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Shell Shock, described as the ‘emblematic psychiatric disorder’ of the First World War has long been synonymous with its soldiers. Its association with close proximity to exploding shells and thus the front lines, leading to the various symptoms of ‘shock’, has both facilitated and ensured its existence throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries as a masculine affliction. Of the many shell shock studies that have been produced over the last few decades all have focused purely on the experience of the male combatant, predominantly because of this long held preoccupation with ‘front-line’ warfare and its consequences apparently being the preserve of men. Despite the prolonged interest and analysis of shell shock by medical and social historians along with a significant amount of work by feminist and, more recently, revisionist historians, detailing the involvement of women in the First World War, there is stHl no comprehensive study of the psychological problems encountered and suffered by the women who served alongside the British Expeditionary Forces (BEE). However, this study of the roles and duties of a specific group of women, namely nurses, voluntary aid detachments, and ambulance drivers, reveals they frequently endured a variety of traumatic experiences, involving injuries and fatalities, through the vicarious witnessing and dealing with horrific sights and sounds, all compounded by extremes of conditions and privations. Many, if not all, of these factors were given as antecedents for war neurosis in soldiers. Yet, while the nurse has been idolised for her role in the Great War, her experience of psychological ‘breakdown’ has not been examined. This thesis, through the analysis of professional medical literature, of medical case notes, personal testimonies, diaries and autobiographies, is a contribution to the areas of women’s history, medical history and, more specifically, to the history of psychological war trauma. Following a review of the literature in chapter one, chapter two is a re-examination of the proximity of nurses to the fighting zones and therefore of their exposure to danger. Chapter three analyses the nurses’ experience and subsequent symptoms of war trauma, including, importantly, how contemporary medical authorities understood the disorder, and then cared for and managed their female sufferers. These two chapters fundamentally argue that the notion of war-induced traumatic neurosis being the preserve of men is essentially pretence, and that this ‘focus’ on male sufferers means the history of the condition is incomplete. Chapter four essentially examines the issues of repatriation faced by these nurses, specifically examining the evolution of war disability pensions process of which they were excluded until 1920. It also looks at how the nurse, as female war veteran, coped with the consequences of her war experience. In conclusion, this thesis asserts that these nurses did indeed suffer psychologically for their involvement in this war and not because their symptoms and disorders ‘resembled’ those experienced by men, but were in fact, indistinguishable to the extent that some nurses were classed as ‘shellshocked’

Military Service Tribunals were established following the passing of the first Military Service Act, 1916, to consider applications for exemption from men deemed thereby to have enlisted. Given that conscription itself was an entirely novel mechanism to early twentieth century Britons, there existed no criteria or known models against which the function of these bodies might have been measured or standardized. Gifted a marked degree of independence by Government, even to the point of determining the nature and quality of evidence they should consider in adjudicating cases, they represented a uniquely autonomous stage in the processes that took men from civilian to military life. Being comprised entirely of civilians, drawn from the communities upon which this new coercion fell, the Tribunals were also the visible, accessible face of Government policy. Their sittings became in effect the sole ‘official’ forums in which the human cost of industrial-scale warfare might be rehearsed without circumspection. Though charged with keeping the national interests of the country foremost in mind, many tribunalists appreciated, or discovered, that local issues and concerns represented no less fundamental a part of those interests than did the maintenance of the New Armies. This thesis, utilizing a rare, near-complete body of Appeals Tribunal records, examines the minutiae of the exemption process. It considers to what extent the contradictions inherent in a ‘system’ staffed by volunteers, implementing legislation that aimed towards an as-yet undefined manpower policy were, or could be, resolved. It also tests largely negative assumptions regarding the attitudes, motives and preconceptions of tribunalists in discharging their role. Finally, it assesses the validity of two prevalent, though conflicting, judgements upon the Tribunals collectively: that either they were too receptive to localist pressures in exempting far more men than had been anticipated by the architects of conscription, or, that in demonstrating an unswervingly middle-class empathy with militarist values, they fell far short of the judicial impartiality required of them by legislation

This thesis is about the depiction of the damaged male in contemporary American war films in the period 1990 to 2010. All the films in this thesis deploy complex strategies but induce simple and readily accessible pleasures in order to mask, disavow or displace the operations of US imperialism. It is my argument that the premier emotive trope for emblematising and offering up the damaged male as spectacle and political tool is the American war film. I also argue that masochistic subjectivity (and spectatorship) is exploited in these films, sometimes through using it as a radical transformative tool in order to uncover the contradictions and abuses in US imperial power, but mostly through utilizing its distinct narrative and aesthetic qualities in order to make available to spectators the pleasures of consuming these images, and also to portray the damaged male as a seductive and desirable subjectivity to adopt. The contemporary war film offers up fantasies of imperilled male psychologies and then projects these traumatic (or “weak”/“victimised”) states into the white domestic and suburban space of the US. Accordingly this enables identification with the damaged male, and all his attendant narratives of dispossession, innocence, and victimhood, and then doubles and reinforces this identification by threatening the sanctity and security of the US homeland. My argument builds towards addressing ethical questions of spectatorial passivity and culpability that surround our engagement with global media, and mass visual culture in the context of war. I ultimately identify ethical spectatorship of contemporary war films as bolstering a neo-liberal project advancing the “turn to the self”, and hence audiences could unwittingly be engaged in shoring up white male ethno-centricity and the attendant forces of US cultural and geopolitical imperialism.