A Soldiers Suicide Letter

[Robert Dunlop]

Neil, that is my first reaction too. Particularly the comment about 'bursting'.

Robert

[Guest]

Hi Neil.He was obviously feeling the strain of responsibility too.Seeking to be demoted back to Private.Was that quite common? I wouldn't have thought his Captain would have been able to have done anything about his rank would he?That also seems to smack of desperation.The poor man was obviously tormented.

Mike

[Gunner Bailey]

Hi Neil

Thanks for sharing this with us. It's a terribly sad story but one probably repeated many times. No less a tragedy for the families concerned though.

I think this has to be a result of shell shock. Almost all at the front must have suffered from it, but the results varied enormously. At least you can still be proud of his service and his unblemished record.

Gunner Bailey

[ianw]

I think the question about a head wound relates to the comment 'my head hurts so bad', perhaps seeking a physical cause for the symptom.

Robert

Yes, that was exactly what I was simply trying to establish - although a closer reading of the thread reveals that he was not so wounded. Not quite sure what Geraint's rant was trying to say. Perhaps I am just being obtuse.

[Dragon]

Ahh! Come on Ian! The suggestion that you needed to be struck on the head is demeaning! Psychological illness, severe depression, and chronic mental problems are NOT caused by a bump on the head.

Indeed they may be. Although it is obviously untrue to say that all depressed people have had head or brain injuries, there is evidence that head or brain injury may precipitate depressive episodes or behavioural changes in individuals. (There is a link with later-life dementia and earlier head injuries in some people.) Further, it isn't possible to rule out predisposition to mental health problems or the effects of head injury or other brain trauma earlier in life.

I have spent a fair amount of time with suicidal and very severely depressed people. The privacy of one's mind is about the last thing one can hang on to. I feel that in probing a man's suicide, there is a danger of becoming mental health tourists; and in seeking the painful close-up, there is a risk of marginalising the man by defining him principally by his mental distress and its outcome. And people might get it wrong.

The suicide-fact and the note is the evidence there is; anything else is likely to be supposition, guesswork and imagination, because even medical records would only say what someone observed. Here are total strangers, scrutinising the evidence 90 years on to guess at a truth. In order to preserve the man's dignity, I tend to feel people should ask themselves how far they are entitled to this truth.

[geraint]

Sorry Ian mate - wasn't ranting, and 'demeaning' was too strong a word. It was reaction at the connection made in your posting to headwound=depression, and my own background of having gone through a longish period of severe clinical depression that caused me to react. There's a pint of Spitfire in the bar for you!

[NeilEvans]

Geez, you try and catch up, then another post comes along.

The more concerning thing is which was wrote first.

His place of death, would almost certainly have been well known by him, he'd have walked some 3/4 miles from his home to reach Bryn Elwy at St. Asaph. It is a tranquil location, by the river quite seclueded. He left his home equiped to die, so why take the second letter, i suspect the second letter was wrote not long before he took his own life, a sign of desperation.

It is obvious he knew what was troubling him, his transfer didn't work, sleeping at his mother's and being near his family didn't work. Being away from the front is safety didn't work. Reverting from L/Sgt speaks of total desperation in nearing his end.

'I am better dead than insane'

An horrific line.

Neil

[manchester terrier]

The suicide-fact and the note is the evidence there is; anything else is likely to be supposition, guesswork and imagination, because even medical records would only say what someone observed. Here are total strangers, scrutinising the evidence 90 years on to guess at a truth. In order to preserve the man's dignity, I tend to feel people should ask themselves how far they are entitled to this truth.

Puts another perspective on this thread for me, thanks Dragon.

cheers

baz

[NeilEvans]

I'm glad this thread has provoked some thought. Are there any statistics on the number of suicides in the war?

Neil

[phil andrade]

I'm glad this thread has provoked some thought. Are there any statistics on the number of suicides in the war?

Neil

Yes : the German army, from a total of two million deaths from all causes 1914-1918, officially reported 5,106 as suicides. Nothing to hand for British or French statistics, though I'm sure that they must be available. The United States reported 916 suicides, which, as a proportion of total military dead, is a much higher rate than the German one. Ironically, it appears that the higher the proportion that was actually deployed in battle, the lower the suicide rate. Maybe troops that languish in garrison duty are more at risk of suicide than those who actually fight. But what of suicides after the war? We read so much about suicides among our veterans today : Falklands, Gulf War etc, and then there is a phenomenal suicide rate among Vietnam vets in USA. PTSD is wreaking havoc....but why, and how, did so many survivors of the Somme and elswhere adjust and live out their remaining days?

There were suicides - Edmund Campion Vaughn, author of Some Desperate Glory, comes to mind. Touchy topic, this; I'll resist the temptation to comment on prevailing obsessions with counselling, compensation, PC etc.

