Shell Shock
Thursday, September 7 2006
Shell Shock
It's difficult today to understand the carnage of World War I, and how different it was from wars preceding it. There were the horrors of the trenches. And at the front lines, soldiers were subjected to unprecedented artillery barrages that drove many of them mad. The received wisdom was that they were malingerers. Their condition later became known as "shell shock". Today we know it as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
In the fall of 1914, Private Harry Farr went off to war, leaving his young wife and infant daughter behind in London. In the next year and a half, he was hospitalized four times for shell shock, once for five months. Each time he was sent back to the front. Finally in September, 1916, during the battle of the Somme, he could take no more. Assigned to a take supplies to the front with a ration party, he refused to go. After a twenty-minute court martial, during which Harry was left to defend himself, he was found guilty of cowardice and executed the next morning at six a.m.
For decades, Harry's ashamed wife told no one about his sentence. Harry's father would not allow his son's name to be spoken in the family. Harry's daughter, Gertrude Harris, learned the truth by accident when she was forty years old. She kept the secret to herself. Harry's granddaughter, Janet Booth, only found out when she asked where his grave was located while doing the family tree.
Today Dick speaks with Harry's ninety-two year old daughter and sixty three-year old granddaughter about their battle for pardons for Harry and the other 305 British soldiers executed for cowardice and desertion during World War I.
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WEBLINKS
- The story of the campaign to pardon the men executed for cowardice and desertion can be found here
- Harry Farr's story is called Shell Shocked and Shot
- For more on the war
