Between the psyche and the social: masculinity, subjectivity and the First World War veteran.

Subjectivity occupies an awkward place in much recent work on gender, whether the context of research is contemporary or historical. Within the field there has been a widespread reaction against the supposedly "modernist" assumption of a universal human subject, and a tendency to privilege what could be called "external" understandings of masculinity and femininity. The focus has been on identity: that is, on the normative codes or cultural scripts associated with what it means to be man or woman in a given time and place, and on the contingent, changing, and multiple nature of identities. Approaches that deal with emotional states and unconscious processes, aspects that might be termed more "internal"--and which suggest that there are some essential aspects of subjectivity--have remained, by comparison, under-developed, if not actually decried.

In part this tendency reflects wider theoretical developments, notably the "cultural turn," which, in its most radical incarnations, denies the very idea of a subject existing outside of language. Subjectivity, some argue, is constituted through language and we can never reach beyond "subject positions" to access some authentic "inner" psychological truth or essence (e.g., Bruner, 1991). Much has been gained by this theoretical more. It has sensitized us to the power of language to shape emotions, and to the gaps and dissonance between human experience and its representation. It reminds us that even the most "personal" and intimate of cultural forms, such as the diary, private memoir. life-history interview of letter to a loved one, though the writer might feel it to be an outpouring from the heart, draws upon pre-given conventions of expression and is not a transparent psychological record.

Nevertheless, I depart from the assumption in some of this work that the culturally constructed meanings of masculinity and femininity are wholly defining of subjectivity. I am also keen to persuade those who might accept that there is more to subjectivity than cultural codes, but who nevertheless still take these codes as their principal object of study, that there is much to be gained by thinking about masculinity in terms of relationships, emotional experience, and unconscious processes, matters that are never beyond representation but that are not wholly defined by it either. Interested as I am in subjectivity, I'm always trying to think about what states of mind might be being conveyed by language, and I resist the idea that language wholly encapsulates or constructs emotional states.

The bias toward the external in work on masculinity has been a characteristic from early on. When John Tosh and I wrote the introduction to Manful Assertions (1991) a decade and a half ago, we envisaged masculinity as an over-arching term, which included both cultural and psychological dimensions. We argued that masculinity was "the product both of lived experienced and fantasy," and that further studies were needed to "explore how cultural representations become part of subjective identity" (pp. 14-15). We indicated the need for approaches that explored points of connection between the social and the psychic.

Four years after Manful Assertions the tendency to conceive of masculinity largely in external terms was already being noted. In 1995, Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell commented that cultural approaches "might be able to specify the different representations of masculinity made available by a particular culture, but they are not so adept at explaining the emotional investments which men make in such images" (p. 211). In Masculinities, also published in 1995. R. W. Connell warned that a "purely normative definition gives no grip on masculinity at the level of personality" (p. 70). The "erasure" of subjectivity that Steven Angelides notes elsewhere in this journal is widespread within gender studies.

The problem identified over a decade ago as the field consolidated, remains as true today. Masculinity is still more often viewed as a matter of social or cultural construction than as an aspect of personality. An edited volume published in 2004, Masculinities in Politics and War, demonstrates this (Dudink. Hagerman. & Tosh). The vast majority of articles in it study masculinity through publicly circulating representations, including political tracts, enlightenment philosophy, art, conduct books, poetry, religious discourse, and propaganda. They are concerned with the particular forms, provenance, and circulation of cultural meanings, rather than the admittedly very slippery question of how these codes are understood and negotiated by human subjects. Such studies tell us more about identity than about subjectivity.

However, despite the overwhelming focus upon normative concepts in work such as the volume just cited, references to subjectivity abound. Authors write of how discourses open the space for a "new masculine subjectivity," yet without demonstrating what that subjectivity itself might consist of (Dudink, 2004, p. 90). They invoke oxymorons such as "American subjectivity," of "masculine political subjectivity," subjectivity here connoting a particular ideological formation (Smith-Rosenberg, 2004, p. 68: Dudink & Hagerman, 2004, p. 17). Any sense of subjectivity as a matter pertaining to actual people is lost. The complex mechanisms that operate and mediate between the emotional states of individual subjects, their relationships with one another, and the prevalent cultural formations of masculinity, are short-cut. In an introductory essay to Masculinities in Politics and War, Stefan Dudink and Karen Hagerman (2004) write of how discourses of the citizen-soldier may be "written into soldiers' subjectivity." as if the subject was a blank page onto which cultural processes were then inscribed (p. 13). (1)

So, if you ask me how I differentiate subjectivity from identity, I would say that identity concerns the cultural resources out there that actors draw upon to construct a sense of self, but that I am also interested in the emotional experiences that constitute subjectivity. For the Klenian psychoanalyst and First World War tank commander Wilred Bion, it was not so much language that conditioned the possibilities for subjectivity, as the nature of emotional experiences, and the ways in which they were handled within the mind. Some emotional experiences, particularly those of acute anxiety, he argued, cannot be digested and so cannot be thought, though they remain all the more powerful for being unprocessed (Bion, 1984a, b). They remain within the mind in a raw state, as stimuli, felt as things in themselves rather than as memories, and they continue to show themselves in unconscious ways, in physical ailments perhaps, or in violent projections into another (Bion, 1984c, pp. 6-7). For Bion, moreover, an emotional experience is rarely detached from communication with another. The mother helps the infant develop the mental mechanisms to process emotional experiences through the way she responds to its distress; for example when she picks it up, holds it, or offers soothing words in response to its cries. She takes in its projections and contains them, giving them back to the infant in a form that can be integrated and processed. Bion called this process "containment." The mother's ability to be receptive to the baby's state is thus crucial for how emotional experience is handled. Bion believed that "an emotional experience cannot be conceived of in isolation from a relationship"; he was particularly interested in early relationships of containing, and their effect on the way that later experiences would be processed within the mind (Bion, 1984c, p. 42).