Phil.

[Dragon]

Touchy topic, this; I'll resist the temptation to comment on prevailing obsessions with counselling, compensation, PC etc.

I doubt you would be saying this if you had the faintest idea of what it is like to try to live with a PTSD. The implication that a sufferer is somehow weak is offensive and lacking compassion. It also fails to recognise that some members of the forum are former service personnel and members of other occupations who are afflicted even at this very moment. Where on earth does "PC" come into this?

Only those who have a diagnosis of PTSD or related disorders can know what it is truly like to endure the terrors which are part of living with this condition: the long nights where you daren’t go to sleep because the places your mind generates during sleep are just too terrifying to visit, the sneaking malevolent incubi who are ready to pounce in the most mundane situations and transform them into places of terror, the ghastly hallucinations, the black places that are absolutely visible to you even when your rational mind (what’s left of it) says that they can’t possibly be there, the screwed up logic, the feeling that your mind is a jigsaw puzzle smashed and scattered into irretrievable pieces. The sepsis has to come out somehow so you dream it out, every night for years, several times each ghastly night. And the rest of the time, you’re frozen.

When you have a PTSD, you need people who believe in you, accept you, respect you, make few allowances unless you ask them to and permit you the dignity of managing your own condition in the way that your psychiatric professionals have helped you to. As long as you know they’re kind, their humour and individuality might be the lift that takes you from nihilistic to merely black. Empathetic friends who know that your mind is haunted, who’re sensitive to your personal demons yet refuse to let you define yourself by your mental health and who let you be you, are special and rare. Condemnation is too easy.

Today psychiatric services can help people to achieve some quality of life. Just because the sufferers after the Great War bit their lips and - we're led to believe - got on with it doesn't make it wrong or weak or "politically correct" that today's patients are given help.

Gwyn

[Guest]

Well said, Gwyn.

Heard of a farmer who after serving in WW1, returned home, married, raised a family, then twenty years after the war, went out into a far paddock and blew his brains out.

For many, the horror never went away.

They did not have the services available today.

We that have not been in that dark place, can not possibly begin to imagine.

Those that have been, and are in that dark place, my heart goes out to.

Kim

[John_Hartley]

counselling,

Personally found it helpful during a particular time of my. Not wildly helpful but it was well worth coughing up for a few sessions.

Wouldnt describe it as "politically correct" to have counselling - but then I never really know what "politically correct" is intended to mean and just assume it's an insult of some sort.

John

[Nigel Marshall]

Yes Gwynn,

As always, well said. I knew I had read much of your post before , and a very simple seach lead me to a previous thread on PTSD which was discussed at length and from various angles. No harm in saying it again when it is absolutely valid and very understanding. Thanks.

As for suicide of soldiers years after their war ended, well, look at L/Sgt Fred McNess VC, Scots Guards. He won his VC on the Somme at Ginchy in September 1916, getting terribly wounded in the action with major facial wounds involving the loss of part of his lower jaw, which was re-built from a rib bone, and wounds to his neck and chest. Fred McNess VC was set up in business as a cobbler and boot dealer with premises on Woodhouse Lane in Leeds. The Second World War put him out of business after all his staff were called up. His own pleas for a military position where he was willing to do 'anything useful' were rejected due to his age and wounds.

He moved to Bournemouth when he retired, but after only a few months in his new home he was dead by his own hand.

Many theories have gone around trying to figure out why he killed himself. The disturbance of the move, retirement giving him too much time to think, the impending 40th anniversary of his VC action, his pain and fragile health from his wounds have all been considered to be contributory factors, and the truth probably covers most if not all of these possibilities.

The tragedy is that for Fred McNess VC and many of his kind, the war which ended for most in 1918, never ever ended for them.

Cheers,

Nigel

[geraint]

Doesn't even have to be 'diagnosed' Gwyn. My son in law served 8 years REME attached to Light Infantry, served in Iraq and has Op Telic medal. When asked if there was any councelling available in the army; his response was that they would have been laughed out of the unit if a squaddie even mentioned PTSD or councelling. Councelling facilities are there but seldom if ever used. He's never sought advice, and doesn't feel the need to, never diagnosed; but the symptoms are there. Sleepless nights, cold sweats, the 'horrors', riveted by TV news of casualties, then turns pale and quiet for hours. Keeps a mental catalogue of mates who are now in prison, suffering from drug or alcohol problems, and of suicides. It was depressing listening to him describe what happened to the lads in unit photographs taken only five years ago.

What does give him support is reading threads like this one on the GWF! Same experiences; but another time, another war, and other people. AND that there are people who sincerely try to understand.

[NeilEvans]

What does give him support is reading threads like this one on the GWF! Same experiences; but another time, another war, and other people. AND that there are people who sincerely try to understand.

