My lips shall bourgeon no sweet song, / My heart shall echo no refrain’. However, he tells us that with her return, ‘my song shall be long, and glad, and strong’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Similarly, in ‘Song of Songs’ the narrator associates his sweetheart's laugh, voice and sigh with singing, which ‘like lifting seas. . . solaceth’ him.Footnote ⁸⁶ He asks to ‘Let viols die’, for he'd rather hear her. In the final lines of the poem, he cries to hear ‘youth's immortal-moaning chords. . ./ Throbbing through [her], . . . sobbing, unsubdued’, hinting at what he presumes to be his sweetheart's own trauma. Significantly, he imagines this connection between trauma, the body and movement within her – a connection he had learned through Craiglockhart's treatment regime. Rather than productive bodily movement, the narrator here presents the reader with his internal, emotive and bodily response to trauma.

Narratives about friendships with other soldiers in their units, often known from before the war, also foreground music and bodily movement. For example, in ‘The Road to Armentieres’ [sic]Footnote ⁸⁷, a poem about two soldier-friends in northern France, one of whom is killed, sound – specifically, music – delineates the time before and after the friend's death. The narrator tells us that as the two marched on ‘the lonely road, the weary road, the road o’ mud and stone to Armentiere’, ‘My pal and I were singing in the courage of our years’. But he left his pal asleepin’ by this road – ‘the happy sleep, the endless sleep, the sleep o'quiet ease’. Now the narrator must walk the ‘weary roads, down all the lonely years’, in quiet.Footnote ⁸⁸ Here he associates singing with this friend from his past, an intimacy that brought relief from the loneliness and desolate landscape of these marches. The positive representation of music while moving (marching) is also key. Indeed, music often bonds men together in The Hydra, to alleviate fear while at the front lines. In the poem ‘The Next War’, men – even while their ‘eyes wept’ – sing choruses and whistle together to ward off the ‘bullets’ and ‘shrapnel’ that ‘Death’ has ‘coughed’ at them. Both of these poems demonstrate that music making for these men was a confidence-instilling protection against loss and destruction.Footnote ⁸⁹

Writers in The Hydra also associate music with idyllic military pasts in which movement and the body are aligned. In ‘The Passing of the Turk’, voiced from the perspective of a violent and exoticized, downtrodden and war-weary Turk, the narrator links song and singing with an idealized, glorious Ottoman past. He wants to hear the ‘song of the day that is gone / Song of an age that is fled / … song our father sung / sung in the days of old’ as ‘sabres flashed, our spearsmen dashed’ and the ‘white-faced Christians broke / They called on the name of their pale-faced God’ – the ‘day of the grand wild song’.Footnote ⁹⁰ This connection of music with a glorious military past can be seen again in the short reflection ‘The Drum of Fate’. As in ‘The Passing of the Turk’, music encourages a warrior from some unnamed exotic land; in this case, the sound of martial music, drumming, lures a colonel's son to his future as a warrior.Footnote ⁹¹

Like the testimonial poems discussed above, ‘Sick in Billets’ also conjoins music and bodily movement and sensation with memories of an idealized past. Here, however, the narrator initially does not want to think about the past; it comes to him like a nightmare as he lies awake at night in his hospital bed. These memories, these ‘dear songs of long-dead yesterday’, are intrusive to him at first; they are ‘broken’ and ‘childish tones’ with ‘unharmonious clang / with no soft-toned melodious swell’.Footnote ⁹² Noisy and clashing with his current environment, they are ‘harsh crank against the twilight grey’. However, by the second and third stanzas, the insomniac patient succumbs to the songs and revels in pre-war, pre-traumatic memories of sweetness and passion, specifically through maids in crinoline who dance and beautify domestic spaces with their quiet reading. This musical experience so moves him that by the fourth stanza he is staring at the ‘moonbeams through the gloom / stretching ghost-like fingers in my room’, his ‘head’ ‘wet’ ‘with unshed tears’.

