From their hospital wards disabled American veterans of W.W. I express their bitterness concerning the futility of war:
“By God, I would not go to war for nothing or nobody… So far as I’m concerned they can blow Europe to Hell… They could come over here, even Japan, and take the whole damned country and I would not go out and blow my head off. It wouldn’t be any worse than it is now anyway.”
“If you want to see the guys that know about war go upstairs to Ward 2-South. They are the guys that don’t leave here until they take them out in a box. Shell shock. And in 4-South, where they got the guys with no jaws and their eyes and ears eaten off, and look at some of the guys with tuberculosis they got after gas burned up their lungs. Look at the T.B.’s and ask them if they’d fight again. Those are the guys the public never sees. They never go out of the hospital. Every once in a while one of them will go off his nut – crazy as a bedbug, thinks he’s fighting again, and they transfer him to another hospital. Thousands of those guys lying in beds are still fighting in France.”
A similar testimony can be read here
Click here to read one man’s account of his struggle with shell shock…
Click here to read about the new rules for warfare that were written as a result of the First World War – none of them pertain to the use of poison gas or submarines.