Well Said Geraint.

Neil

[Dragon]

Yes, I did repeat myself, on the assumption that a new user wasn't going to trawl through a search on PTSD. I didn't see any point in trying to rewrite it. I find many public attitudes to mental ill-health to be simply callous and those at times seen on this forum are no exception.

As for adjustment .... What families went through may not even be formally seen as the consequence of a man's mental ill-health. Or even seen. I knew a WW1 MM war hero - and please make allowances for my vagueness, as this is the Internet, but no relative of mine - whose family were, to outsiders, impeccable. Wife, suitable number of children, committed to religion.... but whose family life contained shocking, taboo, abuses. From what I've been told, I'm reasonably sure that picking his mate's brains off the floor left him dysfunctional. I think it's next to impossible to estimate how many families had to cope in private with surviving soldiers whose behaviour was disturbed, and kept it a dark secret, because what alternative did a wife with children have, in the social climate of some communities? I know Peter Barham discusses the effects on families in 'Forgotten Lunatics'. What account is taken of suicides of family members who simply couldn't cope with the man who came home? Or even suicide attempts - which may have continued into adulthood?

I understand that trauma psychiatry is now investigating the effects of PTSD in old people in whom the lability of old age is precipitating the delayed effects of war service in 1939-45. I was in communication with someone a couple of weeks ago about a man in his 80s whose PTSD was triggered by the recent death of his wife. The fact is that we just don't know whether people coped or not, and how long it may be before they can't.

Prompt intervention and modern techniques can arrest the condition. I cannot see why this is dismissed as pandering to weakness.

Gwyn

(Just re-read the thread linked in Nigel's post. Crumbs, that was some discussion!)

[Desdichado]

I watched an Australian documentary a year or so ago in which some survivors of the Burma Railway were interviewed. Although PTSD was not specifically mentioned, one old man broke down and, apparently when off-camera - was reduced to a nervous wreck. I suspect, that he had never discussed his experiences in public before.

[NeilEvans]

I'm remember this chap, Robert Gamble, of South Shropshire, buried Shrewsbury.

http://www.cwgc.org/search/casualty_detail...casualty=393367

http://content.ancestry.co.uk/iexec/?htx=V...&pid=211930

Image 1569 provides some good reading.

Neil

[Andrew Hesketh]

Neil,

I just came across a write up in the Abergele & Pensarn Visitor of 1 July 1916. Full account below.

ANOTHER SAD KINMEL TRAGEDY

___

Pathetic Farewell Letter

____

The story of still another Kinmel Camp tragedy was told to the Flintshire Coroner on Wednesday, the victim being Lance Sergeant Nuttall of the 12th Welsh Regiment, who was found hanging in a wood near the camp.

Nuttall had been transferred from the 9th battalion after being wounded at the front, and sent home for convalescence. Of late he had complained of loss of memory and the breaking up of his nerves. He wrote to his company officer asking to be allowed to revert back to the rank of private, as he did not consider, with his loss of memory, that he could properly perform the duties of a non-commissioned officer. He had been hit by shrapnel in the head, and complained of pains there. When his body was found there was a letter in his cap, in which he wrote: -

"I, Lance Sergeant Nuttall, cannot rest day or night, my head is so bad, and I deeply grieve to think of the pain and trouble it will cause. I am going to see the other world. May God comfort my dear ones, and have mercy on my soul. But I am better dead than insane, and I have done my bit for England. Good-bye all. My head is bursting again now. God comfort my loved ones. Amen, amen, amen."

The jury returned a verdict of 'suicide whilst temporarily insane', and paid tribute to the character of Nuttall as a soldier and a man, for he was well known in the district. His conduct in the army showed that he was of exemplary character.

[NeilEvans]

Cheers Andy, that's fantastic. I often wondered how he was wounded, now I know.

Neil

[Guest Patsysatch]

Hello Neil. I'm helping with the development of a none profit making website http://www.flintshirewarmemorials.com. I'm researching the names on the WW1 memorial at Bodelwyddan church which includes John Leonard Nuttall. Whilst searching on the internet I came across your post regarding the same name. As well as giving the recorded details of the servicemen we also want to provide as much background information about their lives before and during the war. We don't post information on the website unless it is verified and therefore I am contacting you in the hope that you will give your permission to use the content that you posted on this forum?

Patricia

[TEW]

I was going to add bits from Hurst's text on 'Concussion and so called shell shock headache' but seems a bit unnecessary 90 years on. Anybody wants it, I'll provide a link.

However, Nuttall's MIC shows his number as 13575 (not as per newspaper) and was Cpl. Nuttall. MIC marked as suicide 25/6/16 temp insane. OC I/C records requests perm to dispose of medals 1921.

TEW