Apres la guerre

[Roberta]

All those thousands of people--veterans--the shell shocked, especially, but also the permanently wounded--what happened to all of them? What did they think and feel about the effects the war had on them? When Britain entered WWII, how did they deal with that, the Blitz, etc.?

Are there any books or sources that describe this? Or any facility that might organize its materials so that such information is "find-able"?

I'm brand-new to this site and forum, and love it! I'm also American, and my nation did not experience any of this in the same way the U.K. did.

Any help would be most appreciated!

Roberta

[Tim Birch]

The pension for the wounded was not enough to live on. Many limbless men finished up selling matchboxes and the like on street corners, relying on their obvious war disability to touch the consciences of passers by. Many of the shell shock cases went into mental institutions and wasted away the rest of their lives. The problem was compounded by the Great Depression which meant that the able bodied were also out of work, and the war victims tended to take second place to them.

Many men found it difficult to adjust to life in civy street. They had gone straight into the forces from school, and had never had to think for themselves or organise their lives. They were utterly lost when they were discharged, and missed the camaraderie of the Army. Large numbers of men took to the roads as tramps literally tramping from place to place doing work and trying to find part of their lives which had been denied and lost from them forever. They became the true "gentlemen of the road" living rough, and earning a few bob here and there on farms or road vergeside maintenance, but constantly moving on being unable to settle down. They were very different from to-day's winos and rough sleepers who are usually alchohol and/or drug dependent and lack the dignity of the tramps who rarely resorted to outright begging, and if they did, it was for a loaf of bread rather than for a fix.

When I was a boy in the 1950's these old soldier tramps were still quite a common sight in the British countryside.

Tim

[mordac]

Hi Roberta:

The situation for returning members of the CEF was much the same in Canada as Tim has mentioned in the UK. Many of the men were promised their jobs back when they returned from the war. Few of these promises were kept. Then came the Great Depression...

Also as Tim mentioned, many returning veterans found it difficult to return to 'normal' civilian life. Some of those who found work couldn't keep a job for long and went from job to job and from city to city.

A forgotten group of veterans were those that suffered from the lasting affects of being gassed. Many of these men spent the rest of their lives living in Canadian military hospitals.

Attached is photo of a demonstration by unemployed ex-soldiers, taken in Toronto on Thanksgiving Day 1920.

Garth

[ianw]

Welcome Roberta. Several other Yanks are members here. We really are very tolerant !

The Taylor family of Leatherhead , Surrey lost 5 sons in the Great War. One returned home without a leg. He used to earn an extra sixpence in the 20's doing casual work at Leatherhead Golf Club - as a caddie ! Things were tough in those days before the welfare state.

[Drummy]

Interesting article by Jack Cavangh on the Hell Fire Corner web site that you may find of use about the UK:

The Cost was still Apparent in 1938.

In 1938 which was twenty years after the cessation of hostilities, there were still 442,000 men still alive who were so maimed, gassed, nerve-racked, or otherwise ruined in health, that they could not work at all, or only with diminished efficiency, and were wholly or partly dependent on the State for money to live.

Over one hundred and twenty seven thousand widows still mourned their men that they had last seen in uniform, and two hundred and twenty four thousand parents and other dependants were still suffering through the loss of sons and relatives who were their breadwinners. There were 8,000 with one or both legs missing, 3,600 with one or both arms missing, together with 90,000 with limbs damaged to a marked degree.

Ten thousand men had eyesight injured by poison gas, and explosions, with 2,000 of these being completely blind.

Head injuries accounted for 15,000 with many wearing metal plates to protect them, and 15,000 had been deafened by explosions of various kinds. Most soldiers who had served near the front line, or in the artillery suffered from some impairment of their hearing.

There was no such thing as industrial deafness, being recognised as a pensionable disease in those days.

Severe exertion due to heavy labour in the trenches produced Hernias in 7,000 men making them unfit for manual work, whilst some 2,000 still suffered the effects of Frostbite with in some cases loss of toes and fingers.

Thirty two thousand more suffered from various unclassified wounds causing disability of various kinds. Many of these men (14,000) still had wounds unhealed that required treatment including amputation even at this late stage. Much of this was due to a condition called Latent Sepsis which was very common in the wounded of the Great War especially in France and Flanders. Almost without exception soldiers wounded on the Western Front had wounds which were grossly infected, due to the manured soil in which they occurred. Even after these wounds had healed, many still contained organisms deep within the tissues which were liable to flare up, many years after, to cause amputation and even death.

