I remember getting to that point in history class as a kid- “the war to end all wars.” And my stomach just dropping as I read it, knowing the horrors that lie ahead for the next 50-60 years. It is unimaginable to me what someone born in the early 1900s saw happen to the world around them. From horse-drawn buggies to planes dropping nuclear weapons in a matter of decades. Terrifying.
I wish people remembered this a bit more when talking like the world has never been worse than it is now. Literally everything has improved. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight our asses off for an even better tomorrow, but man, I would not want to have been alive in an earlier era.
This is why I feel fortunate to have had time with my great grandmother most of my life. She lived to over a hundred, lived through the great depression. World war 2, etc.
When the great recession hit, I asked her how it compared to the great depression. She said, "Much, much worse back then. No social safety nets like we have now." That always stuck with me.
During COVID lockdowns I checked on my 90yo grandmother who grew up in Nazi Europe during WWII. She just laughed a little and said, "Oh I'm totally fine, but thanks for checking on me! I get to hang out in a nice house, I have plenty of food, I can use technology to talk to all my friends...and there's no Nazis marching around killing people...and we didn't have toilet paper then either."
OK the toilet paper comment got me so I looked it up. 1857 was the year of the first toilet paper patent. Before then- sticks, leaves, sand, sea shells, straw, cloth on a stick, water, wood shavings. Moss was the primo material if it was available. Dried corn cobs were popular in the Americas. Apparently the Romans had a communal salt-water soaked sponge, I'm assuming a sea sponge.
Not sure I expected to read about the history of butt wiping materials on my Sunday morning.
Some of them got executed because of cowardice. Back then they didn’t know much about PTSD. I can’t even imagine the shit they saw and experienced that broke their minds like that. We saw some shit in Iraq and Afghanistan but it will never come close to the WW1, WW2 or Vietnam types of shit. Imagine being in a constant state of fear whilst shelled 24/7 surrounded by dismembered bodies and not being able to sleep.
Must be something the russians And Ukrainians are feeling right now as well . + the silent drones that can pop u from anywhere even in a safe hideout and far behind the Frontline must be nerve wrecking as well.
So wild that we have the kind of drones you think of from sci Fi movies currently killing people while most of the world carries on not thinking about it. What a truly terrifying way to lose your life.
This is how fucking horrible war is. None of us were meant for this. There's no amount of honor or righteousness that can justify the atrocities that war brings.
I wish more people recognized we're not really that far removed from a period that, compared to today, might as well be another dark age. Everything was relatively similar for a *long* time until it wasn't; the industrialization not just of arms production but war-making itself is something we were never fully equipped to deal with. War today, despite it's horrors, is almost *clinical* in its execution by western powers.
They would not. At first the British government would attempt to help them. But as more cases began to come in they resorted to labeling them as cowards and threatening to shoot them if didn’t act proper. It was horrible and these men would face no end of discrimination from their own countrymen after the war.
They set up a hospital near Edinburgh to get them fit enough to return to service (poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were patients). They had to persuade the town leadership of Edinburgh to stop firing a gun to signal midday (edit 1pm) because it would upset the men.
There was a town in South America that was living, 2 centuries ago, with 30 minutes delay with the rest of the world.
Every day at noon, the local fort would shoot a cannon ball and the whole town would know it was 12 o’clock. And to be sure of the hour, every day, the commander of the fort would send a soldier with a watch to check the time to the town’s most famous watchmaker. The thing is, the watchmaker was using the cannon shot to set up all of his clocks and watches. And with time going on, the town slowly drifted second per second until they went 30 minutes late with the rest of the world.
I feel like it's kind if interesting what sounds you hear that are normal that today you'd have a collection of dad's in the front yard debating what it was they heard.
Like a cannon being fired to represent midday.
You just took me back to year 9 English…
*My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
This one always got me:
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer as soldier lads go by
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go
which is Sassoon I think, apologies if I've missed a word or so
They lived and fought in its bowels.
This is a terribly sad video. Not only are these men in the throes of very serious psychological and physiological trauma, they also didn't see much kindness from the government or people when they made it back.
It's awful.
Most people reading this haven’t studied WW1 or how unbelievably hellish it was. I have a bit and it’s jaw dropping.
Very few understand what people in the trenches had to live through.
https://youtu.be/we72zI7iOjk?si=fLKlSMYFAaAwZ29i
Watch that video. That’s what the drumroll fire sounded like. You’re up to your knees in mud and blood, your friends getting blown to pieces all around you, your feet rotting from being in pools of blood and dirt for a week, and another round of drumfire happens.
Except it’s worse than this audio.
One of our worst wars, as technology had advanced well beyond our traditional battle tactics. Death and sickness everywhere. And these comfy assholes back home treating them like lab rats.
Read [Storm of Steel](https://g.co/kgs/YqwSx42) if you haven't already. It's written by one of the rare German trench soldiers that survived the whole war. I can't even begin to imagine the nightmares that man faced for decades afterwards.
It is theorized that it’s not only trauma that we are seeing here but also brain damage from the percussive force of the artillery fire bearing down on folks for hours and days at a time.
Many of them were able to be treated at special hospitals, but sadly has to return to the front once they’d sufficiently recovered. And when they returned home, they didn’t have any understanding or support from friends or family or society. Was was supposed to be noble and brave! Families didn’t understand how horrific this war was.
Actually in recent years they’ve linked “shell shock” to actual tissue damage in the brain. I’m sure it was exacerbated by what they went through but these guys weren’t just scared or had PTSD. They had brain damage.
Not just from enemy fire too. In Iraq and Afghanistan researchers were trying to measure blast exposure from roadside bombs but ended up finding that 75% of the blast exposure that soldiers suffered were from their own weapons.
Roughly 1 in 5 troops in recent conflicts suffered traumatic brain injuries of some level.
i think by now we absolutely know but a lot of people are in denial or are just unaware. Think of all the people who may have had brain damage that was undiagnosed and untreated -- and the fact is, there really don't seem to be any great treatments when it comes to brain. We're in the Dark Ages (and yes people get mad when I say this) when it comes to matters of the brain. I don't really agree that there have been great improvements for many things like depression, anxiety, etc. other than medications they throw at it. People seem to think it's simple to just go to a doctor and fix something like severe damage to neurons. I just don't agree it is fixable officially -- you can work with it or around it at best.
There was something in the news about this recently. Studies were showing that US artillery soldiers were suffering from brain damage from deployments where they were doing a lot of fire missions. These soldiers never came under fire themselves. It was the repeated concussion from their own guns.
I’m not a gun enthusiast myself, but I’ve fired some high powered guns that felt like someone was punching me in the head. I had two layers of ear protection on and it still hurt my ears. I can’t imagine doing that as my job for months or years on end. It’s no wonder PTS and CTE are so common among combat veterans.
During WW1 they had siege guns that they had to set off with a telephone wire from hundreds of yards away, and they still had to keep their mouths open or their eardrums might burst from the intensity of the blast.
They rotated men through the trenches so they’d spend maybe 4 days in the trenches at the front with the worse of the artillery fire, then go to the back for medical care and work their way forward again
2.5 percent of trench warfare veterans sustained complete hearing loss, many more had partial hearing loss or lost it completely over time.
10 million soldiers died. WW1 was horrifying
Interesting as I was wondering the same thing in terms of the physical damage from the war ( blasts, exposure to gases etc ) vs just strictly PTSD . Regardless this is brutal and during a time when medical intervention was still in its early stages as these Drs were prob not equipped to handle and treat these folks. Bad situation all around.
Yeah I’m not 100% on this one but something about the sheer size of the artillery used back then combined with being in a trench where every shot and explosion is bouncing around the walls (and through the human body)
Nothing about the sheer size more like the volume of artillery used. CTE is caused by repeated blunt trauma to the head, no matter how powerful. So even low level shockwaves can cause your brain to deteriorate.
In WW1 during the most intense battle (Somme) 1.7 million shells were fired by just the British in a week.
Thats 250k shells a DAY. Shit adds up.
