Landscapes of Trauma

The Psychology of the Battlefield

Nigel Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351975278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

Integrating trauma studies with historical research and social psychology, Landscapes of Trauma examines a range of battlefields from across history, including Waterloo, the Battle of Sedan, the Battle of the Ebro and the Battle of Normandy, to bring to light what these battlefields say about our collective and individual psyches.

Hunt explores how war shapes the nature of trauma, not only by its innate horror but also by the historical and societal contexts it is fought in, from the cultural and social conventions of the period to the topography of the settings. This book provides a deep analysis of how war is experienced and remembered in different eras and by different generations. Moving beyond the clinical concept of post-traumatic stress disorder, Hunt discusses how trauma can be understood socially and historically, as well as through the lens of individual suffering. This book also investigates the psychological foundations of memorialisation, remembrance and commemoration that shape the legacy of the battles discussed.

Using interviews with veterans, their letters, journals and diaries, as well as literary and historical sources, Hunt locates the battlefield as a place where humans explore the parameters of human behaviour, thought and emotion. This book is in important resource for students and scholars interested in the psychology of trauma and war, as well as military history.

1

Introduction

This book explores something of the psychology of war from an unusual perspective – that of physically exploring old battlefields and reading accounts of these battles and their consequences. We may more easily understand the impact of war on its participants if we tread in their footsteps, go to the places they fought, and take note of the landscape, the topography, the archaeology and the movements of the fighting troops, not just written interpretations, but incorporating written interpretations.

Most research by psychologists has focused on the negative personal impact of war: war trauma. While that is a critical part of this book, other factors will also be considered. There are a host of these factors, psychological and otherwise, that add to our understanding of the psychology of war. These include the impact of fighting on individual soldiers, training effectiveness, automaticity of behaviour resulting from training and experience, obedience and discipline, leadership and camaraderie. There are also the difficulties faced during war, the hardships, punishments, diet, general privation, health and illness, and the morale and strength of the enemy. These factors will be considered at various points throughout the book, along with the psychological aftermath of war, such as trauma and memory. The book is not intended as an exhaustive account of the various battles and the psychological understanding that may arise out of them, but rather as an introduction to such an approach.

Psychologists have long been interested in the impact of war and war trauma, with the latter usually being over-simplified and labelled as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; APA, 2013). The impact of war is more complex than PTSD. There is no single set of symptoms experienced by a veteran. Their reactions vary widely, and while many if not all people are profoundly affected by their war experiences – and some do experience mental health difficulties – they are not all negative. Many veterans have positive and happy memories of their war experiences; the people they met, the places they went, the things they learned, and the things they did, remembering that a war is not all about fighting the enemy. If we are to understand the trauma of war, we need to have a more nuanced understanding of how war affects people and not just focus on mental disorders, though these are critical.

We have complex narratives about war and remembering war. It is not just about the narratives of individuals, but also about how those narratives are affected by the broader narratives held at the societal level and how those societal level narratives develop and change over time. Our experiences and what we remember are influenced by the people around us and the places we go. We are essentially social animals, and so the way we think, feel and act is determined by other people and the environment as well as our own personalities. This is often missing from explanations of the impact of war and war trauma, which largely focuses on the problems faced by individuals. Indeed, this ignorance of culture and the social world is a problem with a lot of mental health research generally. Not only individuals but societies are changed because of the experience of war. World War I did not cease to have an effect on its participant countries after the armistice in 1918 (apart from the fact that many countries were fighting well into the 1920s). The longer-term impact of the war carried on for decades, not just in the traumatised and maimed veterans and their family members, friends and society, but in the grief of the families, the communities who had lost a significant number of their young men, and in the economy and politics in general. It takes decades for a society to recover from war, and in parallel with the notion that once someone is traumatised they can never regain their pre-trauma self (and some remain traumatised for life), societies that have been at war are changed forever, both in positive and negative ways. Erich Maria Remarque described both the impact of World War I on German soldiers (All Quiet on the Western Front), and the difficulties they faced on returning to Germany after the war (The Road Back). He made the important point that the older men who went to war had wives, families, homes and jobs to return to, and could take up where they left off. The younger men had none of this. They were taken to war before they had fully grown up and knew nothing of civilian life, so they would be the ones who would not be able to adapt to post-war life, the implication being that they would profoundly affect that society for years to come. As a novelist, he effectively described the psychological impact of war (Hunt, 2004).

