 Welcome to New America. I'm Peter Bergen, Vice President of New America. Very honored to introduce our guest Charles Glass, who's a fellow with New America's international security program. The author of multiple books, including tribes with flags. The tribes triumphant. Our books about focus on Middle East, his books on the Second World War include Americans in Paris life and death under the Nazi occupation, and also the desert is a hidden history of World War Two. Today we're going to be talking about his new book which just came out soldiers don't go mad a story of brotherhood poetry and mental illness during the First World War, which I got a very nice review already in the Washington Post. Charlie was formerly the ABC News Bureau, ABC News Barrett Beirut bureau chief. He was also the ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent. He's written for multiple magazines and newspapers around the world contributes regularly to the New York review of books and I'm going to turn it over to Charlie to discuss his latest book. I started on this book I read a little piece in the newspaper about a hospital in Scotland called Craig Lockhart War Hospital for officers. It opened in the First World War and I knew nothing about it so I actually went up to the place which still exists to find out what happened and why it was opened and who was treated there. I discovered that it was the leading psychiatric hospital in the First World War for British officers. The reason they took such care for officers that is that the officers were breaking down in great greater percentage than their actual numbers, and they were needed at the front to leave their platoons and companies in battle. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers French soldiers German soldiers were reporting to hospitals. During the war, the height of battle with no visible wounds, they were blind, they couldn't talk, they were shaking or they were paralyzed. They couldn't move they couldn't think they were having terrible nightmares and they weren't able to sleep, and the doctors couldn't find a physical cause for it. The soldiers themselves started calling this this malady shell shock, they were shocked by the shells, because they, this was the first war in which they were subjected to high explosive heavy artillery regularly daily hourly, while they crouched underground in their trenches, living with lice and rats and very bad food, and just trying to survive. The pressure was so great that the numbers of mental casualties were at least about about 20% as as many as there were physical casualties, and these men were suffering greatly. Some hospitals that they went to simply regarded them as cowards and thought that they were useless and they tried to give them electroshock therapy, anything to get them to go back to the front. But at Craig Lockhart hospital there were two extremely good well educated psychiatrists one was called Dr William Hulse Rivers, who in addition to being a psychiatrist was a neurologist and an anthropologist who had worked in self sees in India among what other people, not him called primitive peoples he always rejected the idea that was such a thing as primitive people he thought, old people were equal he was what it was very rare. For someone of his time in his class that he wasn't a racist in any way at all. And he was very sympathetic to the officers who came to be treated by him. The other the other psychiatrist was a man called Dr. Brock Brock was a Scottish psychiatrist also and like rivers. He had studied in journey studies I call right on psychoanalysis listening to the man listening interpreting their dreams as Freud did with his patients, and trying to understand the causes of their symptoms it wasn't to cure the symptoms. It was important to get to the cause to find out the triggering event that caused these horrible symptoms that they were suffering, and then to begin their treatment, and then, and then ultimately, and one they hope to get them to go back to the front and battle. This was easier said than done and most most men were never able to go back to battle. Most of men and officers were not able to go back to battle, despite the great efforts of these of these psychiatrists at Craig Lockhart and other hospitals. It Craig Lockhart. It stands out because early in night it opened in October 1916 and capacity of about 150 men by the end of the war it treated about 1800. One of the early people who came was a young second lieutenant called Wilfred Owen, and Owen was an aspiring poet. He had been buried under he had been blown into the air been buried underground. He had been stuck in a trench or in a ditch for days under relentless artillery bombardment and machine gun fire. The view of the body of one of his comrades who was who has been killed days before and who's whose remains were still hanging on barbed wire in front of him, being eaten by maggots in P and the body was in P lieutenant lieutenant cow Owen was very badly shocked by this but he still went back to when the when the shelling ceased he went back to try and continue fighting. But his men and other officers noticed that he was trembling, you could barely control himself as hard as he tried. He went to a casualty clearing station and ultimately was sent back to England and then up to Scotland to the Craig Lockhart hospital where Dr Arthur Brock treated him and Brock for for Owen Brock was the ideal psychiatrist. Brock believed in something called ergo therapy in addition to psychotherapy ergo being work therapy that you do have to work you have to do things, you have to engage with your community so he got Owen to edit the in house he got Owen to go to teach young boys literature, he