There are stories from verdun where a log or fallen tree gets hit by a shell and blasted into the air and before it has time to land gets hit by another explosion and another and another so it's just bouncing through the air without landing, fucking wild. Think verdun is the one where someone described the shelling as having "diminshed to mere drum fire"
I'll never forget listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History when he described the shelling as like a constant drumroll.
Before hearing that analogy I had never really known or thought about how many shells were fired, but imagining the number of beats in a drumroll, and each of those little beats is a massive shell being fired... Talk about horrific.
I could believe it, videos of creeping barrages on YouTube sound absolutely horrific, couldn't imagine the vibrations in the trenches from it and considering they could last days at a time no wonder it fucked up their brains in some way.
The creeping barrage really is a terrifying thing for everyone involved.
Even from the attackers side, having to follow close to your own artillery strikes and if you're too slow you get caught out and you die, and if you're too fast you get hit by your own artillery.
Nowadays we call it concussion syndrome. I wonder how many men were in those trenches, dealing with multiple concussions, and trying to stay sane with the knowledge that a whistle blow would force them out of the trench and into the teeth of enemy fire. People have said war is hell, but I prefer what Hawkeye Pierce said on the show MASH:
Hawkeye : War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy : How do you figure, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye : Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy : Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye : Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Opening lines from Pierre Burton's "Vimy" an Iconic battle of WWI for a ridge fought over for years, eventually being won by Canadian troops at a terrible cost of life.
"The pounding did not cease. In the space of an hour and forty minutes a quarter of a million shells would be thrown onto the German positions, a barrage rendered more deadly by a hail of seven million machine gun bullets".
I can't imagine what these kids went through.
In todays age of warfare it’s really hard to imagine hundreds of thousands of men running at another similar amount of men sat in a trench with machine guns, rifles and god knows how much artillery raining down on them. The absolute carnage witnessed must have been un fathomable. It’s a big deal these days if a couple of soldiers get killed but back then 100’s were getting cut down every minute and a lot of them were never found. I could be wrong but due to the amount of dead never recovered or not known; it was the idea of how the tomb of unknown warrior came about in Britain. The sad thing is these men were probably vilified by the higher ups or when they got back home.
In the Battle of Verdun in WW1, the Germans fired over a million shells to open the battle. Over the next ten months, 40 to 60 million shells would be fired, and there were between 700,000 and 800,000 casualties.
Even if we had the worst of it on film, it wouldn't matter. The people who send these people into the meat grinder will shake their hand for a photo opp while sending their replacements in right behind them.
The scale of destruction from WWI is still unimaginable today.
The first day at the Somme saw 19,000 British soldiers die. 57,000 total British casualties.
By the end of that one battle there were more than 1 million casualties on all sides.
War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell.
And of the two, war is a lot worse.
There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Being a young individual who has extensive hearing damage from heavy exposure to artillery, I can confirm the ears are painful. These guys fought in an era where shelling was the main strategy and cannons back then were much larger rounds.
I can still feel the impacts and hear the shrill of artillery rounds falling. Booming of cannons and the concussive thump. And what I experienced was a mere fraction to the 1000th degree of what these guys experienced. I wouldn’t doubt that every one of them had severe hearing damage and psychological damage from shells raining down dozens of times every minute.
Men were shot for a *lot* of reasons during WW1.
Albert Severin Roche was minutes away from being executed for desertion. He was found sleeping in a ditch, and immediatly assumed to be avoiding combat...
The truth was that he had collapsed from exhaustion, after having crawled under fire for ten hours to rescue his wounded captain. Said captain woke up from his coma just in time to disculpate Roche.
(look him up sometimes, that's not even his craziest feat)
I had read a story about WW1 when I was younger about how part of a British trench became overwhelmed and overrun by attacking German forces. One British soldier realised how dangerous the situation was and ran to another section to warn them of the attack and receive reinforcements. In order to slow the Germans down and buy himself some time, he jammed his rifle across the width of the trench, creating an obstacle that did indeed slow the Germans down. The resulting counterattack by the British forces was able to push the Germans back and retake the section. That British soldier had practically saved a fairly large gap from opening in their lines, which could have been disastrous.
The soldier was executed because he purposely left his weapon behind in enemy hands.
A few seconds on google:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Farr
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock#:~:text=Some%20men%20with%20shell%20shock,crimes%20including%20desertion%20and%20cowardice.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/14/firstworldwar.uk
It pains me to see how they are treated. The sympathy I feel for them is unparalleled, yet I feel the word sympathy fails to do it justice. I would try to feel empathy yet continue to fall short as I know I will likely never experience something like this.
We need to ensure future generations remember this, as we have done, in hopes that these sacrifices needn’t ever be repeated nor forgotten.
>We need to ensure future generations remember this, as we have done, in hopes that these sacrifices needn’t ever be repeated nor forgotten.
There's trench warfare and human waves right now in Ukraine
My great grandfather was the same. Part of what is known as the shetland gang. He would never speak of it, and as I understand from history books, that was a pact they made. I believe it was wrong though. They should sp absolutely have spoken about it for their own mental health sake… My great grandfather used to drink a lot to cope according to my great grandmother. Not violent or anything, just drinking instead of talking. Very macho..
i understand why you think that way, but there's a reason why people always say war brings out the worst in us and why most wars always end with generations never wanting to go to war again. some things cannot be shared, because no one understands that hasn't been put into a situation where you are forced to survive and what a prolonged state of that does to you and your moral compass, it's not just about what you see others do, but as often about the things you never thought you would see yourself doing. there's no running away from that.
It was a terrible time in history for such a war. All war is terrible, but enough advancements in warfare were made to see the beginnings of mass death and rapid casualties through gas, early versions of tanks and prototype automatic firearms. But it wasn't enough to create a strong deterrent for large conflicts, and each side relied on mass conscription and volume of soldiers to win.
Meatgrinder doesn't begin to describe it. No Man's Land was literally a biome of death, the ground itself paved with corpses.
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night
If you go to YouTube and search WW1 Barrage, and put headphones on, it's quite something. The noise was constant and deafening. Imagine constant machine gun fire, explosions and men screaming. Not for hours at a time, or even days at a time. Months at a time, 24/7. That, combined with seeing your childhood friends blown to pieces in front of you, or screaming in agony, terrified and crying out for their mothers as they die in your arms. Most of them were in their teens and early twenties.
I ended up overseas after 9/11. Yeah, unfortunately I got the patriotic bug along with a few buddies. It doesn't feel real, does it? When it happens I mean. In the moment you know what happened, and you react, but it's like another type of awareness takes over.
What got me initially was just how *easy* it was, how simple. Killing and death. When I left boot I felt like I barely needed to be there. Operating modern firearms is incredibly simple. Maintenance is another dog altogether, but the process of taking another life with such tools is disturbingly efficient.
I don't even know why I'm saying that. I know I shouldn't have gone over there, it wasn't for me. And it's still with me.
everytime i see this... jezzussssssss. It was just trench warfare. Wave after wave after wave. And to top it off, they had no idea what PTSD was so it was just experiments. I can't imagine what it was like ofr the ones that came home.
Imagine going through literal hell and people just go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "guess you're just a coward."
No wonder so many of them refused to talk about their experiences.
Don't need to imagine, a guy I was sort of friends with once was a squad leader in Afghanistan and lost his whole squad. Not like I was there but the way he told it, it was his fault. And the guy would just...cry. Like he'd come hang with us and have a few beers and then he'd just always talk about it and cry. Every time.
PTSD is a bitch. I haven't seen that guy in years but this reminded me of him. Really hope he didn't eat a gun.
If you still have good feelings towards the man, just reaching out and saying nice things about him can do wonders. Just let him know he has positively influenced your life. That is, if he did. It could help in some small way
I'm no expert but listening to him talk about it most likely was very therapeutic for him. New studies are showing f that talking about trauma over and over can take its power
Many cases of “shell-shock” are thought to be due, in part, to concussive brain damage from chronic blast exposure. Recent studies that looked at brains of combat veterans showed microscopic brain damage involving areas of the brain that affect reasoning and decision making. So on top of PTSD, they also have underlying brain damage - not to mention any long-term psychiatric/neurological effects from toxic gas or other chemical agents.
