Browse Items (31 total)

In June of 1922, the War Officer Committee of Enquiry published their report on shell-shock and its treatment during the Great War. In 1922, the term which the War Office Committee references most often is war neurasthenia, or simply neurasthenia.…

In this speech, given in front of the Royal Society of Medicine, Rivers explains the process of being shell-shocked as repression, a means of obscuring mental content from memory and rendering memory inaccessible. However, when trauma was…

This draft of Break of Day In the Trenches was typed and set by Annie Rosenberg, possibly in June, while Isaac Rosenberg created the written annotations, likely in July.
Rosenberg’s earlier poetry betrays his Romantic influences. In “Break of Day…

As a private on the front lines of the Western Front, Rosenberg was injured before he was reassigned to a works battalion. This experience is reflected in his poem “Dead Man’s Dump,” which is written from the point of view of a soldier going out on a…

In his poem "Repression of War Experience," Siegfried Sassoon uses a metaphor of moths, who "blunder in," only to "scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame," like soldiers who believed that they would prove themselves heroes through war. Like…

Wilfred Owen’s poem portrays two speakers meeting in “some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped / Through granites which titanic wars had groined” (2-3). This granite tunnel is the aftermath of titanic wars, an image which reflects afterlife as…

In April 1917, Sassoon’s company with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers supported a French assault on the supposedly secure German defenses, known as the Hindenburg Line. His 1917 poem “The Rear-Guard (Hindenburg Line, April, 1917)” is based upon this…

This piece of ragtime music satirizes the stereotypic movements of those diagnosed with shellshock. For voice and piano. The lyrics of this musical arrangement reads thus: Verse 1:Over there, somewhere in France, our boys have learned a brand-new…

The following item shows a pictorial comic, featuring two men standing in the foreground, while the background features a green wall with a black door in it. On the wall, a sign reads, "Bones Broken While You Wait." One man uses crutches, while the…

Published in Current Opinion in 1917, Mary Borden wrote of her experiences as a woman at war in her poem "The Song of the Mud." Throughout the poem, Borden enumerates the various qualities of mud, an environmental threat on the battlefield of war,…