The Hydra's representations of memory through ‘music in the brain’ highlight the anxiety that night time, nightmares and insomnia brought to shell-shocked patients. In his memoirs, Sassoon contrasts the ordered, physical activities of daytime with occurrences at night, when doctors ‘lost control and the hospital became sepulchral and oppressive with saturations of war experience … One became conscious that the place was full of men whose slumbers were morbid and terrifying – men muttering uneasily or suddenly crying out in their sleep.’Footnote ⁹³ Soldiers’ writings in The Hydra attempt to make humour and sarcasm out of these night terrors and Rivers's talk therapy treatments for them. In ‘Panics in the Night’, the ‘new skeleton in the cupboard’ that has become fashionable is talking about one's traumatic experiences with others. But ‘the really grisly skeleton, the ghost that refuses to be laid … is the Panic in the Night’, or the nightmares and anxiety attacks shell-shocked men suffered due to traumatic memory.Footnote ⁹⁴ The author goes on to argue against Rivers's talk therapy treatment and in favour of Brock's cure-by-functioning regime. In this author's formulation, the distractions of the day help him to forget and, with practice, to simply not care.

Many of the nightmares that Craiglockhart patients narrated are what Shephard has termed ‘battle dreams’, in which men ‘return[ed] night after night to the same scene of horror’, ‘whether … a faithful repetition of an actual experience or a rendering of the affect, or emotion, cause[d] by it’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The officer ‘Windup’ captures the repetitiveness of these battle dreams in ‘The Counter Attack – A Story Full of Morals’: ‘Last night I slept badly. Oh, those awful war dreams!!! It was zero minus one hour, and the barrage would start any minute now’.Footnote ⁹⁶ What he describes of his dream – bombarding the Germans with silk stockings, digging trenches only to find silk stockings, and he himself being tangled in barbed wire made of silk stockings – certainly aligns with what Shephard would recognize as ‘a rendering of the affect, or emotion, caused by [the actual war experience]’, rather than a true depiction. Indeed, Craiglockhart patients depicted representations of their battle dreams even beyond the literary, showing that testimony can go beyond the verbal. The drawing ‘Shell Shock!’ features a patient in bed sleeping, haunted by four ghost-like spectres wearing gas masks as shells come towards him (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3

‘Shell Shock!’, The Hydra, 2nd series, no. 2, December 1917, 17, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, Scotland, The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, The Wilfred Owen Archive, The English Faculty Library, University of Oxford

Soldiers’ accounts of battle dreams, as in other literary content in The Hydra, frequently evoke music. In particular, ‘music in the brain’ often metaphorically propels physical movement through traumatic experiences and toward recovery. In the short story ‘Phantasmagoria’, ‘unearthly music’ transports the dreaming soldier's body from ‘nothing in the dark’ where ‘all sound [is] muffled’, to a battle where ‘above and beneath [him is] … music wild and terrible beyond description’.Footnote ⁹⁷ From there the ‘Dance of Death commenced’, carrying him over the ‘Mountain of Hatred’ to the ‘Star of Man's Love and Forgiveness’, where the ‘ineffable glow of Promise’ awaits. Such powerful testimony in ‘Phantasmagoria’ about trauma and recovery certainly draws upon what Santanu Das calls ‘the vocabulary of touch as an index of the intimate, or the exposed’ that is ‘antidote against the desolation of death’ in a variety of First World War writings.Footnote ⁹⁸

Indeed, in these testimonies music appears as a therapeutic tool that propels afflicted men towards movement, bringing them towards healing and peace.Footnote ⁹⁹ As in ‘Phantasmagoria’, a number of authors conceptualize this peace in religious terms.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ An excerpt from ‘Bees in Amber’ (included in ‘A Christmas Message’) lays out this religious element more explicitly. Although the title of ‘Bees in Amber’ came from a popular collection of poems by John Oxenham rather than a traumatized officer, the poem's content clearly resonated with patients’ understandings of music. The poem depicts a child in white who undoubtedly represents Christ. He is carolling, ‘along the arduous road we all had trod’ and says to them ‘Why wait yet here without? Come, follow me!’ ‘We heard his singing’, the narrator says, and they proceed to follow him – even the ‘War Lord cast aside His victor's wreaths, and all his pomp and pride’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Again, music lures them physically down a different path – not unlike in the poems of the exoticized warriors discussed earlier who are also lured by music – through a doorway away from the ‘arduous road’. The Hydra readers would have conceptualized this safer path as one towards light and God, where the war does not exist. Music prompts physical movement within the poem, but also metaphorically prompts psychological movement and healing.