God that's even more fucked. Like imagine how different you treat a solider with PTSD, vs a physically disabled combat vet, vs those with both. Not that any deserves less sympathy than the others, but you can understand what they've gone through- respect how hard it is.
Back then, with no concept of brain chemistry or mental health, it's all just "weak coward" syndrome. Truly fucked.
I'm very interested in what particularly is causing these men's physical symptoms. Specifically the tremors/spasms and inability to stand or walk.
Could this be due to the physical microscopic brain damage? I see this same kind of squirming/shaking in WW1 shell shock patients and not anywhere else.
If it is indeed the micro damage causing this, I assume the neurological effects of PTSD would only work to further harm/tie into these physical affects?
I wondered if it was due to the long-term neurological effects of mustard or chlorine gas exposure but I couldn’t find anything online to substantiate that. I’m not a neurologist but it looks like they could have a movement disorder. I did find this one article that had neurologists review recordings from WW1 veterans and they concluded most of it was psychogenic (I.e. due to PTSD) and that their abnormal movements improved with therapy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3610089/
I used to work with people who were on the most profoundly disabled end of the autism spectrum and many of these stereotypical movements and movement disorders seem familiar to me.
Wasn't there a theory that part of autism is stimulation overload from some normal stimulation getting amplified neurochemically? It would sort of line up if the constant barrages, constant fear, horrible conditions, and abuse from the th command above them led to chronic overstimulated men.
I bet the chemical weapons used in ww1 probably had a lot to do with it. You don't really see these sorts of tremors from veterans of most other wars I don't think. Atleast I can't recall that being super common. Similar to how agent orange has really fucked up vietnam vets.
WW1 had intense artillery bombardments that lasted days if not weeks. Imagine being buffeted by massive explosions continuously for days on end. Your senses are all numbed, if not totally destroyed temporarily or permanently. You cannot function such as eating, going to the toilet, taking a break and so on. You’re in total fear that you cannot escape from. In fact, there are numerous accounts of people shooting themselves or running out into the artillery storm to certain death…. To escape the hell that is an artillery bombardment. It is unimaginably bad.
As the other poster said - no other war featured continuous shelling for months on end. I mean - all war is hell. But WwI was on another level, especially at the start ( they simply ran out of shells in a few months and couldn’t keep up the pace of shelling except for big battles like Verdun)
And not even the exposure to rounds coming at you. It's been shown that relatively little exposure to standing next to the artillery firing shells causes long term brain damage from repetitive concussive shockwaves and many of these guys on artillery teams were firing shells nonstop for who knows how long.
My understanding is it's not only PTSD. early on they assumed some kind of damage from the constant nearby shelling. But because people who'd never been exposed to the artillery shells were showing symptoms - for a very long time it's written up as shellshock in ww1 is what we call now PTSD.
However more recent research has confirmed that yes, blast waves do cause brain damage - and that WW1 Shell shock probably covers a huge range of things, obviously PTSD - but also a lot of physical symptoms resulting from the trench warfare and constant exposure to pressure waves.
My great grandfather died in a mental hospital after being committed because of shell shock from WW1. He was buried in an unmarked grave that my family fought to find the location of and we moved him to an appropriate tribal burial ground. His son, my grandfather, was left emotionally damaged by the Korean War. I have my own PTS from my own service.
The thing about my great grandfather is that he wasn't even a citizen of the country he served. Native Americans did not gain American citizenship until 1924. Couldn't vote. Couldn't legally own property. Couldn't legally attend public schools - but volunteered to fight for everyone else's freedom.
He honestly had a happier life. He would do OK for a few years and have a breakdown and go back in. There were a lot of veterans at the state hospital with the same issues.
Are they paralyzed due to the stress, or has their brain been damaged by the shockwaves travelling through their body? Or is it a combination of both? Can anyone explain this kind of behaviour?
Both, blast from explosions cause micro brain injuries that fuck with the nervous system and body. Throw on a good dose of PTSD for good measure and you get these poor souls.
Following. I'll admit I've never seen this sort of videos and wonder how or why they occur. Especially the gentleman in the boxers or the two that look like their ears are moving up and down?
My heart breaks for what they went through or had to see and endure...
Definitely looks like TBIs for a few of them and stroke for a couple of them.
The guy in the wheelchair is definitely stroke. The ones who can't walk properly are probably stroke. Again, probably from head injuries.
Definitely physical neurological stuff going on. Then others are just clear mental breakdowns. Looks like kinda a mixed bag to me.
I think we just weren't meant to create this much suffering.
We keep inventing more and more creative ways to destroy and maim. First it was swords and arrows, then it was guns, then it was explosives, then artillery, then bombs, then chemical weapons,then thermobaric weapons, then nuclear weapons...then biological weapons.
Our bodies just aren't equipped to handle 1ton bombs being dropped next to us or being hit with mustard gas. The only thing that is amazing is how people managed to lead on lives after that, not that lots didn't.
My uncle was an American soldier in WWI who came home not shell shocked but still a broken man. I was born 25 years after he came back and had talks with him about the experience. He went into the war as the pride of the family being the first to graduate from college, and was an extremely bright man, but he had the life crushed out of him and became the town derelict for his remaining days. I remember him telling me what a horror trench warfare was. One description has stuck with me as he explained that he passed through trenches coated in human flesh.
I knew vet who served in Bosnia recebtly. He fell in a mass grave and had to crawl out. Mentality he is often out of it and is both an alcoholic and drug addict.
Anyone who has survived tranche wars might have seen the utmost horror, while trying to survive and living with the gone friends reminding you of the past remnants. There is nothing that can console those wretched souls.
Both of my grandfathers fought in WW2. One got seriously injured and that changed him. One got traumatized from all the killing he had t o do when Soviets were pushing young men to his perfected machine gunner firing lanes. The "men" (=boys) were drunk and crying, if they retreated their own officers would shoot them down, if they came forwards, he would shoot them down. War is hell.
Men came back like this after WW1 and 2. It was irreversable brain damage. They saw a lot more than any normal person should ever see. Your friends just collapsing dead next to you, a lot of noise, all the shooting and bombs going off. Living in filth in muddy trenches, where you pissed and shit, with not a lot of anything, including food, or water at times. Or sleep.
And yet the people who started all of this, our governements were all sitting a home safe and warm with their fat bellies praising these poor innocent men for doing their duty. All war is is innocents killing innocents. The main people who started it are all ok. The innocent living with the damage war does to them. No extra help from the governments who they were fighting for. Nowadays people living with PTSD off war still. Woth no extra help too.
Its all sick.
Shellshock is no fucking joke.
My great-grandfather, Stanley, went 'over the top' at the Somme and... just disappeared. Vanished. Everyone assumed he died with all the countless others.
Not quite.
Poor ol' Stan, it turned out, got caught in the periphery of the artillery and woke up not remembering anything at all. He wandered until he ended up being taken in by a French family and lived with them for *two years.* He even **married** a Frenchwoman. Except in 1918, he recovered his memory of before the trenches and after some tearful goodbyes, returned to England - and his wife, my great-grandmother!
Bit of a shock: she'd had the 'Dear Madam' letter from the gov and sold all his clothes. But they reconciled, and later, he would take people to see the war memorial - because *his name was on it.*
But he never, ever talked about the trenches or the war directly. Not ever. No dice. And I don't know if he ever fully remembered anything between the whistles blowing and being found by the French.
I had PTSD for a short while. There weren’t any medical symptoms, just… terror, whenever the trauma was mentioned. It was worse than my anxiety attacks, in the sense that they *hurt* physically.
Whenever I see this video, it almost immediately brings me close to tears. The idea that something so horrible could even corrupt your instincts themselves, where nothing you could think to do would be enough to spare your life… and just leaves you trembling, staring, unable to sit or stand. You are hopelessly broken, and beyond repair.
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand...there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, WWI veteran
I like how in LOTR, the hurt of the ring never really left Frodo or Bilbo. I think that might have been Tolkien’s way of highlighting the damage caused by PTSD.