got him to learn German, he was constantly owned was constantly active, and this was very was a key to his, his recovery. But while he was there he read a book of poetry by another officer called Siegfried Sassoon who was then fighting in France, and Sassoon wrote a book of poetry called the old huntsman. In the book, there were some anti war poems, which Owen responded to greatly because his experience of the war was nothing like the propaganda that surrounded the world, the great glorious war in which all the men were brave and everybody did well. He knew that was a lie and he read Sassoon and for the first time could see in poetry, the profundity of that. And he wanted, while he was there he heard that Sassoon had also come to Craig Lockhart to be treated. And so he went, I waited about he was very shy. He waited about three weeks and then went to Sassoon's room and knocked on his door and brought several copies of the old huntsman for Sassoon to sign. Sassoon was very unimpressed. Owen was much shorter than he was he was from the lower middle class. So soon from the upper middle class in England that's quite a big deal. And the, but he liked it, they got on they got on very well, and Owen asked him to sign copies of the book for his family and for for himself. And as he left, he said, I'm a poet to even first time he admitted it to anyone outside his family. And Sassoon didn't think anything of it but as the months went by Sassoon was reading Owen's poetry helping him to improve it. But came to the conclusion that Owen was a better poet than he was, although Sassoon was a published and famous poet, and also a very very brave officer who would won the military cross. He had not distinguished himself in battle at all at that stage, and he, he came to rely on Sassoon as a mentor. But Sassoon was actually not there because he was broken down Sassoon was there because he was a political prisoner effective. He had published a letter called a protest against the war in which he condemned the war and condemned the politicians for prolonging the war and not negotiating a piece with Germany. And rather than court martial in which would have been a stand in Britain, because Sassoon had won the military cross he was a published poet, and his first cousin and Phillips Sassoon was a member of parliament and the aid to count of the British commander of all the British forces in France. And so they rather than risk the publicity of a court martial, they sent him to a medical board and had him declared insane and sent him to Craig Lockhart to be treated. And there he was treated by Dr rivers, who tried to talk him out of his passiveness. It wasn't really psychological it was it was political. And they had debates rather than psychological therapy but it was an interesting time for both men, they became very close to soon called rivers his father confessor and relied on him a great deal. Even after the war. Yeah, so I mean reading the book. Last night. And one of the things that was striking was the psychiatrist involved felt that you mentioned this triggering event that that that patients should actually relive the experiences that it sort of set them down the path I guess the in general the treatment for people with this shell shark had been like we just let you be and do sleep and I mean there was a new approach to this issue right. It was a new approach but it wasn't a universal approach there are other hospitals. One headed by a Canadian doctor called Lewis Yellen, who didn't take the problem seriously and felt that he could simply eliminate the symptoms by using electro shock therapy and, and there are examples of him which he which he recorded, and he couldn't take the electric shocks and a man forcing him to talk. And he couldn't take the electric shocks off until the man could actually speak and then he could speak, because it because he was so suffering so much he finally spoke, and then he regard and Yellen and others like him regarded that as a cure and sent those men back to the front were they not surprisingly broke down again. Psychiatrists like rivers and Brock, who wanted to go to the causes. So they wouldn't break down again so they would understand their fears and they understand that it was natural to be to be afraid in those circumstances. It was a rivers and wrote in an essay called the repression of war experience about the fight or flight syndrome. So there you're leading men and you have to fight, but you know you're going to be killed. It's very very you've seen everyone being around you can you're going to be killed. But you're until you're tempted to run. So you but you don't run because you don't want to desert your lives. That's when you break down and that's that's what they had to get to the root of that, in order to cure them. You have a striking scene in the book which I think helps understand the scale of the problem which is the battle of the song which I guess is the most was at the most lethal day for British soldiers ever. It was the first of June 1916 when General Hague decided to break through the German lines with a massive assault, which he proceeded with days of heavy artillery fire thus alerting the Germans to the fact that the that there was going to be an attack along that line. And the Germans had observed the mobilization of forces from their, their observation plans. So when, when the morning came, the shelling ceased, and men were led across the line by their officers many officers on arm into the German machine guns in German artillery across no man's land no man's land was a wasteland barbed wire shell holes mud. Mines, it was a killing zone. On that day, the first of July 1916 20,000 British soldiers died between