Beginning of August 1916. A wonderful summer sun shone on the Somme: “It wasn’t the right time to kill,” Harold Macmillan wrote to his mother on August 2. Six nights later, the Germans attacked British trenches at the Ypres Outpost and, before the attack, launched a preliminary gas discharge.
19-year-old shallow soldier John Bennett, who was frightened by the sudden, alarming noise, fled the trench to rear guard. When he returned, a few hours later, to the trenches in support of his battalion, he saw that seven men had died and that there were forty-six injured as a result of the gas attack. He was immediately arrested and charged with “misconduct before the enemy.”
In Bennett’s trial, his commanding officer made it clear that Bennett, who had enlisted six weeks before the war started, was coming down during the bombing. He was sentenced to death, but during the review procedure, a brigade general recommended that his sentence be changed.
Corps Commander, Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston, a veteran of the combat at Gallipoli, disagreed. The cowards, he said, "are a serious danger to the war effort and with the death penalty it was claimed that men would be more frightened than with the prospect of facing the enemy." Bennett was shot. On the same day two more men were executed for desertion.
As fighting continued on the Somme, many men left the battlefield with nerves shattered. They were part of patients and, when asked what had happened, most answered: "war neurosis." In some cases it was obvious, but for medical authorities it wasn't, necessarily.
According to the official medical history: "Explaining to a man that his symptoms were due to an emotional disorder produced by his tough online experience and not, as he imagined, due to some serious alteration of his nervous system produced by the explosion of the projectiles, became the most frequent and most effective form of psychotherapy.
His simplicity did not take away his value, in any way, and it was no wonder that in the end, after spending the two weeks of rest he so needed in a hospital, he volunteered for service. ”

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