Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930

Eds Mark S Micale, Paul Lerner

Cambridge University Press, £40, pp 315

ISBN 0 521 58365 9

Rating:

Our fascination with the psychological costs of the first world war shows no sign of diminishing. The successes of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy and Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong have been a publisher's dream. Battlefield tours have never been more popular. Apparently sane men from Humberside recently consented to spend three weeks in a recreated Flanders trench on behalf of the cameras, although the fact that all survived the experience unscathed suggests that the recreation was not entirely authentic. However, afterwards all the participants made a pilgrimage to one of those vast, spellbinding cemeteries—to be confronted with Sassoon's “nameless names”—and paid their tearful respects.

There is a barely suppressed subtext to much of our modern fascination with the psychiatry of the Great War. It is that we do things better …