For Bion, what constituted subjectivity was not language so much as the psychic mechanisms through which emotional experiences were handled: words were not evidence of an abstract "identity" but a form of communication with another. They could function as containers of emotional experience, but they did not constitute them, and in psychotic states, the very capacity to differentiate between words and things was damaged. The words of the psychotic patient did not express emotion so much as act it out; they were repetitions of undigested emotional experience.

How then might these ideas apply to a history of masculinity, concerned with language as evidence of human relationships and of emotional states? To show this I would like to take two case-studies from my research on the relationships between British soldiers and their families in the First World War. This research is primarily about mothers and sons, but here I want to reflect on the relationships between veterans and their wives, as a way of considering the war's longer-term emotional impact, and in particular, the role of women in containing the violent residues of war.

The First World War, Becker and Audoin-Rouzeau (2002) remind us, was without precedent in the extent and intensity of its violence. It brought about a "new kind of armed confrontation," with large civilian armies opposing each other locked into trenches, using increasingly mechanized and deadly weapons (p. 20). It was violent even by comparison with the Second World War, in which the overall death toll was higher. An average of 457 British men were lost each day in the First World War, compared with 147 in the Second (Becker & Audoin-Rouzeau, pp. 22-23). Around one in eight British soldiers were killed and one in four wounded (Winter, J.M., 1985, p. 72). George Mosse (1990) is right to assert that the "encounter with mass death" was the defining feature of the war, and would have a profound effect throughout the lives of the men who had been trench soldiers (pp. 3-6).

The psychological effects of violence on the domestic lives of survivors, however, and the consequences for masculinity, are overlooked in many studies of the war, partly because historians tend to be more comfortable dealing with the "external" aspects of masculinity. The impact of the return home, for example, has been viewed through the prism of politics rather than in the place where its impact was arguably felt most intimately, the domestic sphere. George Mosse (1990), working on Germany, has asserted that the war gave free reign to "primitive, instinctual, and violent" impulses that had hitherto been restrained; the soldier ended up "holding life cheap" (p. 163). He returned from the war full of hatred and "numb ... in the face of human cruelty and the loss of life," the evidence of which, for Mosse, can be seen in the myth of the "stab in the back," and in the activities of proto-fascist organizations (Mosse, p. 159). Paul Fussell (1975) in The Great War and Modern Memory traced the development of a binary mentality, an "us" and a "them," which framed the veteran's perception of the post-war world, but he, like Eric Leed (1979), was mainly concerned with the public sphere and in the men who were the targets of veteran anger: the profiteer, the war-mongering politician, or the military "Red Tabs" (Fussell, esp. Chap. 3; Leed, esp. Chap. 6). Becker and Audoin-Rouzeau (2002) are correct in their observation that many aspects of the soldier's return home, such as the "severing of ties with comrades at the front, survivor's guilt, and the after-effects of battlefield traumas ... require further study" (p. 167).

In what follows, the experience of return, and its relationship to the war. is traced through two veterans, the Regular soldier and veteran of the East African campaigns, Captain H. J. C. Leland, and the "Kitchener's man" and volunteer. Private Charles Templer. Their testimonies, written in Leland's case as letters to his wife, and in Templer's case as a memoir written in his early eighties, reveal how loved ones were drawn into, and called on to contain, the emotional experience of war. They show too how, in the mental effort of the veteran to contain distress, wartime identities--the Edwardian conventions of soldiering and masculinity associated with the "warrior ideal"--could be re-appraised, and they show glimpses of emergent forms of subjectivity (on the warrior ideal, see Mosse, 1996, Chap. 6).

Captain Leland's Dream

In the period between his arrival in France in June and his home leave in late August 1917, Captain Leland was subjected to heavy and prolonged bombardments on the Western Front. As a serving Divisional Staff officer for musketry, he was constantly roving around the back areas upon which the German big guns were trained, and where the reports of the nearby British guns were particularly violent. His letters to his wife from late June are dominated by the violence of shelling: "Two more shells have just burst overhead with a tremendous crash," he writes on 21 June, while in early July, "The air never seems to be free of shells, and the ground fairly shakes" (Leland, June 21, 1917; July 10, 1917). Around him the casualties were mounting up (Leland, June 16, 1917: June 29, 1917). On 13 July, six pieces of shrapnel fell within "a yard of two" of his dug-out, any one of which, he commented, might have given him a "kingdom Come" (Leland, July 13, 1917). Three shells fell within a dozen yards in late July, showering him with earth and stones; the closest, which fell "a yard or two from me," was a dud and failed to explode (Leland, July 17, 1917; July 28, 1917). "We are daily bombed and battered," he reported on 30 July (Leland, July 30, 1917).

By early August he was "just DEAD BEAT." All he wanted to do was to "get home ... and tumble into bed, and sleep for a month, or a year" (Leland, August 8, 1917). Among his men, camped for much of the time in leaky tents, the constant shelling was taking its toll. Those who remained uninjured were "windy" (Leland, July 27, 1917). Two of his best men had "gone under," leaving him with more work to do. The fetid smells were making him sick, and he was finding it difficult to sleep.

As he waited during mid August to be granted leave--which was continually being postponed--he had a "singular dream":

 I dreamt that someone threw a bomb at me and it smashed the glass
 of my watch. I was furious, as I remember your telling me that the
 glass was unbreakable. It was a very real dream. When I woke up, I
 looked at my watch--the glass was all right, but the watch, fully
 wound up, had stopped, and refused to go, although I tried every
 shaking and thumping I could give it without actually breaking it,
 so I gave the matter up as a bad job, and put it away, being very
 inconvenienced all day without a watch. I borrowed one from one of
 the men. This morning I happened to look at mine and found the
 uncanny thing ticking away merrily and nearly run down. I wound it
 up and it is going as well as ever. How can you account for this?
 (Leland, August 17, 1917)

Leland's dream presaged his admission in December 1917 to the Special Hospital for Officers in Palace Green London, suffering from a racing heart, inability to sleep, headache and loss of vision. In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Sigmund Freud (1920) argued that the mind was normally protected by a kind of shield, which, with the help of the senses, selected and filtered stimuli from the external environment and allowed it to be stored of "bound." Violent physical assaults however--such as shelling--could break through this shield. (2) Leland's dream about his watch seems to picture this very moment, when the glass that protects the delicate mechanisms of the mind is shattered. The smashed watch-face anticipates Leland's own cracking up.