By visiting the battlefields themselves (whether just in this book or in reality) we can try to understand participants’ experiences a little more. We can extend our psychological knowledge by exploring the reasons for the battle, the topography, the dispositions and movements of the troops, the archaeology, and by attempting to see the perspective of the participants. By being on the ground, walking where possible, but perhaps driving around some of the larger sites (the D-Day invasion in 1944 was across over 50 miles of beaches), travelling in the footsteps of the soldiers who fought, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of what happened. This is not to claim that those without battle experience can understand the experiences of those who fought, but that it does broaden one’s perspective.

In order to do this effectively we need to go beyond traditional psychology, with its experiments, surveys and interviews. Psychologists are not the only ones who understand something of the effects of war. Novelists, playwrights, artists and historians – among others – have also written about or illustrated war, both factually and through fiction (though much fiction by ex-soldiers is often autobiographical), through science and art, showing how war affects people in many different ways. This book attempts to illustrate a small part of this, exploring the impact of war on people using the sites they fought at and the varying accounts of their experiences. The historical element is that the book tries to draw on people’s understanding of war across the centuries, using a range of different methods, such as journals, novels, and historical accounts, along with more traditional psychological methods.

My speciality is traumatic stress, and in particular the ways in which people respond to war experiences and the ways in which they get better or can be helped to get better. I have worked with people from all over the world who have been involved with a variety of traumatic events, from World War II (Hunt & Robbins, 2001a,b) to more recent conflicts such as The Falklands War (Burnell et al., 2006), Bosnia (Hunt & Gakenyi, 2005) and Iraq (Al-Hadethe et al., 2015). I have also been involved with projects relating to non-war-related traumatic events such as earthquakes (Zang et al., 2013) or fires (Alghamdi et al., 2015). This has been interesting and stimulating work, and it involves understanding fundamental human behavioural processes, but it is not enough to understand the response to traumatic events simply by being a psychologist. You also have to be a politician, a sociologist, a geographer, and many other things, but most importantly, certainly in relation to war experience, you need to be an historian with some depth of understanding. If you are studying the effects of war and are interviewing people who took part in a particular war or battle, it helps tremendously if you have some knowledge of the battles in which they fought. In relation to my early work with World War II veterans this was not really a problem for me. I was interested in the subject from an early age. My father fought throughout World War II in the Royal Air Force, and so I grew up with the war a part of me even though I was born nearly two decades after it ended. As a psychologist I began to understand the impact of the war on individuals. As a social psychologist this inevitably also means focusing not only on war and the individual, but the effects of war socially, between people and across society, and then, as an extension of this, understanding the need to explore the battlefields themselves, the topography through which these people fought. An understanding of these three functions, the self, the social and the landscape, can lead to a better understanding of war.

Visiting battlefields

Over the years I have visited many battlefields relating to wars that have taken place across the centuries. I have been to the battlefields of Crimea, to the places with names that British people usually know as street names – Alma Street or Sevastopol Road or that eminently useful Balaklava helmet. The sites are little visited by British tourists, but there are memorials dotted around the battlefields, and some museums, (A particularly good one is inside an ex-Soviet secret submarine base in Balaklava.) Sevastopol was fought over even more savagely during the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, and the remains, the guns and the trenches are scattered around the landscape, making it difficult at times to identify Crimean War remains. This is common to many battlefield sites, for instance in northern France and Belgium, through which numerous armies have marched and countermarched. Even during World War II, some of the battles were fought on World War I cemetery sites, as evidenced by damage to gravestones or to monuments.

The battlefields of the U.S. Civil War are usually much better preserved than many sites elsewhere as they are often national parks, with monuments to the generals still facing each other across the fields and strict codes of behaviour for visitors. It is odd but perhaps understandable that the Northerners have their generals and their guns facing south, and the Southerners have their generals and guns facing north, as though ready for further battles. In Chile, the site of the Battle of Maipú, just north of Santiago, where patriot rebels defeated the Spanish forces and enabled the independence of the core central area of Chile contains very little evidence of the battle apart from a monument. In Crimea, the sites of the Crimean War battles are strewn with the detritus of more recent wars, particularly the sieges of Sevastopol in the 1940s. Northern France and Belgium have many battle sites, with monuments, trenches and cemeteries. Bosnia in the 1990s still had mines along the sides of the roads, the villages were destroyed, and men with Kalashnikovs were blocking the roads. During one visit NATO forces were busy firing missiles and dropping bombs on nearby Serbia, clearly audible from our hotel, and we were being woken each morning by machine gun fire. The older battlefields are safer.

All the battles contained in this book took place in Europe. There is no logical or rational explanation for this, but it does make it easier for European readers to visit the sites. My apologies to readers from non-European countries. There is also no logic to the choice of battlefields. They are all from the last six or seven centuries, with the focus on more modern wars. This is not a coherent history of war, but a glimpse through the eyes of participants and others who have tried to understand particular battle experiences.

