The Evil Hours

by David J. Morris

  The urge to reinvent one’s moral and physical universe through travel is so common that some students of trauma think it might be biological. Laurence Gonzales, a National Geographic writer who has written extensively on the science of survival, wrote that “travel is a time-honored strategy for healing. It forces the unconscious reorganization of a number of areas of the brain, especially those involving the hippocampus, which has the special function of creating spatial maps. Every time you travel to an unfamiliar environment, your brain undergoes an important transformation.” The neuroscience behind this claim hasn’t been firmly established, but the point remains: Homer was on to something.

  Homer died some four hundred years before Hippocrates, the father of medicine, was born, and the bodies of knowledge they promulgated were as separate then as they are today. Hippocrates, as with Plato and his idea that the quality of one’s childhood influences the quality of one’s adulthood, formulated notions of the self that have, over the centuries, exerted a powerful influence over the field of psychiatry, not to mention our general view of human development. Some students of depression have even gone so far as to argue that Hippocrates is, in effect, the grandfather of Prozac, viewing the body as the originating point of mental ills.

  Nothing remotely similar can be said of Homer, whose works have largely remained under a sort of house arrest in ever-shrinking classics departments across the United States (most of the classical scholars I know are forced to scrape by, struggling to find teaching work). Even today, when so many Greek assumptions about life and society are woven into the fabric of our lives (such as their faith in human reason, individuality, and democracy), the Greek views of postwar life and heroic loss remain oddly removed from our modern view of trauma. In Denis Johnson’s epic Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke, the dominant character, a towering army colonel turned CIA puppetmaster named Sands, observes that “war is ninety-percent myth,” a truism that was never more resonant than with our Greek heritage and trauma. War, it seems to me, is mostly myth, ancient ideas and dreams handed down to us by our fathers, stories we live out unknowingly, often having no idea of the invisible stories and archetypes that guide us from day to day.

  Unfortunately, whatever psychological insights Homer has bequeathed to us remain hidden behind the wall of a more recent, very unclassical sort of mythology, obscured by our society’s need for heroes who are somehow immune to normal human weakness, which conversely views survivors as damaged goods, aliens, and walking time bombs rather than as people burnished by adversity. In my own life, my experience has always been that the joys of survival, the exuberant embrace of life that seemed to emanate from my deepest cells, was always greatest on my way home, neither here nor there, in the remote airfields and transient barracks that are every war correspondent’s postwar odyssey. Home: that was always another matter entirely, and it was almost as if some deeper sense of life’s preciousness leaked out in transit, hour by hour, in between the world of the war and the world of the protected.

  If, as Siddhartha Mukherjee argues, “every era casts illness in its own image,” there can be few clearer examples of the way that a particular age has cast the image of psychological trauma than the Middle Ages, an era dominated by the Catholic Church. During this period, the post-traumatic condition, such as it was, was treated as a question of theology and, secondarily, as a matter of tending to the moral needs of warriors returning to their communities after war. In a world viewed as God’s Kingdom on Earth, where little distinction was made between the natural and the supernatural, the first challenge was how to conceptualize violence in a religion whose messiah’s teachings strongly emphasized pacificism over bearing arms. Keeping this in mind, leaders in the early Christian church assumed that warriors returning from battle would be racked by feelings of guilt and shame over their role in breaking the “Truce of God,” and they paid an unusual amount of attention to their plight, providing them with what could generously be described as a sort of religious medicine. Veterans today are often encouraged to undergo therapy and deal with their conflicted feelings about their wartime experiences, but returning warriors during the Medieval period were encouraged, and in some instances commanded, to undergo various rituals of repentance and reconciliation, cleansing themselves before the Lord. In the eyes of the church, warriors were, in essence, sinners until they got right with God. As Pope Gregory VII put it, “It is impossible to engage in military service without sin.” In particular, church leaders were concerned with those warriors who had broken or believed they had broken the Sixth Commandment, which declared without qualification that “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

  Dying and suffering exemplified Christian devotion, as Jesus showed on the cross, but actual killing presented a number of theological problems that vexed the church for hundreds of years. Oddly, while church leaders at the time acknowledged war’s horrors and worried that it rendered men “more savage than wild beasts,” the officially stated concerns were almost always of the cosmic variety, ensuring that the potential sins associated with warfare were properly understood and accounted for and that a sort of balance could be maintained between the politics of the time and the need to please God.

  Apart from the theological concerns with killing, there was also a deeper sense that the act of killing somehow soiled the killer, even when the killing was justified by the powers that be, a sentiment found in The Odyssey as well. (After slaughtering Penelope’s suitors, Odysseus calls fire and brimstone down upon the hall in order to cleanse it.) Whether or not the clergy were aware of this primitive belief regarding “blood pollution,” they often insisted that warriors who had killed stay away from church for a period of time. The Archbishop of Canterbury in the seventh century, for instance, ordered that “one who slays a man by command of his lord shall keep from the church for forty days.”