dawn and dusk 20,000 and another 40,000 physically wounded at the hospitals that calculated clearing stations that night and in the days that followed. Men were coming without limbs men were coming who had been had their face half of their faces blown off they've lost their eyes. They were bleeding to death, but there were also men who were completely unmarked, not a mark on them, who couldn't move, who were. If they moved at all they were trembling, they couldn't walk some of them, because of what they'd seen they'd actually gone blind, psychosomatically blind, or they couldn't describe what they experienced. They went they went mute they couldn't speak at all couldn't say any words at all. And the psychiatrist in that stage in early stage of the war were unsure how to cope with all this. And it was only as time went on and the treatment. The psychiatrist learn what these men were going through and learn ways of dealing with them that they were able in some but not all cases to treat them and make them make them better. Allow some of them to go back to the front when they were fully cured and some of them to take on light duty in Britain. They still don't want to be soldiers, but they were not capable of going back to the front, or they were in such bad shape that they were dismissed from the from the serve they were given discharges from the service and sent home. You've covered a lot of wars in your career. Have you seen, I mean we call this today, I guess PTSD. Is it something that you've encountered in the wars that you've covered since obviously World War One was a very extreme event but every war has has its horrors. In World War One it was it was mainly soldiers. It wasn't a war that involved civilians in large numbers there were farmers in the war zone in France and Belgium, went on growing the food to feed to feed France and Belgium, but and they suffered but mostly almost 99% casualties in the military. In the wars that I covered is the opposite. Most of the casualties are civilians in the Balkans and Sarajevo or in Beirut, the Middle East. They're they're fighting in cities, fighting around, like in Ukraine today they're fighting in cities and it's the civilians are suffering. And I remember, after the massacre that the Israeli sponsored at Suburban Shatila refugee camps in 1982. Even a year later, women were still wailing and screaming and they, because they'd seen their children shot before their eyes by Christian militiamen. They were they had the worst case of what we now call PTSD that I have ever witnessed. And I don't think that they got any treatment. They were, they were, they suffered and they and they went on suffering and they were they were left to languish with their with their grief and their pain. And of course, in Ukraine today, there's fighting in the cities but there's also trench warfare. I mean there's a there's cameras and I would not be surprised to find that under the under those conditions. A lot of a lot of soldiers will break down on both sides. If you have questions put them in the slider on the screen and I will relay them. So what was your writing process for this book. I don't really have a process I, I do a lot of research and then I sit down and write and then when I'm writing I discover I need to do more research. I went up to, to Scotland to find everything that was still at the at the Craig Lockhart hospital. It's no longer a hospital belongs to something called Edinburgh Napier University but they preserved a small part of it as a war poets collection. I went to the, to the battle fronts in in France in Belgium to where where all those men had fought to the place where Wilfred Owen had his breakdown where where Sassoon fought where he won his military cross. And then I went to the archives in Britain, the National Archives in Britain and the Imperial War Museum archives, and through the help of some families got diaries and letters of some of the soldiers who had broken down during the war. And then it was just a matter of putting it all together, coming up with a manuscript was, it was too long, and turning it over to my editor at Penguin and God of who helped me to make it readable, something for which I am grateful. And, and then that, and that was it then we had a book four years after I started and God of is a pretty legendary letter editor penguin have you done all your books with her. And so you write the flags Americans in Paris deserters and they fought alone so for this is the fifth book we've done together. That's great. And you also you mentioned the acknowledgments that you had a near fatal encounter with COVID when you're writing this. Yes, in March of 2021 before they were before we had the vaccines. And I started feeling a bit rough. I wasn't sure, but then I went and had myself tested and it was COVID. But as you know, you can have COVID seriously or not very seriously. And I thought I could just write it out in the event I couldn't I finally passed out and friends called an ambulance and they took me off to intensive care. I was at Seattle hospital where I received excellent care for I was there for two weeks. I had double I hadn't double pneumonia and COVID at the same time and they put them on steroids and antibiotics and oxygen. But they did a wonderful job and then I came out and I recovered fairly quickly and I did I look like I didn't have long code and then I was able to go back to work on the book. Very good news. So when you when you when you started the book, did you know I'm Wilfred Owen and see for soon other two great poets of one to the great poets of the Britain has produced. Did you know going in that they've both gone to this institution. How did you. It's because I then got Pat