If Freud's idea of the traumatic break tells us what was at stake in Leland's dream, Bion's theories, linked back to the smashed face in Leland's dream, suggest that what had been damaged was the part of the mind capable of absorbing and processing emotional experience. To crack up meant not being able to think: the watch, like his mind, could not now be relied on. For Bion, the confusion between reality and dream would be another indication of uncontained distress. Leland was having difficulty distinguishing the two, his dream seemed so very real, a repetition and acting-out of recent events rather than a symbolic working through of them. (3) It brought those anxieties to the surface, but it did nothing to process them.

So far we have interpreted Leland's report of his dream as if it was a private record, its significance purely autobiographical. Yet Leland's wife figures in the dream, and it is to her that he confides it. From the way Leland talks about his wristwatch, it would seem probable that it was a gift from his wife, perhaps even a good-bye present as he prepared for his service in France, as this was a common custom among loved ones, and watches were often treasured by men on the Western Front as tokens of a loved one. Yet Leland's dream expresses not gratitude but anger toward his wife: she is to blame because she assured him that the watch was unbreakable. She must hear how angry he is with her. The dream of the supposedly unbreakable watch seems to impugn the Edwardian ideal of militarized masculinity, of stoicism and courage in adversity, and furthermore, to accuse his wife of peddling this stereotype, as if to say, "You boosted me up so that I seemed unbreakable, you put me under unbearable pressure and now I am breaking down."

The dream gives us a glimpse of the stresses that life in the line could place on a marriage. As Leland saw it, he and his wife were growing ever more divergent in their attitudes to the war. While during his months of service in France, Leland had lost the appetite for fighting, his wife seemed to have become all the more enthusiastic. He had written to her in June telling her just that: "I don't think you quite realise [w]hat this kind of warfare is like"; especially that "practically every casualty you see is from shell fire" (June 25, 1917). "There is no romance in this war," he wrote on July 10 in reply to her letter, "it is nothing but murder, pure and simple ..." (July 10, 1917).

Frustrated as he was by his wife's patriotic fervor, he also worried about what she would make of him, ravaged as he felt by the war. Unlike a mother who could be counted on to love her son regardless, she had married a professional soldier and had certain expectations of him. The week before the dream Leland had "rather damaged" his features when, traveling on horseback, he struck a tree going through a wood. A thorn had entered his left eye, completely closing it up: "I fear that you will be very disappointed in me this time, for I am really worn out and very war worn.... It is just pouring with rain, and I am soaking ..." (August 8, 1917; August 9, 1917). His damaged face--like the damaged watch face in his dream--revealed the emotional damage the war was wreaking. He was not the invincible warrior that she imagined him to be. As his leave became imminent, this feeling that he no longer conformed to her "romantic" image of him, and that she must get used to his damaged self, preyed on his mind. Would she love him despite the damage?

Around August 20 the prospect of leave became more certain. Leland, having just lunched on Bully beef, hoped to "make up" for his poor diet once home. "All I want," he said, was fish, fowl and milk, "no beef" (August 21, 1917). He would get his men to try and bring back a German shell as a souvenir, but he was not very keen on the idea. They "are so very bulky, and weigh very heavily"; "goodness only knows how I am going to get them home," he grumbled (August 24, 1917). We do not know how Leland spent the time with his wife and young children, but he was filled with despair on his return. Home felt more remote than ever. If the dream of his broken watch had been remarkable because so "very real," leave was "nothing more than a dream." "How I hate leave," he wrote as he made his way through France to his Division, "The returning is just too damnable. You cannot come down to my present state of misery (no not misery--melancholy)" (September 7, 1917). That last statement was, to say the least, ambiguous. Leland was sorely missing his wife and the pain of return, as his careful replacement of the word "'misery'" with "melancholy'" suggests, felt something like a death. (4) She must never be allowed to suffer like he had and yet he was perhaps resentful too that she, safe from it all up in Edinburgh, Scotland, would not be brought as low as he, and would thus never really appreciate what he was going through.

Leland became more distressed in the months after his leave. Mutual acquaintances continued to be killed, one of them "a few minutes ago" (October 3, 1917). "I am very muddled," he writes after being under heavy shellfire "all night"; while his letter the following day reported shells "falling all around," one within tire yards. "I am so muddled that I don't know what I am doing" (October 4, 1917). His Hilton barman was drinking and had gone to ground--"nothing can unearth him"--so Leland was often hungry (October 5, 1917). He had become convinced that he was going blind, his hands were shaking, he was having "awful dreams"; and he was taking morphine to help him sleep (November 2, 1917; October 26. 1917). It seemed extraordinary to Leland that his wife, despite his ever more disturbed and disturbing descriptions of the war, continued to have a romantic view of it. He could not understand why she would think his accounts of shelling "thrilling and make your heart stand still !" He simply could not get through to her: "I have told you nothing, nor can I describe what it is like" (October 21, 1917).