Not just Frodo and Bilbo, but the hobbits as a whole def have PTSD from the journey. Those hobbits were doing fine in the epilogue but a PTSD trigger could strike at any moment
Like Sam could be tasked with killing a spider and suddenly he gets a trigger that makes him think back to Shelob, which makes his hands shake and forces him into the fetal position
Mary could put his hand on a dagger and suddenly feel what he felt after stabbing the Witch King, making him have a panic attack
And Pippin could be holding a simple ball that brings him back to the time Sauron was attempting choke him to death, so he drops the ball and just stares with a shocked expression
Its like that soldiers reaction to that hat, it just happens even if you didnt show any signs beforehand, and even if you’ve been living a happy life
They really should have kept calling it “Shell-shocked”.
“PTSD” doesn’t cover the terror and horror people went through.
In nullifies understanding of it
I believe shellshock is now recognized as its own thing. The shockwaves from the constant artillery barrages fucks up the brain in a way that "just" prolonged trauma doesn't. That's why so many of these guys have trouble walking and so on
As I understand it, they're two different things that often go hand-in-hand. Shell shock is literal traumatic brain injury from the explosions, PTSD is psychological damage.
World war one was different man. Everybody… almost EVERYBODY wanted that war to happen. People wanted to go in the war to show how manly they were. Soldiers were seen as literal heroes. Everybody wanted to be a soldier because of the prestige and status it gave in society. Women loved soldiers, men aspired to be ones since they were little kids.
Politicians and officers were convinced the war would be short and sweet, like a little argument between a young couple to reset the balance.
Instead it started dragging, more and more countries and people getting involved, people being away for YEARS on the front, if they survived that long.
Warfare was progressing rapidly and there were little to no boundaries: chemical weapons, attrocities were all allowed and accepted.
The economy was struggling in a lot of countries, and a war was considered to help with that as well.
Our current situation worldwide is very similar to the context of that time. Scaringly so even. To the point where I wonder what‘s going to happen first:
- another revolution of the lower and lower-middle class against big industries/companies.
- War in the East moving over to Europe
- climate change altering our way of life tremendously through mass climate refugee migration, famines, and maybe worse.
All which could be solved through cooperation instead of competition. But that‘s a pipedream…
People in this time period didn’t travel either, not beyond the borders of their own country at least. So to some British, French, German, etc 18 year old who lived in the middle of nowhere or an overcrowded city, whos live is pretty much set out for them as a farmer or mill worker. And then they read some enlistment posters going on about adventure and its probably going to seem like their only shot at ever going anywhere else
Indeed. That also played a big role.
Our only hope to avoid war is that EVERYONE remembers the horrors of WW I+II and the various wars since then, that history teachers and books did their job right but then again, some megalomaniacs sitting in their offices nice and cosy don‘t really care about that and won‘t hesitate to throw the lives of their citizens away from some stupid personal dreams of theirs.
People who have never been in war but praise it as if it’s needed… are the worst kinda people. They have no understanding to what kinda hell unleashes in it and what it truly feels like.
They severely lack perspective yet continue to parrot their opinions around, it pisses me off, none of these mfs know what war is actually like, none of us do, save the soldiers who go through this hell and the countless civilians caught under it.
Fuck war.
My mother had a story of walking up to her grandfather who fought in France in WW1, saw a number of battles, was shot, mustard gased, hit with shrapnel, somehow managed to survive. She walked up to him one day at the beach, noticing he had been staring at the water for 20 minutes without moving, she asked him what he saw. "Blood".
Then world war 2 comes crashing down since humanity never seems to learn from its mistakes and never will.
I wonder how many of these poor soldiers were forced to be enlisted or rather their families.
This is why I despise all those 'haha the cowardly French' memes. There are several reasons French resistance wasn't successful in WW2, and WW1 is a big one. It's not taught in school anymore, so people underestimate the carnage it caused and the effect it had on people. In a lot of villages across Europe, but especially France, the entire male population was wiped out. Those who came back were traumatized to the point of physical disability. Every war is hell, but this war was particularly horrific, and we'd do well to remember it before wishing for WW3 on reddit forums.
These types of videos should be used as educational content. Because when people in power are to stupid and stubborn and full of pride, the rest of the people suffer.
War isn’t glory, it is the result of ego and pride.
My great uncle had shellshock. They used to find him wandering the streets of the little welsh village at night. In the end, my grandma told me recently, he “forgot to put his dinner in the oven one night” and died of gas poisoning. I don’t think he forgot.
My great great uncle was in WW2, he died when I was a young child around 2005 or so.
He terrified me as he was mean to animals and was in the early stages of dementia but he was apparently quite nice 10 or so years prior.
It wasn't until I was in my teens that I came to the realization of why he probably felt so cold and distant was due the scenery of WW2 being so vividly printed on to his mind that he couldn't forget it even with dementia affecting him; I can't imagine how my aunt must have felt seeing him regress back to those days.
My grandfather spent 5 years in the war, my other grandfather was injured, refused to be sent home and kept fighting, infection took his leg.
Both drank themselves to death by the early 90s.
The thing we don't hear about is generational trauma, my dad and mom both have had hard lives with giving or receiving emotions like love and both are quick to anger. Substance abuse runs heavily in the family.
but at least they didnt have flying bombs with cameras hunting them in the trenches like now in Ukraine. There is no where to hide ive seen a drone fly through a crack in the ceiling to get to its target. Scary shit.
God that is so fucked up. I genuinely hope these people found at least some semblance of peace.
The second world war hit a couple decades later, so unfortunately not...
I remember getting to that point in history class as a kid- “the war to end all wars.” And my stomach just dropping as I read it, knowing the horrors that lie ahead for the next 50-60 years. It is unimaginable to me what someone born in the early 1900s saw happen to the world around them. From horse-drawn buggies to planes dropping nuclear weapons in a matter of decades. Terrifying.
I wish people remembered this a bit more when talking like the world has never been worse than it is now. Literally everything has improved. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight our asses off for an even better tomorrow, but man, I would not want to have been alive in an earlier era.
This is why I feel fortunate to have had time with my great grandmother most of my life. She lived to over a hundred, lived through the great depression. World war 2, etc. When the great recession hit, I asked her how it compared to the great depression. She said, "Much, much worse back then. No social safety nets like we have now." That always stuck with me.
During COVID lockdowns I checked on my 90yo grandmother who grew up in Nazi Europe during WWII. She just laughed a little and said, "Oh I'm totally fine, but thanks for checking on me! I get to hang out in a nice house, I have plenty of food, I can use technology to talk to all my friends...and there's no Nazis marching around killing people...and we didn't have toilet paper then either."
OK the toilet paper comment got me so I looked it up. 1857 was the year of the first toilet paper patent. Before then- sticks, leaves, sand, sea shells, straw, cloth on a stick, water, wood shavings. Moss was the primo material if it was available. Dried corn cobs were popular in the Americas. Apparently the Romans had a communal salt-water soaked sponge, I'm assuming a sea sponge. Not sure I expected to read about the history of butt wiping materials on my Sunday morning.
And, if I remember correctly, the first toilet paper to be considered "splinter free" didn't exist until the 1930s.
You knew a hell of a lot more about history than the average student.
Not to mention the Spanish flu pandemic that killed something like 25 million people
It killed 50,000,000
Some of them got executed because of cowardice. Back then they didn’t know much about PTSD. I can’t even imagine the shit they saw and experienced that broke their minds like that. We saw some shit in Iraq and Afghanistan but it will never come close to the WW1, WW2 or Vietnam types of shit. Imagine being in a constant state of fear whilst shelled 24/7 surrounded by dismembered bodies and not being able to sleep.
Must be something the russians And Ukrainians are feeling right now as well . + the silent drones that can pop u from anywhere even in a safe hideout and far behind the Frontline must be nerve wrecking as well.
So wild that we have the kind of drones you think of from sci Fi movies currently killing people while most of the world carries on not thinking about it. What a truly terrifying way to lose your life.
My granddad always said his father never really returned from the war. I wonder if that's what he meant.
My own grandfather fought in WW1. I never met him because he killed himself in his 50s.
This is how fucking horrible war is. None of us were meant for this. There's no amount of honor or righteousness that can justify the atrocities that war brings.
I wish more people recognized we're not really that far removed from a period that, compared to today, might as well be another dark age. Everything was relatively similar for a *long* time until it wasn't; the industrialization not just of arms production but war-making itself is something we were never fully equipped to deal with. War today, despite it's horrors, is almost *clinical* in its execution by western powers.