Barker's regeneration trilogy which I recommend to anybody that three magnificent novels, mostly set at Craig Lockhart involving Owen Sassoon and Dr rivers. It's a fictional account minds and nonfiction account but hers is beautiful so I knew from that that Sassoon and Owen were not only there, but they helped each other to write their poetry there and some of their best poems were written at Craig Lockhart, Owen is editor of the Hydra that the in house journal published Sassoon, and at Sassoon's insistence finally published himself for the first time. And it was a breakthrough for him to have other people reading his poetry and it was the beginning of what would have been a great career if he had not been cured and sent back to the front where he was ultimately killed and the point was to send they weren't really looking to just to cure people they wanted to send them back into the battle zone right they know the whole purpose it was like a machine shop for damaged tanks and trucks. It was to fix them to go back and do their job as officers at the front it was not because they sympathize with them or wanted to help them per se was a military issue and these were military psychiatrists. Some of the psychiatrist felt torn that once they cured these men that they'd get that they'd become close to they'd listen to them tell their problems. That they were that when they certified them this is as cured that they would go back and either be killed or or or have a mental breakdown again and it was it was a it was very difficult for a psychiatrist to face that dilemma. In terms of British society in general was did did the average person recognize that shell shock was a real thing and people were not malingering they were not just trying to get out of fighting or what was the. The widespread view the widespread view in the military, particularly in the senior office class staff office class and in the general public and in the newspapers was that shell shock was just an excuse to try and get out of battle. It wasn't a real thing. Right. There's a famous scene when General Patton sort of berate somebody who's got shell shock in World War Two. And now sort of reprimand reprimanded him right for. But I mean this this view that what we call PTSD or shell shock is sort of made up but it was, I mean it persists I don't think it. Does it persist today or is it mostly just sort of something I don't think it persists today I have British friends who were officers in Iraq and Afghanistan who have PTSD I mean, had it long after they left the theaters of war. They received medical care and they were not in any way disparaged or looked down upon because because of what happened to them. I think times that have changed for the better in that regard the medical care isn't that great, by the way, but it's not. It's not given with any malice it's not it's not saying we're just doing this because we believe you're actually a coward they don't say that anymore. Yeah. And there seems to be also a movement with PTSD to. I mean, more inventive approaches like using psychedelics or other kinds of drugs to get people to. I mean, it seems to be efforts to come up with better treatment. It's not an experimental thing. As you say psychedelics and also flashing lights going back and forth that seems to help some people. It's, it works for one doesn't necessarily work for another. It's yeah, it's not one illness. It's, it's a number of illnesses and psychiatrists are still working on ways of helping each individual. There is something else which is related but not the something called moral injury which can reveal itself you know for instance drone pilots, who may actually not be on a battlefield, but spend a lot of time with the people that are going to be killed, actually some form of stress, because they've been living you know if you drop a bomb from a plane you don't know who the victim is but if you're a drone pilot spending maybe weeks or months following a particular person around before they before the, before the weapon is launched. That can be also very disturbing. Well I'm not surprised I would not really want to sit in a little room in Nevada and kill a family in Afghanistan. PTSD is not just a wartime phenomenon. It's a peacetime phenomenon as well and the most most most of the sufferers of PTSD in America today are people who have been raped. They're traumatized and that is that that was a trauma that left them traumatized accounts for most of the cases PTSD in America today. And then there was also, you know, there are these cases of mass psychosis which is more common than we might imagine an example of which is in Sweden where hundreds and hundreds of Swedish kids have essentially gone to sleep. They are on life support that they, they're all mostly as Edie's interestingly, who whose families face are trying to get asylum which is very complicated. And they have this thing called resignation syndrome will they collectively fall asleep so all by way of saying that is the mind is often, you know, can do a lot of things at the body that we don't completely understand. I understand the as Edie's being traumatized after all they went through at the hands of the Islamic State and they were victims of genocide. The women were slavery and the children, the boys were killed. What they went through is unimaginable. And I don't know how people survive that I don't know how a psychiatrist can deal with it. You have to try, but it's it's it's more than more than the heart can bear. Yeah, when you're going to your point about peacetime I mean so what happens with these kids is they've had this extremely traumatic experience. They go to Sweden speaking seeking asylum asylum there is pretty