This is not intended to be just another psychology book attempting to understand war trauma. It is broader than that. It is hoped that those with an interest in the history of the countries included, and the history and politics of war, will also find it interesting. I have attempted to weave a coherent narrative through the book, and I regularly depart from the central theme in order to provide what I hope is a deeper understanding not only of the effects of war, but also the broader context of the relationships between countries, the nature of the countryside and the present day. After all, if we visit these battlefields, we are seeing them in the context of today, with people living their everyday lives on or near them. Sometimes – at least at the popular sites – the visitors get in the way or intrude into these lives. Sometimes the visitors provide a key part of the economy, particularly for the battlefields of World War I, though at the same time they can annoy farmers by wandering across ploughed fields in search of war material. (This is illegal in some countries, so do not do it!) A key difference in this book is trying to understand the psychology of war through the battlefield tour. Several of the battlefields are described so that the reader can take a real (or virtual) tour of the areas where the fighting took place, either walking or by car. This is what provides a key different experience in terms of battlefield understanding for psychologists.

Narrative and war

My academic research into traumatic stress has also made me realise the importance of the story – the narrative – if we are trying to understand something related to the human condition. We are storytellers and storymakers in most things we do. We try to make sense of things that happen to us; we want to tell other people about it, and we like listening to other people’s stories. Octavio Paz argued that it is language that makes us human (Verani & Clarke, 1982). Jane Goodall went a little further and suggested: “What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language” (Kamrani, 2007). This is partly true, but it is the way we put the words together, the narrative or story, that really makes us human. Questions are there to help us build this narrative, to gain a greater understanding. Without narrative, language is nothing. As far as we are aware, we are the only species that can make up stories and tell them to others. It doesn’t matter whether these stories are written down, thought about while out for a walk, or discussed in the café, the pub or at home. Sometimes we ourselves are the only audience, sometimes it is many people. Narratives can be informal, like a conversation between friends, or they can be formal, such as this book or giving a lecture. The essentials are the same.

Psychologists became interested in narrative in the 1980s. Theodore Sarbin (1986) introduced it and suggested that human behaviour can best be explained through stories and using qualitative research methods. Jerome Bruner (1986) proposed a more empirical approach to understanding narrative, suggesting that there are two fundamental types of psychology: paradigmatic psychology, which is the traditional approach using traditional methods, and narrative psychology, a storied approach. Bruner suggested that both approaches are important, indeed fundamental to psychology, but that they are irreducible to one another – a debatable point.

One key aspect of narrative is construction. When we talk about events that have occurred in our lives, we do not simply recount what happened, we talk about what it meant. We confabulate, we make things up, we add detail to enrich the story and give it meaning. We remember things and we forget things. For life stories we contextualise our memories of our lives with meaning that might relate to our personalities, jobs, family or friends. Critically, the narrative is not just personal, it is social. The audience matters. The way we build and structure our stories depends on the society in which we live, so they are cultural. These stories or narratives build up into a complex narrative that we call our life story or autobiography. This is a socially constructed account of our lives. Actually, it is a whole series of constructed accounts. If I wish to describe my past to my wife, it will be a different past to the one I describe to my students, which is still different to the one I tell my friend in the pub. Depending on our audience we highlight certain things that have happened to us; we forget to mention other things; often we genuinely do not recall. Our mood and personality also affect how we construct our stories. If we are depressed, we tend to remember the sadder, more negative events; if we are optimistic, we over-emphasise the happier, more positive things (or our positive interpretation of things). This sense of meaning making, and the need for confabulation, is critical to understanding how we live our lives and how we make sense of them. It is similar for war stories, except sometimes people cannot help focusing on certain events – or are unable to mention or even recall other events.

The book brings together several different important elements to try and understand something of the human psyche and behaviour in relation to war. Many accounts begin and end with the person. In order to fully understand trauma, we need to know more about the person, about their habits, their personalities, but also their relationships and the meanings these relationships have for them. We also need to know about their cultures, how culture affects the ways we think, and that includes historical culture,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Methods used in the book
• 3. The psychological impact of battle
• 4. Memorialisation, remembrance and commemoration
• 5. The landscape of battle
• 6. The Hundred Years War
• 7. The British Civil Wars: Wingfield Manor
• 8. Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca: The Peninsular War
• 9. Waterloo
• 10. The Crimean War
• 11. The Franco-Prussian War: The Battle of Sedan
• 12. World War I and the Western Front
• 13. The Spanish Civil War and the Battle of the Ebro
• 14. The Battle of Normandy
• 15. Reflections
• References
• Index