  Throughout the Middle Ages, religious authorities imposed penances on returning warriors, requiring, among other things, periods of prayer, fasting, and abstinence from communion. These edicts, which came down in a manner not unlike Supreme Court rulings today, were designed to work within a larger body of Christian theology, which, among other things, created the first “just war” philosophy in the West. The severity of the penances that were imposed depended upon the kind of war the soldier in question had participated in and on the number of people they had personally killed or wounded. One church document from the tenth century, the “Arundel Penitential,” ordered a penance of one year if the killing was committed in a battle ordered by a king, whereas in the case of a war ordered by a lesser prince, where some doubt existed as to its “justness,” the penance required was two years, which was the same penance required of someone involved in a homicide.

  Church records from the Middle Ages are rife with such “penitentiaries,” or holy requirements, imposed on soldiers who had killed during a war. These edicts were often surprisingly detailed, outlining the specific alms and acts of contrition required of those who had fought. In 1068, in one of the most dramatic decrees of the time, an official gathering of Norman bishops instituted a set of penances upon all ranks of the army who had fought with William the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings:

  Anyone who knows that he killed a man in the great battle must do penance for one year for each man that he killed.

  Anyone who wounded a man, and does not know whether he killed him or not, must do penance for forty days for each man he thus struck (if he can remember the number), either continuously or at intervals.

  Anyone who does not know the number of those he wounded or killed must, at the discretion of his bishop, do penance for one day in each week for the remainder of his life; or, if he can, let him redeem his sin by perpetual alms, either by building or endowing a church.

  Of particular relevance today, this set of commands, which are sometimes referred to as the “Hastings Articles,” goes on to say,

  The archers who killed some and wounded others, but are necessarily ignorant as to how many, mu
st do penance as for three Lents.

  The psychological experience of war during the Medieval period was, needless to say, quite different than the experience of war today. Combat at that time was, generally speaking, far more personal and intimate than it is today, being almost exclusively a hand-to-hand affair. It’s possible that, for many warriors at the time, the primary psychological concern was to understand the slaughter they had been a part of and to come to terms with it through the dominant moral authority of the time, the Catholic Church. Physical distance between enemies in war is significant, and it is likely that the act of killing another person in the Medieval period, because it was generally done by the sword, would have been more distressing than the act of killing today. Studies of soldiers throughout history confirm the judgment of Dave Grossman, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and former West Point psychology professor, that “man is not by nature a killer.” Modern wars, while more destructive, are far less intimate, a fact that increases the death toll, greatly reduces the burden on the individual soldier, and helps to explain why grappling with guilt over killing was a preeminent concern during the Middle Ages.

  Today, the idea that a religious ritual of some kind could somehow resolve the myriad conflicts that arise after combat might seem ridiculous to many. Psychology has by and large replaced the church as the arbiter of inner conflict. The therapist, in some ways, plays the role of the priest today. And yet the questions of one’s guilt and culpability in war and in other traumatic events remain. In times of extreme stress, one’s moral horizon contracts to the size of a pinhole. One is captive to the needs of the moment and nothing else. In time, survivors are forced to pay for what the moment made them do. A soldier, if he kills, kills for his buddies. Later, the soldier comes home, and in the absence of his buddies must face what he has done. As Ernest Hemingway wrote in For Whom the Bell Tolls, “Never think that war no matter how necessary nor how justified is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.”

  In the wake of overwhelming events, after the fateful moment has passed, the mind is often consumed by questions of cosmic responsi­bility and the dimensions of one’s role in the world. For the ­veteran, in particular, these sorts of questions carry a special weight because, as a device of the state, the fateful responsibilities of soldiering were never intended to be borne alone. As one army sniper, who had killed dozens of Iraqis in Baghdad, said several years after coming home, “I should never have been given that much responsibility.” A community belief system that works to take some of the weight of these questions off the shoulders of the individual can do wonders, as recent research has shown. As Jonathan Shay argues at length in Achilles in Vietnam, communalizing the guilt and shame over one’s conduct in war can have a powerful effect on the psyche, especially if the war or traumatic event in question is controversial. Soldiers are ultimately vessels and vassals of the state, and they do not go to war of their own accord, so why shouldn’t the state or the community help relieve them of their guilt when they return home? While this method of addressing post-traumatic responsibility has no direct descendant in the modern world, it did have an impact. Arthur Egendorf, a Vietnam veteran and one of the architects of the PTSD diagnosis, invoked the Hastings Articles of 1068, noting that “modern communities no longer provide ritual cleansing for their surviving warriors . . . The healing we sought in the rap groups, although new in form, was not original in spirit.”

  Give it away, give it to God, this theory of loss seems to say. For the Medieval church, these matters were confronted in an unusually direct manner, one that stands in marked contrast to how guilt and shame are handled today. And in a world lit only by fire and the mind of God, perhaps such a moral feat was more easily achieved. In other times and other places, it seems fair to say, the prospects for reconciliation aren’t so simple.