complicated it can take a long time, and the kids kind of know that it's not going well and then as a coping mechanism. The children fell asleep, and now hundreds of them have fallen asleep in this sort of collective psychosis so it's a, it's a form of PTSD and which has a very particular way of revealing itself with this. They go to sleep they're on life support. They're eating their fine they can survive for years like this. But let me ask you about the title of your book it's solders don't go mad. How did you select the title. Using the title actually of rivers is essay or the repression of war experience. He said soldiers don't go mad. Until they lose control of ugly thoughts that send them jabbering among the trees. So it was it was undercutting the official view that soldiers don't go mad. And it was the appropriate title, and it also helped that he wrote it at Craig Lockhart which is where the most of the book book is set in two places at the front, where the, these incidents happened to traumatize them, and at Craig Lockhart where they dealt with those those experiences. And the in terms of. So how does the, I haven't read the entire book I mean so what is the denouement of all this. Well so soon and on both are treated and as I talk about other soldiers but I won't go into all of them now. And they both treated and they both go back to the front so soon went back and he was wounded, and he came had to come back to England as because he was wounded but he was also this time. Not trauma not not there because of protests and not and not staying too long because of the physical wound. He actually was traumatized the second time, and he went back to Craig Lockhart, which a place he hated couldn't stand great. He didn't be there he didn't feel that he was crazy if he didn't belong there. He spent four days at Craig Lockhart in 1918. And Dr rivers realizing that he shouldn't be there they he sent him to an auxiliary hospital in a stately home called Lennel House, where there was a much more relaxed regime and the officers, there were no psychiatrists living out of rivers would go and visit him there. And the woman called Lady Clementine wearing looked after the men as if they were house guests, and he had a better time there. Oh, and he didn't go he wasn't allowed to go back to France he wanted to be wasn't allowed to go back to France. Oh and went back to France, and astoundingly he wrote some of his finest poetry while in action. He became a very brave officer. He won the military cross. He was leading his men across a channel in France the summer was canal into German machine gunfire padding his men on the vaccine come on boys let's do it we'll go we'll we'll we'll get them and then he was cut down and killed. Four days before the armistice before that ended the war. That that is, that is it anyway, but soon didn't know about it so months later. He heard about it months later and heard about everything that happened. And he had, he had received letters from Owen in France. It only written before he died but he but he received them after he died. He realized how profoundly he had affected on and how much on valued his opinion of his poetry, and so soon was then involved in having volumes of poetry published after the war as a as a tribute to the to his comrade and friend. There was another aspect to their relationship both men were homosexual at a time when homosexual is illegal. It was only a few years before that Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for homosexuality. And they had to suppress it. So, you know, apart from their wardrobe, they had to deal with suppressing their physical nature. And that that was an added thing but was it was something that it helped to create a bond between them because they both understood what they were going through with that. Had there had there been previous conflicts where this kind of shell shock had existed. There I think in all previous conflicts, some people have gone mad, depending on the circumstances in the American Civil War. Many men who broke down and and the psychiatrist that there were no psychiatry but the doctors called their breakdown without physical wounds they called it windage. So what they were saying was that the wind created by a bullet going past you or a shell landing nearly doesn't actually hit you somehow disrupted the nervous system in the spine. And that was that was what caused them to go a bit crazy in my own family. My grandmother's father fought with the Illinois regiment in the Civil War. And she said that she was born she was born just after the Civil War but she said that she would go and see him in his room in his rocking chair, just staring like it's just staring for hours. Those men in the Civil War or in the First World War and the Spanish American War and any war you can name, never got over it and some of those some of the men that I write about were not cured or not did not this therapy was not successful. 