As Leland felt himself to be succumbing to another breakdown he worried about his marriage. This comes through in his concern about his barman. Leland discovered that one of the reasons why Hilton had gone to pieces was that his wife "want[ed] to have nothing more to do with him." Hilton had asked Leland to intercede on his behalf, so Leland had written, "telling her that as I had un affectionate interest in Hilton and as we had gone through some very rough times together lately, would she write and relieve his mind." He thought no good would come of it; Hilton's wife was one of many women who were incapable of realizing how they had made their husbands suffer by their conduct (November 14, 1917). The message, couched conspicuously in the plural, would not have escaped Leland's wife.

When Leland was finally withdrawn from the front in late November he worried because, "I don't know how you will take it." He felt "disgusted" with himself that he had gone off sick; but he also wanted to assure her that he had not succumbed easily, and was not a coward: "It is not my fault. I have fought against it for a long time." In fact, he explained, one of the doctors had told him the breakdown was only as severe us it was because he had hung on for so long (November 28, 1917). Leland's letters reach un abrupt conclusion once he was back in Blighty and in the Special Hospital for Officers. Here he was likely--this being the first of Lord Knutsford's small and lavishly provided private hospitals--to have received sympathetic treatment, including a period of convalescence in the countryside (Woods to Mrs Leland, December 8, 1917; Barham, pp. 43-4).

There is a pointed similarity between the last letter in the collection and Leland's own pleading letter to the wife of his batman just three weeks earlier. The letter is from Major Woods, RAMC, and informs Mrs Leland that her husband has "slight mental confusion and profound exhaustion." Woods notes that Leland has suffered similar attacks before. The letter ends with a request: "I know he will be very glad if you could come to London so as to be able to see him occasionally" (Woods to Mrs Leland, December 8, 1917). The Medical Officer Woods was now petitioning Leland's wife, just as Leland had petitioned his batman's wife. These soldiers were acting on each others' behalf to try and ensure that women were kept constant in their support.

Leland's letters to his wife give us insights into the way that trench warfare could attack the mind, but they hint tot) at the ambiguous feelings of the veteran toward his loved ones, and how daunting it might be to have to care for men broken down by the prolonged violence of war. Leland may have longed for the comfort of home, but he also felt envious of his wife's safety, frustrated at her seeming inability to hear his pain, and anxious about whether their marriage would survive the change in him. We do not know how Leland's marriage fared after his return to Britain, but home was hardly the place of refuge and stability he had hoped for. Leland drifted in and out of convalescent hospitals until September 1918 when he rejoined a Reserve Battalion (Army Service Records, Register no. 97913/17). 1920 saw him stationed in Singapore, from where he was sent back to Britain due to "sickness on military duty," and deemed unfit for general service (Army Service Records, Register no. 97913/21). He was living in Edinburgh in late 1920; in 1923 he is listed as living in Gloucestershire; and in 1924 he writes from a village near Colchester. His post-war life was one of frequent movement, lived close to the edge emotionally.

Charles Templer's Proposal

Charles Templer's wife Dais died suddenly in 1982, two years before he set down his war memoirs. His account was not just a memoir of war, but a history of his marriage, since the war and his love for Dais were bound together from the start. She was his best friend's sister and Charles had admired her from afar long before they met, John having shown Charles her photograph. John met Dais in person for the first time on the day war was declared, and their lives became further enmeshed when John and Charles signed up together. Charles visited Dais on every home leave and in the trenches he carried a memento of her, a Christmas card with her photograph on it (Templer, 1984, pp. 1-2).

The concluding pages of Templer's memoir (1984), which tell of her death, reveal the importance of the war:

 I had lost the girl I had loved since our first meeting on August 4
 1914, through the years of war until our engagement on 2 October
 1918, demobilization in 1919, waiting to re-establish myself in
 civilian life, finding somewhere we could live together, our
 marriage 3 August 1922.

For Templer the war was not "in parentheses," as David Jones' famous war poem of 1937 suggests, but bound up with the flowering of his love for Dais. His memoir was both a war and a love story.

Templer proposed to Dais in October 1918. His timing was significant, for on 23 March he had come close to death when he got stranded in forward trenches during a patrol. Their commanding officer was wounded, and as NCO Templer had taken charge, firing away with such ferocity at German soldiers who had broken out of their position that eventually, after killing a number of the party, his rifle blew up in his hand. Templer looked on helpless as one of his men panicked, ran toward the Germans, and was bit by a hand grenade: "I got to him and found he had a terrible wound in the throat and when I tried to raise him, his blood gushed all over my tunic" (1984, p. 26). It was impossible to bind the man's wound without strangling him, Templer spoke to him but he was "too far gone to understand and I had to leave him" (p. 26). As he did so he felt a "terrific blow" on the shoulder that knocked him to the ground. An RAMC officer looked at him and told him to get back, but Templer wanted to find John and his platoon first. Eventually he found them. John had been bit by shrapnel in both legs, so Templer guided him back out of the trenches and got a lorry to give them all a lift to the hospital. Templer ended up with a shoulder wound, and superficial wounds to the hand and face from the blown-up rifle while John was sent back to Blighty (Templer, p. 27).

Templer believed that it was the prospect of a future with Dais that had given him the strength to escape alive from the raid, and not lose his head as his comrade had done. He was urged on by the thought that if he was to be caught by the Germans, "Dais was something I would not know, especially if I got a bayonet through my gut" (p. 25). When his next leave was due, Templer wrote to Dais' father asking for her hand in marriage. They met at Baker Street and after having declared their engagement, the couple walked to a quiet square near his uncle's house where Charles kissed and held Dais so violently that, "Suddenly she collapsed in my arms." She was left with bruises down her front from the buttons of his tunic. Taken aback by the vehemence of his embrace, the following day she told him, "In future you must be more gentle with me Charles" (p. 29).

Templer had embraced Dais as though his life depended on it; as indeed, in his mind, it did. She was his savior, the strength of his love for her had protected him from death, but so intense was his need that it hurt her. War had left a mark on Templer that could not be effaced by love; wives and sweethearts would have to live with the marks too.