Overall, Craiglockhart patients used musical allusions in narrativizing traumatic memory within these poems and reflections. In their testimonies, music operates as a curative tool that enables traumatized individuals to process and move through traumatic experiences – this repression of fear and desire to self-preservation – to reach a place of recovery. I will end this section with one last, especially poignant example of this psychological movement via music within testimony – the rest of Sassoon's ‘Secret Music’, the first stanza of which opened this section:

The Hydra and the Soundscape of Collective Trauma

Thus far, I have focused on music's role in the individual officer's experience of trauma recovery. But, as the epigraph above implies, shared traumatic experience re-defined and bonded fighting men together. For Sassoon, this collective had its own identity formed over shared trauma and far outweighed what he thought of the men as individuals. In this section, I will consider how music in The Hydra engendered this sense of communal trauma among the men at Craiglockhart.

Literary critics, cultural historians and sociologists working in trauma studies have conceptualized how shared traumatic experiences have bound various people together historically. As Caruth notes, ‘the attempt to gain access to a traumatic history … is also the project of listening beyond the pathology of individual suffering … Such traumatic history may speak through the individual or through the community’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Kai Erikson further elaborates on trauma's ‘social dimension’: it ‘can create community’, in that ‘traumatic wounds inflicted on individuals can combine to create a mood, an ethos – a group culture, almost – that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private wounds that make it up’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While many traumatized people withdraw socially, victims who have suffered similar fates often feel ‘that they have been set apart and made special’ and are ‘drawn to others similarly marked’, forming not just a community of survivors, but a ‘spiritual kinship, a sense of identity, even when feelings of affection are deadened and the ability to care numbed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For Erikson, these experiences can ‘work their way so thoroughly into the grain of the affected community that they come to supply its prevailing mood and temper, dominate its imagery and its sense of self, and govern the way its members relate to one another’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Particularly useful for my purposes is Jeffrey Alexander's understanding of how various media narratives (including magazines, television programmes, films, music, advertisements, etc.) can engender a sense of collective identity among affected groups ‘if such traumas are conceived as wounds to social identity’. But this process ‘is a matter of intense cultural and political work. Suffering collectivities – whether dyads, groups, societies, or civilizations – do not exist simply as material networks. They must be imagined into being.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This theoretical framework of collective trauma is helpful in understanding the community of shell-shocked soldiers in First-World-War Britain and particularly at Craiglockhart where patients formed a community defined by circumstances of neurasthenia, rank, diagnosis, nationality and gender, but who were also ‘imagined into being’, namely by the hospital's activities and The Hydra.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Orchestra rehearsals and concerts, as well as other musical group activities, clearly point to communal identity formation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Musical discussion in The Hydra – from the concert reviews to the allusions to music in poetry and reflections – also function as a collective response to trauma; in Alexander's words, they act as a ‘narrative and coding’ packed with ‘symbolic construction and framing’, ‘stories and characters’. Thus, at Craiglockhart and within The Hydra, music is seminal in forming the ‘we’ that ‘experiences and confronts the danger’ brought on by collective trauma.Footnote ¹¹⁰

One way in which Craiglockhart patients’ writings create a sense of communal trauma is through juxtaposition of the patients with the larger community of Edinburgh. Even though Brock encouraged patients to involve themselves in the Edinburgh community and to take advantage of the cultural activities the city had to offer, most of the patients, because they were not from Edinburgh, felt out of place. They note this fact often in their Hydra writings, expressing feelings of being lonely, misunderstood and gawked at by locals when they went into town. Butlin bitterly complains that the Edinburgh public believes the patients are either raging lunatics or have nervous disorders because of venereal diseases.Footnote ¹¹¹ The poem ‘Stared At’ in The Hydra captures this feeling of alienation and public misconception that runs throughout the magazine, with its refrain of ‘I'm stared at’ in response to the variety of situations the narrator finds himself in Edinburgh city centre, where ‘all people think us mad’. Although they did not wear the ‘hospital blues’ or ‘convalescent blues’ – the required uniform for non-officers in war hospitals – nevertheless the visible arm bands officers were required to wear marked them as shell-shocked, as the poem ‘Stared At’ highlights.Footnote ¹¹² Craiglockhart was the only military hospital in Scotland, let alone for nervous disorders, so these men were indeed outside the norm.Footnote ¹¹³ But ‘Stared At’ also presents a sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’ formed by this shared negative experience on the home front, in addition to their shared horrific experiences on the front lines and subsequent diagnoses of neurasthenia at Craiglockhart.Footnote ¹¹⁴

