Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War

Journalist Glass (They Fought Alone) spotlights WWI soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in this intriguing study of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatments. Before they met at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, Owen and Sassoon had served on the front lines in France. Owen began exhibiting signs of “shell shock” after a German artillery shell exploded two yards from his head and he spent the next several days in a hole in the ground near the rotting corpse of another officer. Meanwhile, Sassoon, a decorated soldier and published poet, had refused to return to the front after being hospitalized for gastroenteritis; the military determined he was suffering from a nervous breakdown and sent him to Craiglockhart. Glass details treatments prescribed by doctors Arthur Brock and William Halse Rivers, including “ergotherapy” (vigorous mental and physical activity), “talking therapy,” and dream interpretation, and notes that patients were encouraged to confront their “phantoms” through poetry. Success meant returning to the front, however, and Owen was killed in France in 1918. Thoroughly researched and lucidly written, this is an immersive look at the healing power of art and a forceful indictment of the inhumanity of war. Agent: Michael Carlisle, InkWell Management. (June)