The Soldier's Return

The physical and mental wounds that Leland and Templer found themselves coping with at the end of their war service were far from unusual. In 1929, over a decade after the war's end, 40% of all serving soldiers were in receipt of a pension (Winter, D., 1978, p. 252). Of these, 200,000 men were given pensions because they were suffering from war-related nervous conditions (65,000 were in mental hospitals), 40,000 were partially blind, 9,074 had lost an arm, and 24,416 were rheumatic (Winter, D., 1978, p. 252; Young, 1999, p. 359).

Ill-health due to the war affected the ex-officer and ranker alike, and sometimes his family as well. William Breakespeare's mother had died during the war, due to worry, he believed, about her seven sons in the army. William returned at the end of the war to find his father unemployed and cadging from his sisters. He set up house with his younger brother, who had been a POW and was so emaciated that, "I didn't recognize him" (Breakespeare, 2005, p. 79). William had his own worries. He had contracted malaria in the war and continued to have bouts of dysentery, eventually suffering a "complete breakdown," which had affected his memory (pp. 3-4). He was unable to work, "I just--idled around." The doctor had told him "'Breakespeare,' he says, 'you're all to pieces--you're starved.' He says, 'you'll have to pull yourself together.'" The two brothers just "existed, I can't say we lived because it was too difficult at that time" (p. 79).

Herbert Asquith might have come from a family at the opposite end of the social spectrum, but he was equally disturbed by the war. He returned from France exhausted. The doctor said he was suffering from "strain at the front" and must stay quiet in bed for a fortnight. Cynthia Asquith would sit at his bedside during his recuperation, reading and talking to him, and doling out cigarettes in an effort to stop him chain smoking. (Asquith, 1968, pp. 81,102). His step-mother, Margot, was concerned about his drinking. On one occasion he fainted and Cynthia "had to feed him like a baby" (p. 99).

Men's demands for nursing taxed their relationships with wives and lovers. On the one hand the stress of war made men dependent; Cynthia Asquith thought her husband had become an "old professional invalid," but it is equally striking how often commentators described the returned veteran as like a child (Asquith, 1968, p. 109). Charles Carrington (1965) thought he regressed to adolescence after the war, a result of the way in which knowledge of the world had been brutally forced upon him (p. 280). On the other hand, if they needed comfort and rest, they also wanted romance, to be restored as men and to feel desired and admired, as Leland intimated when he wrote about his fear that his wife would no longer find him appealing. The different demands of "sexual and maternal attention" were difficult to juggle (Michel, 1993, p. 262).

The appeal of home as a place of recuperation, and of women as carers, is shown in the romantic attachments that became promises of marriages during a soldier's moment of need. Robert Graves had a "sickbed attraction" to a nurse while recovering from shellshock in mid 1917, and shortly afterwards fell in love with his future wife Nancy Nicolson (Graves, R. P., 2004). They were married in December 1917 after a four month courtship and their first child was born in January 1919. Nancy had to endure with Graves the shells that continued to burst in his bed at night. Graves slept a lot, suffered from bouts of influenza, and worried that he was a drag on Nancy (pp. 235-6).

John Middlebrook had been interested in Dorothy, a family friend, for some months before he was shot climbing out of a trench in No Man's Land and had his left arm amputated. He had been taking things slowly, because his mother disapproved of his ambitions and he had seen the outcome of other hasty wartime marches. Just before he was wounded, he wrote to his father explaining, "Dorothy and myself are getting fairly well on the way to intimacy now, but I am really trying to mark time" (Middlebrook to father, July 21, 1916). But once he returned disabled to England, the pace of the relationship quickened. As he described it in old age,

 When I was wounded, I had a letter from her in my breast pocket--it
 got bloodstained--and her letter to me in hospital after my sister
 had given her the news, gave the game away to both of us and to go
 forward was the only way. She herself had a bout of the worst kind
 of pneumonia earlier in 1916 and this also had drawn us together.
 (Middlebrook, n. d., p. 135)

The bloodstained letter intimates how m Middlebrook's mind, the moment of his wounding was also the moment in which Dorothy touched his heart. His letters to his father from hospital make it clear that these feelings were mutual: "She seems anxious to write and also for me to write and she confides m me pretty well" (Middlebrook to father, October 5, 1916). Dorothy had decided to devote herself to the disabled veteran.

Like Templer and Middlebrook, Stuart Cloete had a girlfriend for much of the war, but it was only after he was injured--in the groin--that he proposed to her. At the moment of being hit he had a revelation not unlike Templer's: "Love I must get if I ever got out of this" (Cloete, 1972, p. 295). Eileen was a nurse, and during his recovery she sat with Cloete every day; according to Eileen, on her visits all he wanted to do was "hold her hand and cry" (p. 301). Cloete returned to the war, but afterwards was physically and mentally exhausted. He and Eileen moved to a remote village in France, where Cloete "let go." He avoided people, cried a lot, and had "terrible nightmares"; one night, on waking from a bad dream, he almost stabbed Eileen. Cloete wanted Eileen's exclusive company; he was "living on a kind of emotional island with the girl I loved," in a "private bubble out of time" (p. 317). He grew vegetables and raised livestock. Cut adrift from her friends and family, caring for Cloete through his breakdown, Eileen must have been at her wit's end on occasion.

