Soldiers, psychiatrists and military historians

“Some of us,” intones Sir Max Hastings, with all the authority of a man who has written enough bestselling military histories to fill a small packing case – “Some of us reject any glib response to complex social and psychological issues.”

Well, yes, and that’s part of the problem.

The “complex social and psychological issues” to which he refers are the soldiers who come back from active service physically intact, but mentally ravaged – suffering from depression, anxiety, terrifying flashbacks, alcoholism and, most destructive of all, a tendency to lash out suddenly, violently, and unpredictably. The charity Combat Stress alone has 5,400 ex-servicemen and women on its books.

And the “glib response” that he rejects is the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.

Sir Max’s airy dismissal of PTSD came in a review of my book, Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell. It’s not possible, as I say in the book, to offer a firm diagnosis of a man who has been dead for six years, but Scannell – one of the greatest of the World War II poets, and a leading and prize-winning literary giant – suffered from all the symptoms listed above. That could be a coincidence, of course, and even if he did suffer from PTSD, it doesn’t excuse what he did – which included inflicting savage beatings on the women in his life. But it may help to explain it.

And it’s by finding explanations for such behaviour that we may begin to find ways to alleviate it or even cure it.

Ironically, if Sir Max had looked a little more closely, he would have found that Scannell himself was something of an ally. In one poem, written late in his life after he had read of soldiers returning from Iraq being diagnosed with PTSD, he scoffed at the idea. What he and other soldiers had shared 60 years before as they approached the French coast – Scannell was on the beaches at D-Day – was, he said,

                  “pre-traumatic stress disorder, or

                  As specialists might say, we were shit-scared.”

Sir Max takes a similarly bluff, gung-ho line. “Many others suffered far worse things during the war, and behaved less atrociously afterwards,” he says.

Perhaps he missed the contribution to my book of a leading psychiatrist who is an acknowledged expert on PTSD. Classic sufferers from the condition, she said, have not only experienced the terrors of warfare, but have also been brutalised in childhood with, typically, a violent father and a cold, unaffectionate mother who connived at the violence. That – also possibly coincidentally, Sir Max might say – was precisely Scannell’s experience.

There was some excuse for Scannell being dismissive of the contribution of psychiatrists – he, after all, came from the generation of the stiff upper lip and the repressed emotion. Sir Max, living in the modern world, and having studied warfare and conflict all his working life, has none.

His considered diagnosis of Scannell and his life story is “Repugnant”. That doesn’t matter to Scannell, of course – he’s well beyond hurt, even from such an authoritative source as Sir Max. But it’s bitterly hurtful to his family, the women who loved and still love him, and to his friends. And it does immeasurable damage to thousands of other suffers of PTSD. It’s easy to mourn the dead with a red poppy, but those victims of war who are inconveniently alive surely deserve support and understanding too.

“Some of Scannell’s war poetry is memorable and even distinguished,” Sir Max grudgingly acknowledges, although the general tone of his review implies that he was really little more than a minor figure. Well, that simply suggests that Sir Max is a much better military historian than he is either psychiatrist or literary critic.