From very early times physical conflict between peoples has induced shock among many of the combatants and problems can also occur for veterans long after the conflict has ended. Many centuries ago Roman historians, like Suetonius, had recorded incidents of the adverse reactions of some soldiers to battle. In the US Civil War (1861-65) a condition called ‘nostalgia’, ‘soldier’s heart’, or ‘camp disease’ was noted that was marked by a ‘lassitude of the spirit’, which veterans might be ‘laughed out of’ by his comrades, or by ‘appeals to his manhood’.

Sixty years later, during WW1, over 300 British soldiers were shot at dawn by firing squads from their own side. A few were accused of crimes, but most had been charged with cowardice and desertion. Due to the horrific nature of the warfare, however, many were suffering from ‘Shellshock’ – the name used then for PTSD.

In the decade after the ending of WW1, pension boards examined over 100,000 cases of former front-line troops suffering from psychological disorders. Many of the worst cases were kept out of sight, locked away in mental institutions – often till they died. At the start of WW2 the British Government was still paying £2 million pounds a year towards shell-shocked veterans of the First World War.

Five centuries before William Shakespeare (1564 -1616), who is often called the greatest writer in the English language, did not have a name for this condition that affected many veterans, but he knew and wrote about it. In his Henry IV – Part One, Act 2, Scene 3, Shakespeare has Lady Percy express concern about her warrior husband Hotspur:

“O, my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offence have I this fortnight been
A banish’d woman from my Harry’s bed?
Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit’st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks;
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I thee have watch’d,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry ‘Courage! To the field!’ And thou hast talk’d
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents, frontiers, parapets, of cannon,
Of prisoners’ ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirr’d thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream;
And in thy face strange motions have appear’d.
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest.
O, what portents are these?
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not.”

Those close to a veteran are usually the first to see how different they can be after conflict, from how they were before they went off to war – and close family members often think it is a stranger who has returned to them. So, Lady Percy was expressing anxieties often felt by family members on the return of a veteran from conflict and her description of Hotspur’s condition indicates that:

• He was anxious, tense and preferred to be alone and had lost his appetite for food and sex.
• He appeared depressed, was easily startled and his mind was still in ‘a heady fight’.
• He was experiencing problems sleeping and when sleep came it was troubled, with murmurings and nightmares about the wars.

All these suggest that he was suffering from post-battle trauma, which we would now call PTSD. The condition was not recognised during the time of Shakespeare, but he did provide us with one of the first detailed accounts of this type of combat-related psychological disorder. We now know that PTSD can often occur among those who fight in brutal conflicts and you can listen to Lady Percy’s dramatic speech here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ2vF2zQIDo

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Article by Aly Renwick, who co-founded Veterans In Prison with Jimmy Johnson. Aly served for 8 years in the British Army (1960-8).