In relationships such as these, wives were called upon to nurse and comfort, and so make bearable the veteran's pain. In Bion's terms, the function of containing, having had to be managed internally or between comrades during the war, was restored to women afterwards. Women's role in the recuperation of the damaged veteran is brilliantly captured in Rebecca West's novel of 1918, The Return of the Soldier. Chris Baldry has lost his memory after being concussed by a shell blast. His pretty bourgeois wife Kitty is by turns frightened and impatient at his condition, but his ex-sweetheart, the down-at-heel Margaret, possesses the capacity to restore him to health. Her love has a strongly maternal aspect. When Chris sees her for the first time after his breakdown, he runs toward Margaret and collapses on his knees:

 I saw her arms brace him under the armpits with a gesture that was
 not passionate, but rather the movement of one carrying a wounded
 man from under fire. But even when she had raised his head to the
 level of her lips, the central issue was not decided ... although
 it was a long time before I looked again they were still clinging
 breast to breast. It was as though her embrace red him, he looked
 so strong as he broke away. (West, 1994, pp. 122-123)

Significantly, the physical contact involves, not a kiss, but the holding of the damaged soldier. Margaret's embrace is seen as a repetition of the care between comrades at the front. The veteran's recovery depends on women's ability to go back to the primal scene with their loved one, and mediate distress that had felt uncontained. In a later scene of West's novel the narrator comes across the two figures in a woodland, on a blanket under an oak tree. Margaret sits with Chris as he falls asleep:

 He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a sleeping child, his
 hands unclenched and his head thrown back so that the bare throat
 showed defenselessly. Now he was asleep and his face undarkened by
 thought one saw how very fair he really was. And she, her
 mournfully vigilant face pinkened by the cold river of air sent by
 the advancing evening through the screen of rusted gold bracken was
 sitting beside him, just watching. (West, 1994, p. 142)

"Just watching." This is what Bion describes as "reverie," where the mother is attuned to the infant's emotional state, and, through her cradling and soothing words, makes its anxieties tolerable. Giovanna Rita Di Ceglie (2005), in a commentary on Bion's theories, notes how the idea of mothering, and its physical embodiment in the home, are linked to containing. "To go back to the house metaphor," she says, "Bion's model tells us why we need to rest in our maternal home before we can have our own" (p. 103). What Rebecca West gives us in The Return of the Soldier is a narrative of test in the maternal home. It is Margaret's capacity for reverie that enables Chris to resume his adult life and responsibilities as a husband and soldier.

Historians have noted the popularity of marriage and domesticity among veterans, and perhaps the deep appeal of home as a space of recuperation and "holding" is an explanation for this (e.g., Bourke, 1996, pp. 168-169; Light, 1991, pp. 8-10, 211). Leland's comment just as he was about to go on leave, imagining that he would fall into bed and sleep for a month of a year, suggests the intensified sense of home as a refuge among soldiers. As he finally cracked up under the violence of shelling in October 1917, he yearned for domestic tranquility: the once-professional soldier would never "stray again" from home (Leland, October 20, 1917). For Templer the yearning for domesticity was equally strong, and after the war he set about it with great energy. His two sons were born at home above his business premises m Acton: the business expanded and by 1934 he and Dais were able to buy a farmhouse on eleven acres of land near Dorking. It had a tennis court, garden, greenhouses and orchard, and three acres of copse. They kept animals, grew their own vegetables and cultivated flowers (Templer, 1984, p. 43).

Veterans may have yearned for the comfort of domesticity, but they were also disturbed by the violence to which they had been subjected. We must ask not only about women's role in containing, therefore, but about what kinds of psychic projects that husbands and lovers enlisted them in. What emotions were being lodged in women in response to the objects that had been violently projected into the veteran, both physical (in the form of bullets and shrapnel), and mental? Bion's comment about the inability to think is relevant here, for if experiences could not be processed but must be acted out, what did this mean for those closest to the veteran?

Veterans were angry, and it was often wives who bore the brunt of their anger. Shortly after being sent back to England, Herbert Asquith smashed a vase in a house where he and Cynthia were guests. He felt that such an ugly object did not deserve to survive when so many beautiful men had been killed. Feeling all in pieces himself, he could not bear m be in "a house with its roof on." Cynthia feared that Herbert might not stop at smashing the bric-a-brac, but would vent his fury on their host's face (Asquith, 1968, p. 78). She might even have feared for her own safety. Ruth Armstrong's father seemed to settle in quickly after his return, but his war stories showed how split his mind had become. She recalled how "he used to walk around with me on his shoulder. and he told me nice stories. The nasty stories, he told my mother" (Van Emden & Humphries, 2003. p. 306). He eventually became paranoid, convinced that his wife had had an affair in his absence. Veterans could not always keep their tempers in check. As Peter Barham (2004) shows in Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, when a man was admitted to an asylum it was often because domestic violence had made life unbearable for his wife and children. Frederick Bull had locked his wife up in a room, Charles Davies had been beating his, and Richard H. attempted to strangle his. Some were plagued by fears about the violence they might commit on their wives and children (Barham, pp. 203-204,240).These were men whose disturbances were too great for families to manage, but who also suffered because they had lost the support of their loved ones.

It was not only the veteran's anxiety that had to be mediated by women, his nightmares and sweats, but his rage too. We can see this in Leland's letters as the violence of shelling makes him more and more fragile. His wife comes to stand for the parts of himself that were once enthusiastic about the war. On August 4, the third anniversary of the declaration of war, he recalled how anxious he had been in 1914 to get to the Front, and how frustrating it had felt to have to "remain inactive." He continued: "Now. Well: I don't know what to think." His division was about to be moved up North (toward Ypres) and they were "for the line again." His wife's continued patriotism served as a foil for his growing disenchantment, and he sharply disputed his wife's comments about the state of the war:

 I am glad you think things are going on well up North. There
 is nothing like being optimistic, I wish you could spend 24
 hours in this spot. You would be very optimistic then! I don't
 think!! (Leland, August 4, 1917)

This sharp rejoinder reflected Leland's feeling that his wife failed to understand the terrifying nature of trench warfare. His letters insist that his wife takes in the impact on him of shelling, against her supposed unshakeable faith in the war, and incapacity to understand what war does to men.

