'Great God,' said Younger. 'I pray this wasn't your family.'
'No, but that was our village – Sommeilles,' she said. 'We moved there when I was little – Mother, Father, Grandmother, and I. Luc was born there. When the war started, all our young men went off to the army. The village was defenseless. The night the Germans came, Luc and I were sent to the carpenter's, because he had a hidden basement. That's the reason we lived. The Germans killed everyone, but they never found us. All night long we heard gunshots and screaming. The next day, they were gone. Our house was burned, but still standing. Mother and Father were dead on the floor. Father had put up a heroic light, you could see that. Grandmother was still alive, but not for long. Mother was naked. There was a lot of blood.'
Luc had stopped his game while his sister spoke. When it was clear that she had finished, the boy started playing again.
'Everyone assumes you have to be sad,' said Colette, 'for the rest of your life.'
Chapter Six
With the Great War came great disease – unheard-of illness on an unprecedented scale.
The last was the worst: the flu of 1918-19, spreading with the continent-crossing armies, hiding in the warm but broken lungs of homeward-bound soldiers, ultimately killing millions in every corner of the earth. Before the Spanish flu, there had been the agonies of phosgene and mustard gas, which could burn away a man's eyes and his flesh down to the bone. Before the poison gas, there had been the repulsive incapacitations of fungi and parasites attacking men's feet, gangrenes propagating in undrained, rat-infested trenches. But before all this, there was shell shock.
The initial reports of the strange condition were baffling. Seemingly unhurt men presented a congeries of contradictory symptoms: rapidity of breath and inability to breathe, silence and raving, excessive motion and catatonia, refusal to let go their weapons and refusal to touch their weapons. But always nightmares – in case after case, night terrors that woke and alarmed their comrades-in-arms.
Then came symptoms more peculiar still. Deafness, muteness, and blindness; paralyzed fists and legs. All without apparent organic injury.
The French had a name for these men: simulateurs. The British too: malingerers. In fact the earliest treatment prescribed by the English was the firing squad, cowardice being an offense punishable by death in the British army. German doctors, by contrast, used electricity. The avowed theory behind the Germans' electrocution therapy was not that it cured, but that at a sufficiently high voltage it made returning to the front a preferable alternative. The German doctors had, however, overlooked a third option, of which quite a few of their patients took advantage: suicide.
Yet even these compelling disincentives failed to stem the tide. The numbers of afflicted men rose to staggering proportions. Eighty thousand soldiers in Great Britain would eventually be diagnosed with the mysterious ailment. Many of these were officers of high character and, from the British viewpoint, of unimpeachable blood and breeding. As a result, the malingering thesis came finally to be doubted.
The first doctors to take the condition seriously announced that exploding missiles were to blame. The concussive detonations set off by the mighty shells of modern warfare were said to produce micro-hemorrhaging in cerebral blood vessels, causing a neurological paralysis or shock in the brain. Thus was coined the term 'shell shock.'
The name stuck, but not the diagnosis behind it. Too many shell- shocked men had lived through no bombardment at all. It soon became apparent that psychology was more important to their condition than physiology. It became equally apparent that only one psychiatrist on the planet had advanced a theory of mental illness that could explain their symptoms: Sigmund Freud.
Gradually but in growing numbers, physicians the world over – men who had previously regarded psychoanalysis with the deepest distaste and suspicion – began to acknowledge that the Freudian concept of the unconscious alone made sense of shell shock and its treatment. 'Fate would seem to have presented us,' wrote a British physician in 1917, 'with an unexampled opportunity to test the truth of Freud's theory of the unconscious.' The test proved positive.
English, Australian, French, and German doctors reported stunning success treating shell shock victims with psychotherapy. In Britain, military authorities called on Dr Ernest Jones, one of Freud's earliest disciples – who was still barred from hospital practice because of his penchant for discussing improprieties with twelve-year-old girls – to treat what was coming to be called 'war neurosis.' Germany sent a delegation to an international psychoanalytic congress, begging for assistance in dealing with overcrowded shell-shock wards. Freud himself – so long calumniated and ostracized – was asked by the Austrian government to lead an investigation concerning the proper treatment of shell shock. By 1918, there may have been only one man alive who both accepted the truth of psychoanalysis and yet felt that Freudian theory could not explain war neurosis. That man was Sigmund Freud.
'He should be in school,' Colette said of her brother a few days later. She was behind the wheel of her truck, guiding it over badly rutted roads. She had no qualms about discussing Luc in the boy's hearing. 'But he is too – uncooperative. The teachers in Paris thought he was deaf. They also thought he couldn't talk. But he can. I know it.'
In the back of the truck, Luc was playing with his favorite toy again an old fishing reel – mouthing unintelligible sounds as he did so. 'How long has he been like this?' asked Younger.
'There was smoke everywhere after they burned Sommeilles. It got into the carpenter's cellar, but Luc wouldn't come out. That whole day he lay there. Then he caught cold, and that night he started coughing badly I thought I might lose him too. He got better, but he's been this way ever since.'
'Does he ever have trouble breathing – when he runs, for example?'
'Never,' said Colette. 'Everyone says he must have had a pneumonia, but I think it's something else. Something psychological. A "neurosis," perhaps. Have you ever heard of Dr Freud of Vienna?'
'Left at that signpost,' said Younger.
'He's a psychologist, very famous. Everyone says he is the only one to understand war neuroses. And he treats children.'
'Dr Freud of Vienna,' said Younger. 'He has a peculiar theory of what causes neurosis.'
'You've read his work? I couldn't find anything in French.'
'I've read him, and I know him. Personally.'
'But that's wonderful!' cried Colette. 'When the war is over, I am going to write to him. We have no money, but I was hoping he might agree to see Luc. Will you help me?'
'No.'
'You won't? Why not?'
'I don't believe in Freud's psychology,' he said. 'As a matter of fact, I don't believe in psychology at all. Shrapnel, bacteria, sulfur – get them out of a man's system, and you stand a fair chance of making him better. But "neurosis"? Neurosis means "no-diagnosis." How do you know Luc doesn't have a problem in his larynx?'
'I know he can talk. I know it. He just won't.'
'Well, if you're right, then he's shy. I was shy at his age.'
'He's not shy,' said Colette. 'It's as if he is – how to say it? – refusing the world.'
'Perfectly rational, given what he has seen of the world. Pull up over there,'
Colette did so, bringing the truck to a grinding halt. 'Dr Freud's patients get better,' she replied. 'Everyone says so.'
'That doesn't prove his theories are valid.'
'What does it matter, if his patients get better?' she asked.