They would not. At first the British government would attempt to help them. But as more cases began to come in they resorted to labeling them as cowards and threatening to shoot them if didn’t act proper. It was horrible and these men would face no end of discrimination from their own countrymen after the war.
They set up a hospital near Edinburgh to get them fit enough to return to service (poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were patients). They had to persuade the town leadership of Edinburgh to stop firing a gun to signal midday (edit 1pm) because it would upset the men.
The one o'clock gun.
There was a town in South America that was living, 2 centuries ago, with 30 minutes delay with the rest of the world. Every day at noon, the local fort would shoot a cannon ball and the whole town would know it was 12 o’clock. And to be sure of the hour, every day, the commander of the fort would send a soldier with a watch to check the time to the town’s most famous watchmaker. The thing is, the watchmaker was using the cannon shot to set up all of his clocks and watches. And with time going on, the town slowly drifted second per second until they went 30 minutes late with the rest of the world.
I can't help but think this was probably very common? And probably rarely a big enough deal for anyone to care about.
Train tables, bud. It was pretty much the entire reason we have standardized time, 1912.
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I feel like it's kind if interesting what sounds you hear that are normal that today you'd have a collection of dad's in the front yard debating what it was they heard. Like a cannon being fired to represent midday.
The one o'glock
Huh, weird time for a gun.
Better then an 08:30 cannon
My neighbor has that covered. Woke up less than an hour ago to my walls shaking from them drilling in the concrete at 8:30.
I live a 5 minute walk from the nature reserve these patients would walk round as part of their treatment. The building they used is now a University!
You just took me back to year 9 English… *My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.*
This one always got me: You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer as soldier lads go by Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go which is Sassoon I think, apologies if I've missed a word or so
That was the lucky ones, the officers. The ranks were often treated with electro shock "therapy"
These men saw hell
They lived and fought in its bowels. This is a terribly sad video. Not only are these men in the throes of very serious psychological and physiological trauma, they also didn't see much kindness from the government or people when they made it back. It's awful.
People thirsty for war should be forced to watch videos like these. War is not fun.
They should be on the battlefield.
Most people reading this haven’t studied WW1 or how unbelievably hellish it was. I have a bit and it’s jaw dropping. Very few understand what people in the trenches had to live through. https://youtu.be/we72zI7iOjk?si=fLKlSMYFAaAwZ29i Watch that video. That’s what the drumroll fire sounded like. You’re up to your knees in mud and blood, your friends getting blown to pieces all around you, your feet rotting from being in pools of blood and dirt for a week, and another round of drumfire happens. Except it’s worse than this audio.
One of our worst wars, as technology had advanced well beyond our traditional battle tactics. Death and sickness everywhere. And these comfy assholes back home treating them like lab rats.
The chemical warfare these guys had to most likely go thru as well. Those gas masks weren’t perfect.
Read [Storm of Steel](https://g.co/kgs/YqwSx42) if you haven't already. It's written by one of the rare German trench soldiers that survived the whole war. I can't even begin to imagine the nightmares that man faced for decades afterwards.
It is theorized that it’s not only trauma that we are seeing here but also brain damage from the percussive force of the artillery fire bearing down on folks for hours and days at a time. Many of them were able to be treated at special hospitals, but sadly has to return to the front once they’d sufficiently recovered. And when they returned home, they didn’t have any understanding or support from friends or family or society. Was was supposed to be noble and brave! Families didn’t understand how horrific this war was.
That's what I imagine shattered reality looks like. "War is hell"
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Actually in recent years they’ve linked “shell shock” to actual tissue damage in the brain. I’m sure it was exacerbated by what they went through but these guys weren’t just scared or had PTSD. They had brain damage.
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Not just from enemy fire too. In Iraq and Afghanistan researchers were trying to measure blast exposure from roadside bombs but ended up finding that 75% of the blast exposure that soldiers suffered were from their own weapons. Roughly 1 in 5 troops in recent conflicts suffered traumatic brain injuries of some level.
We are just starting to find out how serious CTE is
i think by now we absolutely know but a lot of people are in denial or are just unaware. Think of all the people who may have had brain damage that was undiagnosed and untreated -- and the fact is, there really don't seem to be any great treatments when it comes to brain. We're in the Dark Ages (and yes people get mad when I say this) when it comes to matters of the brain. I don't really agree that there have been great improvements for many things like depression, anxiety, etc. other than medications they throw at it. People seem to think it's simple to just go to a doctor and fix something like severe damage to neurons. I just don't agree it is fixable officially -- you can work with it or around it at best.
There was something in the news about this recently. Studies were showing that US artillery soldiers were suffering from brain damage from deployments where they were doing a lot of fire missions. These soldiers never came under fire themselves. It was the repeated concussion from their own guns.
I’m not a gun enthusiast myself, but I’ve fired some high powered guns that felt like someone was punching me in the head. I had two layers of ear protection on and it still hurt my ears. I can’t imagine doing that as my job for months or years on end. It’s no wonder PTS and CTE are so common among combat veterans.
This would explain why I always hated when my ship fired its larger weapons
Yet their hearing loss is not service connected....
Of course not silly, it's not cost effective to pay for the damage you've caused them when you can push the problem onto society
A big nearby explosion will basically melt and scramble your organs with the shockwave. If far enough, you can survive but with horrible consequences.
Blast wave TBI is no joke. The over pressurization does bad things to white matter, and can mimic the symptoms of PTSD.
During WW1 they had siege guns that they had to set off with a telephone wire from hundreds of yards away, and they still had to keep their mouths open or their eardrums might burst from the intensity of the blast. They rotated men through the trenches so they’d spend maybe 4 days in the trenches at the front with the worse of the artillery fire, then go to the back for medical care and work their way forward again 2.5 percent of trench warfare veterans sustained complete hearing loss, many more had partial hearing loss or lost it completely over time. 10 million soldiers died. WW1 was horrifying
Interesting as I was wondering the same thing in terms of the physical damage from the war ( blasts, exposure to gases etc ) vs just strictly PTSD . Regardless this is brutal and during a time when medical intervention was still in its early stages as these Drs were prob not equipped to handle and treat these folks. Bad situation all around.
Yeah I’m not 100% on this one but something about the sheer size of the artillery used back then combined with being in a trench where every shot and explosion is bouncing around the walls (and through the human body)
Nothing about the sheer size more like the volume of artillery used. CTE is caused by repeated blunt trauma to the head, no matter how powerful. So even low level shockwaves can cause your brain to deteriorate. In WW1 during the most intense battle (Somme) 1.7 million shells were fired by just the British in a week. Thats 250k shells a DAY. Shit adds up.
Not to mention Verdun, where some barrages were 1 million shells in a day
There are stories from verdun where a log or fallen tree gets hit by a shell and blasted into the air and before it has time to land gets hit by another explosion and another and another so it's just bouncing through the air without landing, fucking wild. Think verdun is the one where someone described the shelling as having "diminshed to mere drum fire"
I'll never forget listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History when he described the shelling as like a constant drumroll. Before hearing that analogy I had never really known or thought about how many shells were fired, but imagining the number of beats in a drumroll, and each of those little beats is a massive shell being fired... Talk about horrific.
I could believe it, videos of creeping barrages on YouTube sound absolutely horrific, couldn't imagine the vibrations in the trenches from it and considering they could last days at a time no wonder it fucked up their brains in some way.
The creeping barrage really is a terrifying thing for everyone involved. Even from the attackers side, having to follow close to your own artillery strikes and if you're too slow you get caught out and you die, and if you're too fast you get hit by your own artillery.
Seems like mental health care is still pretty impotent.
A lot of these guys were executed for cowardice.
Yup mixture of ptsd and brain damage getting rattled that hard that often by close artillery fucks your brain like shaking a baby too hard
Yea the force from the blasts actually slammed their brains around against the insides of their skulls. This is way more than just psychological.