My point here is not so much to agree that women remained ignorant of the realities of the war--Paul Fussell (1975), for example, too readily assumes this--but that, in criticizing women, men were reacting, often unconsciously, against their own previous sentiments. So when Leland is "furious" in the dream because his wife has told him the watch face is unbreakable, and, just as importantly, when he tells her of his fury in the letter, he is in effect evacuating into her his own earlier belief--and don't forget, he was a Regular soldier with pre-war service--in the warrior image. Leland is also envious of his wife, who as he sees it, supports the war from the safety of home without ever once having, as he puts it on one occasion, to "come down to my present state of misery" (Leland, September 7, 1917). She is like the senior officers in his Division, whose comfort and safety in billets, from his frequently damp and draughty tent, he also envied. The dream of the watch, we might conclude, expresses anger toward his wife because she has not had to suffer like him.

Reconstructing Masculinity

Up to this point I have drawn on psychoanalysis and Bion's ideas to show how the emotional experience of the war broke through mental defenses, and how the veteran's return often involved the repetition of violent psychic dramas that women, now back on the scene, were also inevitably drawn into. But recuperation was not just about breakdown and the violent expulsion of bad objects; it could at the same time be liberating. These emotional experiences disrupted gender expectations and could bring about a personal crisis but could also encourage new forms of subjectivity. Men who had been on the edge mentally gained a certain freedom to observe and to re-appraise the Edwardian ideals of the soldier hero. They developed a reflexive understanding about the performance of masculinity; much as some of the gay men described by Duane Duncan, of some of the mid-twentieth century male social workers described by Mark Peel in this journal--also placed on the edge by virtue of their marginal occupations or their sexuality--could develop a critical understanding of the gender discourses they were, at the same time, also emotionally invested in.

The study of subjectivity involves looking at points of disruption when lived experience leads to a questioning of cultural conventions about gender; a questioning that is, however, often not wholly a matter of conscious agency and choice, as is often assumed in studies of identity, but impelled also by unconscious motives. Another way of saying this is that emotional experiences can be motors of social and historical change, they can contribute not only to the emergence of new identities, but to the refashioning of subjectivity.

You can see hints of this in Leland's letters to his wife. At around the time of his dream, he writes to her of a magnificent Chateau in which the Divisional staff were then billeted, with pepperbox spires, mosaic floors created in Rome, walls painted with Fleur de Lys, terraced gardens, and fish ponds. It was, said Leland. the "most beautiful place I ever saw." The Germans had ruined much of the interior, marking the parquet floor marked with hobnailed boots, cutting all the pictures into pieces, and pillaging books. Lying across the library, however, was "the most beautiful clock I have ever seen .... The dial is undamaged and the wooden framework is only just splintered" (Leland letter, dated August 19, 1917, but probably August 12, 1917). Here was a miraculous survivor of the German violence, like Leland himself, knocked about a bit on the exterior (don't forget, Leland had just marked his face passing by a tree), but undeniably still an object of beauty. It, moreover, was a survivor. The tough wristwatch had failed but the fragile and exquisite clock was still ticking.

I would not want to push this line of thought too far, but I believe that throughout the letters Leland is not only chronicling a breakdown, but actively disengaging from an identity, that of the stoic soldier. His descriptions of trembling and weeping during shelling, of not sleeping and of having to take morphine to settle his nerves, refute this image. In the place of the supposedly tough wristwatch, and the notion that a man must be able to endure whatever is thrown at him, a more delicate ideal emerges. Leland is enchanted by the beauty of the clock in the Chateau, qualities far removed from the stoic ideal, and I think there is a subconscious identification in his mind between its lucky escape from the Germans and his own. If the dream of the cracked wristwatch presaged doom, this experience was a hopeful one.

I have written elsewhere about fear in veteran memoirs, and how such accounts register the decline of the concept of "manliness" after the war, and the emergence of "masculinity" in the early to mid twentieth century (Roper, 2005b). These memoirs, drawing loosely and often wildly on ideas drawn from popular psychology and psychoanalysis, assert in their different ways that there is a limit to man's stock of courage, and that to be fearful is not to be unmanly. Writers as diverse as A. H. Herbert, the playwright R. C. Sherriff, the conservative middlebrow novelist Warwick Deeping, and Winston Churchill's surgeon Lord Moran, commended the "sensitive" officer as in some ways a better soldier--provided his stock of courage was not exhausted--than the herd-following ranker. Peter Barham notes the emergence of an empathetic style among some of the medical staff involved in the treatment of traumatized soldiers during the war. Men such as Eliot Smith and Tom Pear, working at Maghull Hospital, regarded their patients as ordinary men who had been subjected to exceptional stresses. and they wanted to understand their pain. Rather than moral judgment, the capacity to "really feel with the sufferer" was what counted (Barham, 2004, pp. 153-5).

Templer's memoir suggests in a rather different way how the war might provide a basis for capacities that were not part of the traditional warrior image. The end of the memoir gives a touching account of Dais' death just two years earlier. She had had two hip operations and was severely disabled in the final years of her life; even getting about the house was difficult. "She needed my care," said Templer. He described the events on the evening of Monday January 11 1982 that led to her death. Dais began to experience sharp pain in her lower back. She decided nevertheless that they would go ahead with dinner, and Templer prepared her usual cocktail, but she had no appetite. Templer put her to bed, where she seemed more comfortable, and then went downstairs to wash up and launder some clothes for her, "as she was incontinent and there was some washing to do every night." After clearing up he went back upstairs to find Dais lying unconscious across the bed. Templer covered her in their eiderdown and called the ambulance. The ambulance men arrived soon after and wrapped Dais up in blankets. They put her on a stretcher on one side of the ambulance, and Templer sat opposite. During the journey to hospital, "Dais kept raising herself up and looking at me with very frightened eyes, which made me jump up, only to be pushed back in my seat by the attendant while he gently lay her down again." In the hospital he held her hand and talked to her:

 I told her that I had loved her since our first meeting all
 those years ago and that she was the only woman in my life.
 As she did not speak, I wondered if she understood what I
 was telling her. So I asked her if she would like me to take
 care of her rings. She moved her hands at once, taking off
 her engagement ring and the solitaire diamond ring I had given
 her in more recent years, putting them in my hands. I then
 said, "Would you like me to kiss you"?, and immediately
 she put her lips up for me to kiss. (Templer, 1984, pp. 56-57)

The next morning the Sister rang Templer at home. She asked if he was sitting down, and said that she was sorry to say Dais had died in the early hours of 12 January.