  In historical terms, technology is the great transformer of trauma.* The Civil War, the first modern industrialized war, produced carnage on a previously unprecedented scale, presaging the colossal slaughters of the twentieth century and transforming the American imagination in the process. Pre–Civil War Americans had long understood the terrors of the wilderness that encircled them and had fought an endless series of campaigns against the American Indian, but the Civil War changed the way Americans understood violence, death, and their place in the world, a world where unspeakable destruction could be visited upon common citizens. As one South Carolinian ­declared in 1863, “The world never saw such a war.” Prior to the Civil War, Americans held a view of violence that fit with their previous experience with conflict generally—as an event limited by time and space that impacted a relatively small circle of dedicated combatants. While visiting Union hospital ships moored along the Virginia Peninsula, Frederick Law Olmsted declared that the war had, in fact, created a veritable “republic of suffering.” The Civil War remains the central catastrophe of the American experience, and in stark contrast to virtually every conflict that followed, it forced Americans of every station and class to grapple with the widespread effects of trauma.

  The major technologies that made such a cataclysm possible were the railroad, the telegraph, and the rifled musket. The rifled musket allowed troops to deliver accurate volleys of fire at greater range, and it heralded a revolution nearly on par with the machinegun in World War I. As Arnold Toynbee observed, every invention of a new weapon is a disaster for society, and the Civil War is a case in point: the number of soldiers who died during the conflict—around 620,000—is roughly equal to the number of American soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The sheer kinetic intensity of Civil War combat is impressive even by modern lights. A British observer who visited the battlefield at Antietam ten days after the fighting wrote that “in about seven or eight acres of wood there is not a tree which is not full of bullets and bits of shell. It is impossible to understand how anyone could live in such a fire as there must have been here.”

  Such violence had a powerful psychological impact on soldiers, both Blue and Gray. For many men, the shock of “seeing the elephant” (the term used for one’s combat initiation) was simply overwhelming. The opening engagement of the battle of Shiloh, an early morning Confederate charge that caught a number of Northern units eating breakfast, sent thousands scampering to the rear. A number of them, estimated by General Grant to be eight thousand, cowered under the bluffs of the Tennessee River, “panic-stricken.” One observer at Shiloh noted, “Such looks of terror, such confusion, I never saw before, and do not wish to see again.” Luckily for the Union side, thousands of Southern troops also ran from the battle with horror in their eyes.

  William Tecumseh Sherman, also at Shiloh, was similarly impressed. One historian, describing Sherman’s tortured recollections of the battle, wrote that “for all its absorption, his mind—perhaps his subconscious mind—was photographing hideous pictures, sharp negatives, and storing them away. Later on they would become vivid positives: ‘our wounded mingled with rebels, charred and blackened by the burning tents and grass, crawling about begging for some one to end their misery . . . the bones of living men crushed beneath the cannon wheels coming left about . . . 10,000 men lying in a field not more than a mile by half a mile.’”

  Unfortunately, the American medical establishment of the time lacked even the most rudimentary knowledge of psychology, and its ability to understand, let alone treat, the terror created by industrialized violence was extremely limited. It is a commonplace among historians that the American Civil War was an instance where technology had outrun tactics, and the same can be said for the medicine of the period. Such terrors had never been seen before. Civil War doctors were innocent of virtually every psychological principle we take for granted today. It would be another thirty-nine years before Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Noting this, one researcher writing in 2012 described Union Army physicians as simply “psychol
ogically naïve.” Basic distinctions made today between psychiatric and neurological disorders were nonexistent. Characterizing the state of medicine as a whole, the Union surgeon general, William Hammond, later observed that the war was fought at the “end of the medical Middle Ages.” Both sides in the Civil War were desperate for personnel, and soldiers who today might be treated as psychiatric casualties were often ignored or punished as malingerers or evacuated far from the battlefield.

  The medical field as a whole struggled to keep pace with the violence the war unleashed, and psychiatric casualties, who existed as a problem without a name, were relegated to the margins of the field hospital. A proper ambulance service was only established at the very end of the conflict, and given the perennial shortages of infantrymen, only around twelve hundred Union troops were ever admitted to the one federal institution dedicated to the treatment of mental illness, the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington. An asylum in the classic nineteenth-century tradition, the hospital, which later became known as St. Elizabeths, was in many respects simply a warehouse for the sick and demented.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, before any formal system of psychiatric classification existed, many Civil War doctors fell back on the four-thousand-year-old Greek diagnostic categories of mania, melancholia, and dementia. In addition to the Greek terms, a minor dictionary of colloquial descriptions for traumatic stress emerged. War has always driven linguistic innovation, and the Civil War was no different. Soldiers suffering from what today might be called “acute stress reactions” were described using a rainbow of epithets, including having “the blues” or being “nervous,” “played out,” “used up,” “worn down,” “worn out,” “depressed,” “dispirited,” “rattled,” or “badly blown.” In a time when spiritual matters were foremost in the minds of Americans, discouraged troops and deserters were frequently characterized as being “demoralized” or “dis-spirited.” Another subgenre of these descriptors had a cardiac component, as with traumatized soldiers who were referred to as being “downhearted,” “disheartened,” or suffering from a “trotting heart.”