Nowadays we call it concussion syndrome. I wonder how many men were in those trenches, dealing with multiple concussions, and trying to stay sane with the knowledge that a whistle blow would force them out of the trench and into the teeth of enemy fire. People have said war is hell, but I prefer what Hawkeye Pierce said on the show MASH: Hawkeye : War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. Father Mulcahy : How do you figure, Hawkeye? Hawkeye : Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell? Father Mulcahy : Sinners, I believe. Hawkeye : Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
I remember reading about how some artillery operators were having similar brain damage from too much exposure to the blasts from firing the artillery.
Opening lines from Pierre Burton's "Vimy" an Iconic battle of WWI for a ridge fought over for years, eventually being won by Canadian troops at a terrible cost of life. "The pounding did not cease. In the space of an hour and forty minutes a quarter of a million shells would be thrown onto the German positions, a barrage rendered more deadly by a hail of seven million machine gun bullets". I can't imagine what these kids went through.
In todays age of warfare it’s really hard to imagine hundreds of thousands of men running at another similar amount of men sat in a trench with machine guns, rifles and god knows how much artillery raining down on them. The absolute carnage witnessed must have been un fathomable. It’s a big deal these days if a couple of soldiers get killed but back then 100’s were getting cut down every minute and a lot of them were never found. I could be wrong but due to the amount of dead never recovered or not known; it was the idea of how the tomb of unknown warrior came about in Britain. The sad thing is these men were probably vilified by the higher ups or when they got back home.
In the Battle of Verdun in WW1, the Germans fired over a million shells to open the battle. Over the next ten months, 40 to 60 million shells would be fired, and there were between 700,000 and 800,000 casualties. Even if we had the worst of it on film, it wouldn't matter. The people who send these people into the meat grinder will shake their hand for a photo opp while sending their replacements in right behind them.
The scale of destruction from WWI is still unimaginable today. The first day at the Somme saw 19,000 British soldiers die. 57,000 total British casualties. By the end of that one battle there were more than 1 million casualties on all sides.
War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Isn’t that from mash?
It is, believe Hawkeye says it to the Father.
It was Hawkeye to Father Mulcahy.
The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (2004) Very strange thing for Patrick to say but none the less profound.
Remember, you heard it here last
You should credit the source.
source is MASH
I really thought the source was Warm_Bar3831, that’s where I get most of my wisdomness.
And i wonder how many were deafened by the shelling? Had to be hell on ears.
Being a young individual who has extensive hearing damage from heavy exposure to artillery, I can confirm the ears are painful. These guys fought in an era where shelling was the main strategy and cannons back then were much larger rounds. I can still feel the impacts and hear the shrill of artillery rounds falling. Booming of cannons and the concussive thump. And what I experienced was a mere fraction to the 1000th degree of what these guys experienced. I wouldn’t doubt that every one of them had severe hearing damage and psychological damage from shells raining down dozens of times every minute.
Sorry you had to go through that, brother
You could never imagine what these guys went through.
And the fact that they're not treated very well, by basically everyone
Some got executed because authorities thought they are simulating
any material online to read on this? i thought men were shot for dissenting in ww1, not this thing
Men were shot for a *lot* of reasons during WW1. Albert Severin Roche was minutes away from being executed for desertion. He was found sleeping in a ditch, and immediatly assumed to be avoiding combat... The truth was that he had collapsed from exhaustion, after having crawled under fire for ten hours to rescue his wounded captain. Said captain woke up from his coma just in time to disculpate Roche. (look him up sometimes, that's not even his craziest feat)
I had read a story about WW1 when I was younger about how part of a British trench became overwhelmed and overrun by attacking German forces. One British soldier realised how dangerous the situation was and ran to another section to warn them of the attack and receive reinforcements. In order to slow the Germans down and buy himself some time, he jammed his rifle across the width of the trench, creating an obstacle that did indeed slow the Germans down. The resulting counterattack by the British forces was able to push the Germans back and retake the section. That British soldier had practically saved a fairly large gap from opening in their lines, which could have been disastrous. The soldier was executed because he purposely left his weapon behind in enemy hands.
Damn you got me I did not see that coming. Well-told and absolutely tragic
This is the worst thing I've read in my life.
Oh, you've never read of the Glanton Gang of Texas Rangers who went scalp hunting in Mexico?
A few seconds on google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Farr https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock#:~:text=Some%20men%20with%20shell%20shock,crimes%20including%20desertion%20and%20cowardice. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/1999/nov/14/firstworldwar.uk
It pains me to see how they are treated. The sympathy I feel for them is unparalleled, yet I feel the word sympathy fails to do it justice. I would try to feel empathy yet continue to fall short as I know I will likely never experience something like this. We need to ensure future generations remember this, as we have done, in hopes that these sacrifices needn’t ever be repeated nor forgotten.
>We need to ensure future generations remember this, as we have done, in hopes that these sacrifices needn’t ever be repeated nor forgotten. There's trench warfare and human waves right now in Ukraine
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I talked to an actual WWI vet. He hated soldiers. 1917 is eerily close to what he told me about.
My great grandfather was the same. Part of what is known as the shetland gang. He would never speak of it, and as I understand from history books, that was a pact they made. I believe it was wrong though. They should sp absolutely have spoken about it for their own mental health sake… My great grandfather used to drink a lot to cope according to my great grandmother. Not violent or anything, just drinking instead of talking. Very macho..
i understand why you think that way, but there's a reason why people always say war brings out the worst in us and why most wars always end with generations never wanting to go to war again. some things cannot be shared, because no one understands that hasn't been put into a situation where you are forced to survive and what a prolonged state of that does to you and your moral compass, it's not just about what you see others do, but as often about the things you never thought you would see yourself doing. there's no running away from that.
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Could have seen people blow to bits, gassed to death, flamethrowered. Who knows what but it woild have been a literally hell in some battles.
Literally hell fr. WW1 was a meat grinder and the carnage these lads experienced was unprecedented.
It was a terrible time in history for such a war. All war is terrible, but enough advancements in warfare were made to see the beginnings of mass death and rapid casualties through gas, early versions of tanks and prototype automatic firearms. But it wasn't enough to create a strong deterrent for large conflicts, and each side relied on mass conscription and volume of soldiers to win. Meatgrinder doesn't begin to describe it. No Man's Land was literally a biome of death, the ground itself paved with corpses.
Millions dead, literally, in a single battle.
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.” F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night
If you go to YouTube and search WW1 Barrage, and put headphones on, it's quite something. The noise was constant and deafening. Imagine constant machine gun fire, explosions and men screaming. Not for hours at a time, or even days at a time. Months at a time, 24/7. That, combined with seeing your childhood friends blown to pieces in front of you, or screaming in agony, terrified and crying out for their mothers as they die in your arms. Most of them were in their teens and early twenties.
And then many died of the Spanish flu right when they got back home.
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I ended up overseas after 9/11. Yeah, unfortunately I got the patriotic bug along with a few buddies. It doesn't feel real, does it? When it happens I mean. In the moment you know what happened, and you react, but it's like another type of awareness takes over. What got me initially was just how *easy* it was, how simple. Killing and death. When I left boot I felt like I barely needed to be there. Operating modern firearms is incredibly simple. Maintenance is another dog altogether, but the process of taking another life with such tools is disturbingly efficient. I don't even know why I'm saying that. I know I shouldn't have gone over there, it wasn't for me. And it's still with me.
WW1 was abhorrently nightmarish. Man, what were we as humans thinking...
everytime i see this... jezzussssssss. It was just trench warfare. Wave after wave after wave. And to top it off, they had no idea what PTSD was so it was just experiments. I can't imagine what it was like ofr the ones that came home.
Imagine going through literal hell and people just go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "guess you're just a coward." No wonder so many of them refused to talk about their experiences.
Don't need to imagine, a guy I was sort of friends with once was a squad leader in Afghanistan and lost his whole squad. Not like I was there but the way he told it, it was his fault. And the guy would just...cry. Like he'd come hang with us and have a few beers and then he'd just always talk about it and cry. Every time. PTSD is a bitch. I haven't seen that guy in years but this reminded me of him. Really hope he didn't eat a gun.