3040 years after, after the war, if they heard a car backfire would jump under the bed shaking. One woman remembered seeing her father, breaking down when anything like that happened. And that some of those men into the war never ended. Yeah. I mean, and it's the nature of modern warfare. I mean we civil American Civil War was the first sort of industrial war where you have machine guns and you had railways taking people to the conflict and you had, you know, massive casualties because you're generating these big armies that the railways are getting people to the battlefield so you have Antietam and these other very large scale numbers of deaths and a given battle which I think if you, when you think about the Napoleonic Wars yes there were large numbers of, but there weren't machine guns. Well, there was artillery. Yeah. But the second, the First World War, though it up the anti 1000 times you had you had artillery of a firepower that the Civil War had never dreamed about rapid fire machine guns, much faster, much more lethal than in the Civil War. Plus you had poison gas. And then we're not only being gassed, they were constantly afraid to be in addition to which you had flamethrowers men were being burned alive by flamethrowers or any number of ways of dying. Plus you could dive in the trenches from the diseases the gangrene that you got from trench foot. There were just any number of ways of being killed and or being debilitated that you were constantly aware of and you're constantly afraid so this was a war that I mean it was the modern industrial war that outshone outshone all the ones that have gone before. And presumably a lot of this was also happening on the German side and the Russian side or the, I mean, also in terms of it would be an interesting question to know if the Germans had anything similar to create Lockhart or the Germans had I mean because Germany was the world leader in psychiatry they they they had they know they had mental hospitals for them. They discouraged more because because of the Prussian discipline they discouraged people getting there but they once they got there. They could be treated by very good psycho try psychiatrists Freud never treated shell shot he wrote about shell shot but he didn't know Austrian soldiers were were sent to him for treatment. Well, fast forward to World War Two, is it, you know, obviously, you know, think about you were GMO or other kinds of conflicts, we don't. I mean, you've written about World War Two in other contexts. Was it as a big an issue you mentioned this 20% figure. Was it as big an issue in World War Two, or. Was it an issue in World War Two. Less so because it wasn't a static war when there's movement rivers also wrote when there's movement when you have some control over your conditions, you're less likely to break down in when you're in the trenches you had no control over your you couldn't do anything you just waited to be killed. When there was a when there was a an offensive in the Second World War, you were less likely because you had some control over your actions. That said, 50,000 American soldiers deserted in the Second World War 100,000 British soldiers during the Second World War, many of them were suffering from what was now called battle fatigue. They put shell shot behind them and they called it battle fatigue, and thousands of soldiers were treated for battle fatigue in the Second World War. And then fast forward to Vietnam War obviously there was mental casualties of the Vietnam War. There are mental casualties on the streets of America today from the Vietnam War to as I speak. Yeah. And so, based on the work that you've done, what is the most effective technique for understanding this that a this is not a one size fits all answer and be that something like shell shot called battle fatigue or whatever may cover a range of kind of symptoms and emotions what what actually works to get people better. One thing that works. It's only one element but it's very important is that to know that you're never going to go back to the war again. In the World War one case. You know that you're going to be looked after and you're going to go home and you're not going to face those things again that helps. Then there there is good psychoanalysis, good dream analysis, sympathetic reception by your by your family and your friends. There are hundreds of things and there is no one thing I read about one American veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who cured himself and he was in a very bad shape he'd become an addict suffering terribly from PTSD and wasn't going to help you needed for the medicine veterans administration, who took up long distance hiking across the Appalachian Trail and the big trails in America. And he's now one of the world leading long distance hikers. And that's what keeps him going that's what cured him. I mean, it could be anything for anybody that that that would just happen to be the one thing that worked for him. But as you said, there is no single thing you can do is no single drug no single therapy that will do it forever. And clearly, you mentioned the Afghan Iraq Wars. I mean if you're in the special operations or community or special forces. You may have deployed a dozen times to these wars, you know, over a period of two decades and it's very stressful. It's a good reason not to have war. Only the dead have seen the end of war, according to Plato. You've, but your and your career has been very much embedded in the question of war and warfare. And so, as you, as you think about your next enterprise what what do you, if you can talk about it, what might it be. I'm doing research on three or four ideas, one of which is a gold war book so I might. I'm leaning towards that at the moment and that is a very different kind of. It was a subterranean war in which there was no frontline, except for the iron curtain but there was no proper frontline like in the world like in World War one, but that maybe or may not I'm not sure I just, I'm doing a lot of reading to try and figure and you mentioned you found this in a newspaper article this particular book how what where did you find it and how how did it. It was in the independent when the independent was still a print newspaper in London. It was just a just a glancing reference to this place that I never heard of, and it just roused my curiosity was wasn't even the article wasn't even about the place just it just mentioned. You know what are your overall