It was not just the Edinburgh locals from whom traumatized officers at Craiglockhart felt ostracized and misunderstood; for many of The Hydra's authors, the larger British public seemed equally oblivious and unsupportive. Fighting men even cast coming back to Britain and feeling this alienation as traumatic, as Owen implied in his debut editorial upon taking up the editorship of The Hydra:

That he uses the term ‘concentration camp’, albeit in a sarcastic way, is telling. Although the term did not, of course, have the horrific connotations it does today, it was used to mean a prison for political prisoners by this period, and one gets a sense that the men felt imprisoned by their diagnosis and trauma, and perhaps by the alienation from the rest of society through time spent at Craiglockhart. The editorial then goes on to list (again, sarcastically) a number of ways in which patients felt misunderstood, misrepresented and ostracized by both the public and the press. They also felt misled by politicians, in addition to sensing that politicians did not understand what fighting in the war was actually like. Craiglockhart patients also voiced their feeling that others back in England should take their turn in the war. As Owen put it: ‘I think the terribly long time we stayed unrelieved was unavoidable; yet it makes us feel bitterly towards those in England who might relieve us, and will not.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ These accounts repeatedly illuminate a communal trauma among this group of men, embodying Erikson's notion that ‘People whose view of the world has been tempered by exposure to trauma can easily lose faith not only in the good will but in the good sense of those in charge of a dangerous universe’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

In this sense, trauma illuminated the rift shell-shocked officers felt existed between them and the rest of society. They were a collective set apart from both the military (in that they did not have physical wounds), but also from British society writ large. The Hydra reified this notion of a collective of traumatized patients at Craiglockhart, in which writer (even when anonymous) and reader were in dialogue and empathy, thus ‘imagine[d] into being’, to borrow Alexander's words – a community with its own symbols, rituals and language. Indeed, even Sassoon felt this bond created through shared trauma and recovery. Although he objected to the war, and he could have continued to stay in Britain under Rivers's care indefinitely, he chose to go back to the front lines, so strong was his solidarity with his men after his time at Craiglockhart.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The Hydra's authors represent the intermediaries between the community and the patients – the nurses, the entertainers – as capable of relieving their collective trauma, and, as discussed above, weekly concerts were integral to fostering community–patient links. The editorial quoted above with the laundry list of ways Craiglockhart patients felt ostracized from the British public, ends by acknowledging what did help them cope with these negative feelings:

Significantly, Peas-Blossom notes ‘Miss Grieve’ is still ‘one of us’ because she came back to lead music, even though she was no longer working as a nurse at the hospital.Footnote ¹²⁰ Even Butlin, who writes of being ‘bored’ at Craiglockhart, had many adventures in Edinburgh and a girlfriend in town for six or so weeks, where he went to many professional concerts and the theatre in the city. In spite of this busy social calendar, he notes that he attends the Saturday night Craiglockhart concerts.Footnote ¹²¹

Although community building through concerts happened at the general military hospitals as I have shown elsewhere,Footnote ¹²² the concerts at Craiglockhart were especially important in fostering a collective identity because this was one of the few shell-shock hospitals in Britain. They engendered a ‘spiritual kinship’ to borrow Erikson's phrase, as the patients were suffering from a traumatic condition which was not fully recognized as existing, and the causes of which were misunderstood and treated with suspicion by the public. These cure-by-functioning treatments were ritualistic group activities that promoted purposeful contact with ‘intermediaries’ – the VADs who played music with the men, and others outside the hospital, like Miss Grieve. These musical activities offered ways to envoice cultural trauma as much as they helped to heal individuals through the cure-by-functioning treatment regime.

Moreover, the ways in which patients interpolated music into their writings in The Hydra point to a shared language and set of symbols. These tropes centre on music's conjuring of memories of pre-war pasts – from romances and friendships to pastoral imagery – and music's representation in testimonies of traumatic experience and healing. Ideas of bodily movement and sensation underpin all of these tropes. These themes not only reflect Rivers's and Brocks's treatment regimes for individuals, but also shared media representation, which is seminal in creating a sense of group identity and communal trauma. But while these narratives published in The Hydra helped to foster solidarity and kinship around shared trauma,Footnote ¹²³ they also put forth a narrative of shell shock that has dominated the cultural memory of the war in Britain.