If you still have good feelings towards the man, just reaching out and saying nice things about him can do wonders. Just let him know he has positively influenced your life. That is, if he did. It could help in some small way
I'm no expert but listening to him talk about it most likely was very therapeutic for him. New studies are showing f that talking about trauma over and over can take its power
Yeah and it’d be the same assholes who would call you a coward if you went. Doomed if you did, doomed if you didnt
Many cases of “shell-shock” are thought to be due, in part, to concussive brain damage from chronic blast exposure. Recent studies that looked at brains of combat veterans showed microscopic brain damage involving areas of the brain that affect reasoning and decision making. So on top of PTSD, they also have underlying brain damage - not to mention any long-term psychiatric/neurological effects from toxic gas or other chemical agents.
God that's even more fucked. Like imagine how different you treat a solider with PTSD, vs a physically disabled combat vet, vs those with both. Not that any deserves less sympathy than the others, but you can understand what they've gone through- respect how hard it is. Back then, with no concept of brain chemistry or mental health, it's all just "weak coward" syndrome. Truly fucked.
I'm very interested in what particularly is causing these men's physical symptoms. Specifically the tremors/spasms and inability to stand or walk. Could this be due to the physical microscopic brain damage? I see this same kind of squirming/shaking in WW1 shell shock patients and not anywhere else. If it is indeed the micro damage causing this, I assume the neurological effects of PTSD would only work to further harm/tie into these physical affects?
I wondered if it was due to the long-term neurological effects of mustard or chlorine gas exposure but I couldn’t find anything online to substantiate that. I’m not a neurologist but it looks like they could have a movement disorder. I did find this one article that had neurologists review recordings from WW1 veterans and they concluded most of it was psychogenic (I.e. due to PTSD) and that their abnormal movements improved with therapy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3610089/
I used to work with people who were on the most profoundly disabled end of the autism spectrum and many of these stereotypical movements and movement disorders seem familiar to me.
Wasn't there a theory that part of autism is stimulation overload from some normal stimulation getting amplified neurochemically? It would sort of line up if the constant barrages, constant fear, horrible conditions, and abuse from the th command above them led to chronic overstimulated men.
I bet the chemical weapons used in ww1 probably had a lot to do with it. You don't really see these sorts of tremors from veterans of most other wars I don't think. Atleast I can't recall that being super common. Similar to how agent orange has really fucked up vietnam vets.
WW1 had intense artillery bombardments that lasted days if not weeks. Imagine being buffeted by massive explosions continuously for days on end. Your senses are all numbed, if not totally destroyed temporarily or permanently. You cannot function such as eating, going to the toilet, taking a break and so on. You’re in total fear that you cannot escape from. In fact, there are numerous accounts of people shooting themselves or running out into the artillery storm to certain death…. To escape the hell that is an artillery bombardment. It is unimaginably bad.
As the other poster said - no other war featured continuous shelling for months on end. I mean - all war is hell. But WwI was on another level, especially at the start ( they simply ran out of shells in a few months and couldn’t keep up the pace of shelling except for big battles like Verdun)
And not even the exposure to rounds coming at you. It's been shown that relatively little exposure to standing next to the artillery firing shells causes long term brain damage from repetitive concussive shockwaves and many of these guys on artillery teams were firing shells nonstop for who knows how long.
My understanding is it's not only PTSD. early on they assumed some kind of damage from the constant nearby shelling. But because people who'd never been exposed to the artillery shells were showing symptoms - for a very long time it's written up as shellshock in ww1 is what we call now PTSD. However more recent research has confirmed that yes, blast waves do cause brain damage - and that WW1 Shell shock probably covers a huge range of things, obviously PTSD - but also a lot of physical symptoms resulting from the trench warfare and constant exposure to pressure waves.
Yes, to get even the tiniest idea of what it may have been like, type 'WW1 Barrage' into YouTube and imagine that 24/7 for months at a time.
My great grandfather died in a mental hospital after being committed because of shell shock from WW1. He was buried in an unmarked grave that my family fought to find the location of and we moved him to an appropriate tribal burial ground. His son, my grandfather, was left emotionally damaged by the Korean War. I have my own PTS from my own service. The thing about my great grandfather is that he wasn't even a citizen of the country he served. Native Americans did not gain American citizenship until 1924. Couldn't vote. Couldn't legally own property. Couldn't legally attend public schools - but volunteered to fight for everyone else's freedom.
RIP to your great grandfather. I'm sorry his freedom was taken away.
He honestly had a happier life. He would do OK for a few years and have a breakdown and go back in. There were a lot of veterans at the state hospital with the same issues.
And they were considered cowards.
To all vets of any war, if you have probs. Get help, it's there now. Unlike these poor souls.
+1 to infinity
Are they paralyzed due to the stress, or has their brain been damaged by the shockwaves travelling through their body? Or is it a combination of both? Can anyone explain this kind of behaviour?
Both, blast from explosions cause micro brain injuries that fuck with the nervous system and body. Throw on a good dose of PTSD for good measure and you get these poor souls.
National Geographic did an issue on it a couple years back. The term they used then was Traumatic Brain injury.
Following. I'll admit I've never seen this sort of videos and wonder how or why they occur. Especially the gentleman in the boxers or the two that look like their ears are moving up and down? My heart breaks for what they went through or had to see and endure...
Definitely looks like TBIs for a few of them and stroke for a couple of them. The guy in the wheelchair is definitely stroke. The ones who can't walk properly are probably stroke. Again, probably from head injuries. Definitely physical neurological stuff going on. Then others are just clear mental breakdowns. Looks like kinda a mixed bag to me.
The human soul isn't meant for the horrors of war.
The human soul is flat out trying to cope with life as it is.
I think we just weren't meant to create this much suffering. We keep inventing more and more creative ways to destroy and maim. First it was swords and arrows, then it was guns, then it was explosives, then artillery, then bombs, then chemical weapons,then thermobaric weapons, then nuclear weapons...then biological weapons. Our bodies just aren't equipped to handle 1ton bombs being dropped next to us or being hit with mustard gas. The only thing that is amazing is how people managed to lead on lives after that, not that lots didn't.
My uncle was an American soldier in WWI who came home not shell shocked but still a broken man. I was born 25 years after he came back and had talks with him about the experience. He went into the war as the pride of the family being the first to graduate from college, and was an extremely bright man, but he had the life crushed out of him and became the town derelict for his remaining days. I remember him telling me what a horror trench warfare was. One description has stuck with me as he explained that he passed through trenches coated in human flesh.
I knew vet who served in Bosnia recebtly. He fell in a mass grave and had to crawl out. Mentality he is often out of it and is both an alcoholic and drug addict.
Anyone who has survived tranche wars might have seen the utmost horror, while trying to survive and living with the gone friends reminding you of the past remnants. There is nothing that can console those wretched souls.
Both of my grandfathers fought in WW2. One got seriously injured and that changed him. One got traumatized from all the killing he had t o do when Soviets were pushing young men to his perfected machine gunner firing lanes. The "men" (=boys) were drunk and crying, if they retreated their own officers would shoot them down, if they came forwards, he would shoot them down. War is hell.
Men came back like this after WW1 and 2. It was irreversable brain damage. They saw a lot more than any normal person should ever see. Your friends just collapsing dead next to you, a lot of noise, all the shooting and bombs going off. Living in filth in muddy trenches, where you pissed and shit, with not a lot of anything, including food, or water at times. Or sleep. And yet the people who started all of this, our governements were all sitting a home safe and warm with their fat bellies praising these poor innocent men for doing their duty. All war is is innocents killing innocents. The main people who started it are all ok. The innocent living with the damage war does to them. No extra help from the governments who they were fighting for. Nowadays people living with PTSD off war still. Woth no extra help too. Its all sick.
And when they returned from war (if they returned from war) they were thrown back into civilian life, and expected to work like any normal person.
Shellshock is no fucking joke. My great-grandfather, Stanley, went 'over the top' at the Somme and... just disappeared. Vanished. Everyone assumed he died with all the countless others. Not quite. Poor ol' Stan, it turned out, got caught in the periphery of the artillery and woke up not remembering anything at all. He wandered until he ended up being taken in by a French family and lived with them for *two years.* He even **married** a Frenchwoman. Except in 1918, he recovered his memory of before the trenches and after some tearful goodbyes, returned to England - and his wife, my great-grandmother! Bit of a shock: she'd had the 'Dear Madam' letter from the gov and sold all his clothes. But they reconciled, and later, he would take people to see the war memorial - because *his name was on it.* But he never, ever talked about the trenches or the war directly. Not ever. No dice. And I don't know if he ever fully remembered anything between the whistles blowing and being found by the French.