Templer was not immobilized by the shock of Dais' illness or impending death, but was thoughtful in his care of her on their last night together. In Bion's terms, what he had done was to maintain a state of reverie toward Dais, trying to mediate and contain her anxiety about dying (Bion, 1984b; Hinshelwood, 1989, p. 420).

How can we explain such a capacity? Perhaps it was partly a result of the war. After all, it was not the first time Templer had accompanied someone to an ambulance. He had done the very same thing for Dais' brother John when he was bit in the legs, holding his hand while John was guided out of the trenches toward the ambulance (Templer, 1984, p. 27). This is an example of what Denis Winter (1979) calls the "rough, protective care" between comrades in danger, but I think you can see its echo in Templer's account of his wife's trip to hospital sixty five years later, when, in the back of the ambulance, he reached out his hand toward Dais in an effort to comfort her (p. 57). Templer remembered the gentle push of the attendant; he was distressed that he could not hold her.

Templer recalled the look of fear in his wife's eyes as they traveled to hospital. He had probably seen a similar look in the eyes of the dying comrade he had been forced to abandon in March 1918. War memoirs and letters frequently describe the eyes of the dying: in 1919, Wilfred Bion recalled the look in the eyes of his dying runner, which was "the same as that in the eyes of a bird that has been shot--mingled fear and surprise" (Bion, 1997, p. 127). Moreover as Santanu Das notes, it was not unusual for a man to offer a last kiss to a dying comrade, just as Templer offered Dais in their final moments together (Das, 2005, Chap. 3).

Then there is the description of Templer's last words with Dais, when he asked permission to remove her rings. At first I puzzled over this: why did he feel he needed to safeguard them? But this too has a parallel in the war, in the taking of rings and watches from the dead by their comrades, to be delivered to their loved ones as mementoes when they might otherwise be lost or stolen. Graham, who was a batman, held onto the watch and diary of his dead officer Munro, later sending them to the man's family (Neil Munro to Sherriff John Macmaster Campbell, October 21, 1915). When Lieutenant Reggie Trench was mortally wounded, his batman pleaded unsuccessfully with the stretcher bearers to let him take the cygnet ring from Trench's finger. He had managed to secrete Trench's watch in his sock, and he kept it in his shoe right the way through his imprisonment, returning it to Trench's wife after the war (Fletcher, D., 2007, pp. 34). Templer's actions in the hospital are similar: by offering to take the ring from Dais he tries to make sure the symbol of their love will not be lost.

In coping with Dais' illness and death, then, Templer may have been reaching back consciously or unconsciously to his wartime experiences of care, death and dying. His army experience also gave him, as it did others, practical survival skills which they continued to draw on in civilian life. They had learned to sew buttons on with the army "housewife," and could rustle up rudimentary meals. Even officers needed to be able to cook: when Captain Leland's batman went to ground during heavy shelling, he was reduced to making his own meals. Men had had to deal with a host of ailments, from stomachs that were frequently upset to the ubiquitous louse. They had to keep their own clothing as clean as they could in-between (infrequent) laundry visits. When Charles Templer took over the washing and cooking from his disabled wife, he may well have fallen back on routines familiar from his army days.

The emotional record left by Leland in his letters to his wife was not like Templer's. While one was a raw and immediate account of anxiety in which primitive psychic mechanisms like splitting and projective identification were being brought into play, the other, composed amidst loss, was a thoughtful attempt, nearly seventy years on, to make sense of a life defined by love and war. However, both record moments of simultaneous crisis and re-fashioning. They show how the intense emotional experiences of war could produce a reflexive understanding of gender codes and their distorting personal effects, and a receptiveness to different ways of being a man. What they do not suggest, however, is a re-casting of femininity. For if we have in Templer and Leland's cases an instance of emerging masculinities, women remain within traditional feminine identities. The "sensitive" veteran might have known something about care, but he was high maintenance, and required women around him as nurses and carers to contain the emotional aftermath of trench warfare.

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(1) Lyndal Roper (1994, pp. 7-9), in her prescient critique of cultural histories of the early modern period, makes a similar observation about the lack of attention to individual psychic processes.

(2) In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud (1920) seems to modify his initial rejection of the idea that shell-shock was due to the physical effect of violent concussion on the brain. Traumatic neurosis, he now argued, was caused by a "breach in the shield against stimuli and by the problems that follow in its train," but his concern was with psychological factors, the lack of preparedness for anxiety, and the element of fright, rather than molecular damage to the brain (p. 31).

(3) In Learning From Experience, Bion (1962) claimed that when the mind could no! process sense impressions, and convert them into emotional experiences that were capable of being thought, then he "cannot go to sleep and he cannot wake up" (p. 7). The state wherein dream and reality become confused was described by the subaltern Donald Hankey in 1917 as "nameless dread"; the very same term that the war veteran Wilfred Bion would use forty years later to describe the mental states of psychotic patients.

(4) Thanks to Christina Twomey for pointing this out.

(5) Author's Note: IWM denotes Imperial War Museum Document Collection.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michael Roper, Department Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, England C04 3SQ. Electronic mail: [email protected]

MICHAEL ROPER

University of Essex

Michael Roper, Sociology Department, Essex University.

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Author:	Roper, Michael
Publication:	The Journal of Men's Studies
Article Type:	Report
Geographic Code:	4EUUK
Date:	Sep 22, 2007
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