These are the figures for the wounded, but the legacy of diseases contracted during their service, such as Malaria, Dysentery, and other tropical diseases, still persisted in 1938, the year before the next great conflict began.

[Clive Maier]

When I was a child – I am 65 now – the legacy of the First World War was very evident, although of course, I did not recognise it for what it was. I thought the large number of limbless men, with their empty sleeves and pinned-up trouser legs, was quite normal. And it was not just the men. Single women, rather unkindly known as ‘maiden aunts’, were commonplace in a time of universal marriage. I imagined this was a natural phenomenon, not the bereavement and gender surplus that it really was. Commonplace too, were men whom we children were warned could be a ‘bit funny’. This did not mean what it would mean today. These were men damaged by their experiences. My father’s friend Arthur could, we were told, be a bit funny. He had been buried and all but suffocated by shell burst, and more than once. Arthur carried on a boot and shoe repair business in a small garden shed a couple of doors down from us. He worked in solitary there and whether this was all he could cope with or all he could get, I don’t suppose we will ever know now.

[Roberta]

Wow! Thanks to all who have replied so far, and keep the replies coming! I'm especially impressed because, living in the Pacific Northwest as I do, it's eight hours earlier here! Double thanks to IanW for his statement of tolerance!

Did any of the veterans you mention write of the effect of the war on their lives? I know, of course, that the war played a role in Siegfried Sassoon's life and writing for the rest of his days, that Graves ducked-and-covered ten years later when a car surprised him by backfiring, that, according to Samuel Hynes (I think), only one memoir was ever written by a physically or psychologically disabled veteran. Is sifting through the 800 oral testimonies at the IWM my only hope?

Thanks again, so much, everybody!

Cheers from Seattle, which barely existed in 1918 . . . !

Roberta

[Guest Steve Seaman]

Roberta,

Thanks for an excellent question. The post's in reply make sad reading.I suspect that by modern standards the same goes on today , you only have to look at the Vietnam vets and our own ex soldiers from the Falklands and Gulf conflicts.

Steve

[uncle bill]

The French veterans formed a very powerful lobby, Les anciens combattants which made sure that their grievances were heard many years later. They also helped war widows like Blanche Maupas rehabilitate her husband's name. He was one of the four corporals shot for example in the horrible Champagne offensives of 1915, an episode that inspired the book that was later adapted by Kubrick, Paths of Glory. The film was banned in France, curiously enough because of pressure from the anciens combattants which goes to show all were not pacifists. I think the French have great difficulties in auto criticism and didn't like the way the film portrayed their war.

Another very interesting story is that of the Gueules Cassées, literally the broken faces, men whose mutilations were so terrible that they retreated from public view. Colonel Picot, himself a gueule cassée formed a union in 1921 and they bought a chateau ( domain du coudon ) in the Var region where the facial victims of the war could escape the public gaze. The union still exists to this day and is a very wealthy organization, principally as a major shareholder in the French lottery. They contribute towards medical research.

[Tim Birch]

I remember being told by one of my schoolmasters, himself a veteran of the Great War, of a friend who on being discharged from the army was too frightened to catch a bus because it was something he had never done on his own and he didn't know how to buy a ticket or how he would know where to get off. Yet this man, who had been conscripted on leaving school, had endured 18 months in the trenches, had been bombarded by artillery and had taken part in bayonet attacks.

Tim

[Kate Wills]

That reminds me of the story of a local schoolmaster who had lost an eye in the war and, mid-lesson was sometimes obliged to hide behind the blackboard to slip his false eye out for a moment to ease the pain.

[Guest Ian Bowbrick]

Interesting comment about someone remembering the limbless men as a child, I too remember them back in the late 1960s/early 1970s. We also had a French onion seller down our way who only had one leg but used to ride a bicycle. He used to chat with my father when he did his rounds and told him how he lost his leg at Verdun. I never could work out how he stopped himself from falling off! He was a very quiet man but would shake everytime he heard an aeroplane.

Ian

[Guest tintin]

My Gran's brother Harry was gassed, stabbed and taken prisoner in the German offensive of 1918, he suffered malnutrition in the POW camp.

He was a very depressed man when he came home and this manifested itself in heavy drinking which led to inability to keep down a job.

Will and Don his brothers were killed in the war and Mabel his elder sister in the Spanish influenza outbreak - all in 1918.

I too remember that when I was a young boy the disabled were a more common site in the streets due to both wars.

[paul guthrie]

When I was in the army stationed in Germany in 68, 69 - it beat the hell out of Vietnam- I visited a sauna a lot with German pals. There were an amazing amount of shot up men as you can imagine.