sort of takeaways having spent several years of your life investigating this phenomenon and these these two great poets. I don't have a takeaway I mean I I suppose we wouldn't have had their great poetry if they hadn't been soldiers if they hadn't been at war if they hadn't been warriors. We wouldn't have had the great poetry if they hadn't been treated by two extremely sympathetic doctors, and we probably wouldn't have had their great poetry if they hadn't. If Sasuna no one had not become friends, there were other poets at Craig Lockhart but not of that stature that was one called Max Plowman, who was shell shocked and wrote poems and published poems but he never achieved the kind of status that that Sasuna was he was a very interesting man and someone who was in favor of the war and was dedicated to fighting the war and even when he came to Craig Lockhart wanted to go back to the front. But as time went on and he read the Bible and he studied what was happening in the war more and more he became a pacifist and then finally refused to fight again, and they court marshaled him. And of course, most people go into wars thinking they're going to be decisive and short. And certainly that was, I think, from reading your book that was certainly the view at the beginning of while we'll run right. Yeah, all those boys who in in August of 1914 they were all signing up thinking they'd be home by Christmas. That was, and does that expectation have an effect on this syndrome. I don't know. I expect that it might be a small factor but remember that most men didn't break down. They might have thought they were going to go home sooner but they stayed and they didn't break down. You have to understand why some men break down and why didn't. There were many studies and there were no one never came to a conclusion of why some did and some didn't. I mean, you've got some questions coming here okay from anonymous. This is so a question about drone pilots which you may or may not be able to answer but you know the fact that they're not mobile might that play into kind of any stress they might have and also thank you for your awareness of the battle against PTSD and the impact of, and it's impact so well I don't know when I say that the people were were unable to move, but they were under fire. Yeah, their lives and they couldn't do anything to save their lives. If a shell hit your dugout you were dead. Not much you could do. Or if even your officers ordered you to go over the top into no man's land to go into German machine guns was nothing you could do. You're sitting in a drone in a place with in Nevada or wherever you are looking at a television screen, blowing people up with your life isn't threatened at all so the circumstances are completely different. This is a question from ad bell jobs are modern Western armies today, recognizing this problem in a timely manner and acting upon it. Well, I can speak for the British and the American armies. They both recognize it they both have treatment centers for it, but they're not as so often happens with veterans. They're not adequate to the need that more money has to be invested in it more research has to be done and there has to be greater awareness of what these these men are going through and how it affects their whole lives. And that's just not happening but however, it's certainly better than it was and and the military is aware of it and the military medical services are dealing with it, but they could do a lot better than they're doing. You know, officers in particular were disproportionately affected because they were at the front on the front line. Is that kind of one of they were just personally affected for a number of reasons one because they were at the front and to they would be any battle they would have to they didn't they didn't send them out they and I'm talking about junior officers now, second lieutenants lieutenants and captains. There was that plus they have the added burden of responsibility for their men. And many went when they would lead their men into battle. If their men were killed they felt a burden of guilt as well that they had lived and the men, the men had died so they were added factors to that caused their breakdown that the non the enlisted men didn't face the enlisted men faced all the other horrors and the risk of their lives and so forth, but they didn't have responsibility for the lives of others. And also it's a big class element to all of this right I mean in terms of the leadership and have the, they were treated, compared to the enlisted man. How did that how did the class play out in all of this. Well the treatment for officers was much better than it was for enlisted men, clearly and just as the food was better for officers the, the billets were better for officers. The officers had enlisted men as their servants to do their cooking and cleaning for them. Oh, the office had a much better life in the war, then then enlisted men and that's, that's the class system in Britain and that was the class system in the British army. I went to new college Oxford and it's kind of striking if you go to the chapel that there's a memorial for the British people who went to new college Oxford, but there's also a memorial for the Germans who went. And I think it, and I took it partly, you know, if you were a German who was going to new college Oxford before World War one, you were from the upper class. And so was there. I mean, was there a sense of, you know, we're going to play by gentlemen's rules during the war, you mentioned poison gas clearly that is a very, you know, outside of what the way that we would conduct wars now in general. So, how did, how did the, the class aspect of the war, in fact, the