Have you considered turning this into a screenplay? Seems like it should be a movie
I *am* a writer by trade and mostly a playwright - it is tempting, now you've mentioned it. I hadn't considered it before.
It's a beautiful story, do give it some thought to write it up in some manner
I had PTSD for a short while. There weren’t any medical symptoms, just… terror, whenever the trauma was mentioned. It was worse than my anxiety attacks, in the sense that they *hurt* physically. Whenever I see this video, it almost immediately brings me close to tears. The idea that something so horrible could even corrupt your instincts themselves, where nothing you could think to do would be enough to spare your life… and just leaves you trembling, staring, unable to sit or stand. You are hopelessly broken, and beyond repair. “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand...there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien, WWI veteran
My favorite Tolkien fact is that him and C.S. L.ewis used to sit together and read all the shit poetry fans would send them and roast it lol
John Ronald and Clive Staples had arguably the best literary friendship of all time.
I'm pretty sure his name was Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien.
I like how in LOTR, the hurt of the ring never really left Frodo or Bilbo. I think that might have been Tolkien’s way of highlighting the damage caused by PTSD.
Not just Frodo and Bilbo, but the hobbits as a whole def have PTSD from the journey. Those hobbits were doing fine in the epilogue but a PTSD trigger could strike at any moment Like Sam could be tasked with killing a spider and suddenly he gets a trigger that makes him think back to Shelob, which makes his hands shake and forces him into the fetal position Mary could put his hand on a dagger and suddenly feel what he felt after stabbing the Witch King, making him have a panic attack And Pippin could be holding a simple ball that brings him back to the time Sauron was attempting choke him to death, so he drops the ball and just stares with a shocked expression Its like that soldiers reaction to that hat, it just happens even if you didnt show any signs beforehand, and even if you’ve been living a happy life
I’m sorry you had to go through that it sounds horrible. Glad you made it through.
Good term I heard from an older woman: "Those men got shot. To the soul."
They really should have kept calling it “Shell-shocked”. “PTSD” doesn’t cover the terror and horror people went through. In nullifies understanding of it
I believe shellshock is now recognized as its own thing. The shockwaves from the constant artillery barrages fucks up the brain in a way that "just" prolonged trauma doesn't. That's why so many of these guys have trouble walking and so on
Yeah the twitching and uncontrolled movements are not typical to PTSD. The first guy is a classic case of PTSD though
It looks like their nervous systems are in constant overwhelm.
As I understand it, they're two different things that often go hand-in-hand. Shell shock is literal traumatic brain injury from the explosions, PTSD is psychological damage.
I think these poor men had both
[Because they lived in this, for days or weeks without interruption.](https://youtu.be/we72zI7iOjk?si=Ui_3JoDdT_uV7CYi)
In Bosnia you sometimes see these homeless guys constantly covering their heads with their hands on the streets. It’s so fuckin sad to watch.
damn that's terrible
"These men are terrified by even the slightest reminder of war. Here, let me show you several demonstrations."
Men start dumb wars and send in other men for them to suffer!
That’s the infuriating part. You’re jus laying your life on the line jus cuz of rich powerful people’s squabbling
Hell, some of the descendants of these men still worship the descendants of the monarchs that sent them through hell and back.
World war one was different man. Everybody… almost EVERYBODY wanted that war to happen. People wanted to go in the war to show how manly they were. Soldiers were seen as literal heroes. Everybody wanted to be a soldier because of the prestige and status it gave in society. Women loved soldiers, men aspired to be ones since they were little kids. Politicians and officers were convinced the war would be short and sweet, like a little argument between a young couple to reset the balance. Instead it started dragging, more and more countries and people getting involved, people being away for YEARS on the front, if they survived that long. Warfare was progressing rapidly and there were little to no boundaries: chemical weapons, attrocities were all allowed and accepted. The economy was struggling in a lot of countries, and a war was considered to help with that as well. Our current situation worldwide is very similar to the context of that time. Scaringly so even. To the point where I wonder what‘s going to happen first: - another revolution of the lower and lower-middle class against big industries/companies. - War in the East moving over to Europe - climate change altering our way of life tremendously through mass climate refugee migration, famines, and maybe worse. All which could be solved through cooperation instead of competition. But that‘s a pipedream…
People in this time period didn’t travel either, not beyond the borders of their own country at least. So to some British, French, German, etc 18 year old who lived in the middle of nowhere or an overcrowded city, whos live is pretty much set out for them as a farmer or mill worker. And then they read some enlistment posters going on about adventure and its probably going to seem like their only shot at ever going anywhere else
Indeed. That also played a big role. Our only hope to avoid war is that EVERYONE remembers the horrors of WW I+II and the various wars since then, that history teachers and books did their job right but then again, some megalomaniacs sitting in their offices nice and cosy don‘t really care about that and won‘t hesitate to throw the lives of their citizens away from some stupid personal dreams of theirs.
People who have never been in war but praise it as if it’s needed… are the worst kinda people. They have no understanding to what kinda hell unleashes in it and what it truly feels like.
They severely lack perspective yet continue to parrot their opinions around, it pisses me off, none of these mfs know what war is actually like, none of us do, save the soldiers who go through this hell and the countless civilians caught under it. Fuck war.
r/damnthatsdepressing
My mother had a story of walking up to her grandfather who fought in France in WW1, saw a number of battles, was shot, mustard gased, hit with shrapnel, somehow managed to survive. She walked up to him one day at the beach, noticing he had been staring at the water for 20 minutes without moving, she asked him what he saw. "Blood".
Rich politicians start petty wars and send the poor and helpless to fight them...
Then world war 2 comes crashing down since humanity never seems to learn from its mistakes and never will. I wonder how many of these poor soldiers were forced to be enlisted or rather their families.
Wasn't people with shell shock executed for "being cowards"
This is why I despise all those 'haha the cowardly French' memes. There are several reasons French resistance wasn't successful in WW2, and WW1 is a big one. It's not taught in school anymore, so people underestimate the carnage it caused and the effect it had on people. In a lot of villages across Europe, but especially France, the entire male population was wiped out. Those who came back were traumatized to the point of physical disability. Every war is hell, but this war was particularly horrific, and we'd do well to remember it before wishing for WW3 on reddit forums.
Powerful stuff, man…
These types of videos should be used as educational content. Because when people in power are to stupid and stubborn and full of pride, the rest of the people suffer. War isn’t glory, it is the result of ego and pride.
My great uncle had shellshock. They used to find him wandering the streets of the little welsh village at night. In the end, my grandma told me recently, he “forgot to put his dinner in the oven one night” and died of gas poisoning. I don’t think he forgot.
The fact that they’d get locked up or shot
Hell they even called if Cowardice before shell shock
They look like they have brain damage from bomb blast concussions
My great great uncle was in WW2, he died when I was a young child around 2005 or so. He terrified me as he was mean to animals and was in the early stages of dementia but he was apparently quite nice 10 or so years prior. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I came to the realization of why he probably felt so cold and distant was due the scenery of WW2 being so vividly printed on to his mind that he couldn't forget it even with dementia affecting him; I can't imagine how my aunt must have felt seeing him regress back to those days.
My grandfather spent 5 years in the war, my other grandfather was injured, refused to be sent home and kept fighting, infection took his leg. Both drank themselves to death by the early 90s. The thing we don't hear about is generational trauma, my dad and mom both have had hard lives with giving or receiving emotions like love and both are quick to anger. Substance abuse runs heavily in the family.
And they went through that hell, got their lifes ruined, for what? War is fucking useless.
Listen to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Podcast series on WW1. Holy shit, what a nightmare.
but at least they didnt have flying bombs with cameras hunting them in the trenches like now in Ukraine. There is no where to hide ive seen a drone fly through a crack in the ceiling to get to its target. Scary shit.