Patients: The Officer Ranks

Abstract

Officers and other ranks experienced the same awful trench conditions and bombardments, felt the same fear of mutilation or dismemberment, and suffered the same distress or numbness as comrades and friends. were injured and killed. However, the Army Medical Services believed that having led by example, worked closely with the soldiers under their command and been pressured to take trenches and win attacks, shell- shocked officers in the field and in British treatment centres should receive certain traditional privileges. Although traumatic neurosis was a threat to discipline and a violation of the established code of military behaviour in the ranks, hysterical officers were in various ways accommodated. They were shielded more than exposed to the taint of dishonour, cowardice and insanity; treated more than disciplined; viewed with sympathy more than suspicion. Consequently, diagnostic expectation and examination was unlike that of the other ranks, as was the view of their condition according to both regimental medical officers in the field and doctors in Britain. Moreover, officers’education, social position and military function gave them a different vocabulary in which to express their feelings and thoughts. Despite the patronage of the Army though, war-traumatized officers still had an ambiguous public image. In the eyes of the press, in politics and in Army treatment, it was officers who suffered shell shock and who were heroes willing to sacrifice their sanity for the war effort, yet at the same time they, like the other ranks, were subject to an habitual, if muted, prejudice against mental disorders and to gratuitous curiosity.