way that it was fought by the British and the Germans who, after all, I mean, the British royal families, essentially a German. Did it make any difference or, you know, the coming video. I mean, it didn't seem to I mean, each side was pretty brutal to the other. The object was to win. And it meant killing thousands of your own men and tens of thousands of the others you did it I don't, I don't think that anybody was chivalrous because they happened to go to happen to go to university together. And of course the, the Russians lost the war early, I mean by 1917, and that contributed substantially to the Russian Revolution. The war played out in, and of course then when the war ended to get the Treaty of Versailles which was a punitive treaty, a peace treaty which to some degree provoked the Second World War. And why did you, why did you select the First World War having written really about contemporary warfare and World War Two. But World War Two I was writing about when people were still alive that I could interview and I could talk to I could get their letters and diaries and so forth so it was it was something I, it was accessible. I was living in Paris, when I wrote my first World War Two book Americans in Paris, and it just intrigued me that the city was under German Nazi occupation for all those four years. And the question that in my mind, which was probably in the mind of everybody who lived there at the time is, what would I do, would I resist the Germans would I collaborate with them but I take benefits from it or would I just try and mind my own business and wait till the war is over. And I realized that, while the French faced this that there were 5000 American citizens living in Paris at that time, who faced the same questions and answered them the same way the French did some collaborated some resisted and some just, why did their time. Yeah, you never really know until it happens. I mean if I if I were in Paris, and I was 18 years old and footloose and nothing to lose. I probably resist. If I were there and I were 42 and I had three kids in school and I know that if I did anything they're going to send my children to concentration camp. I would think very carefully about resisting. Yeah, and it means not exactly the same question, but you, the question of who broke down during World War One. There was no way to predict that going in right it just, you know, you would that would be revealed when you were on the frontline or did people were there a set of circumstances and which had made it more likely for you to basically have to be pulled out on a mental health basis. So in the same way. I mean, it's not exactly the same question but like you mentioned earlier that who in during World War One who broke down. You know, what it wasn't clear going in who that might be but as they did more work on the subject. Did they come to any conclusions about who was more likely to have to be pulled out on a mental health basis, or is it just sort of randomly distributed. They tried they tried very hard. They, they tried to look at the mental health history of their families before they enlisted and so forth but it didn't seem to be a great correlation. And there were many studies that they did. There were parliamentary investigations there were medical investigations, but nobody came to an inclusion to say, we, we can predict that this person entering the military will break down and this person entering the military will break down. They never got that far. Right. Well, is there anything you'd like to add in conclusion Charlie. I'm just going to mention the book is purchasable by the button on the right hand side of the screen. If you would like a great pleasure and a great intellectual adventure and something that will make you think twice about the supporting wars read Owens collected works is collected poems. There's one poem where he's, he's talking about a man is dying and they're dying around. And he says, the end, my friend you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory. The old lie. Dolce at decorum asked pro patria mori. I want you to read my book because I wrote it about in mind but I would, I would encourage anybody to read Owens poetry it's beautiful. This is a question about Homer. You may have no views on this but do you think Homer's works are about the veteran experience and psychological trauma in combat at home. If you mean the Iliad in the Odyssey, I assume. Well, the Iliad is about war and the Odyssey is about going home from war. And, and the Iliad is probably one of the most effective and dramatic portrayals of war in all of its gory detail with spears going through throats and men cutting each other to pieces with swords. I mean, it's, it's, I mean, it's, you could say it's an anti warbook if people react to it in that way. There's a, there's a, I opened the book with, it's from Herodotus. Not, not, but it's Herodotus. He writes about a man called Epizelus, the son of Kufagoras, who was in the thick of battle. He was suddenly stricken with blindness. Without blow of sword or dart in this blindness continued thenceforth during the whole of his life. The following is the account which he himself gave of the matter. A gigantic warrior with a huge beard which shaded all his shield stood over against him, but the ghostly semblance passed him by and slew the man on his side, such as I understand was the tale which Epizelus told. Well, I think that I think Epizelus had PTSD, he had shell shot. He was stridium with blindness, which I thank you very much for this for telling us about the book and the good luck with the book tour. And we'll wrap it up now. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Peter. Okay, thank you.