“NERVES."

Hokitika Guardian, 16 August 1917, Page 4

“NERVES."

(By Vernon Bartlett, Author of “Mud and Khaki.”)

If yon were to take a finely adjusted chemical balance and’ s ' were to throw it on the floor, three things might happen when you came to use it again It might—and this is very improbable—continue to weigh"accurately ; it might not work at all ; or it might give you distorted weights—tell you that a gramme of sulphur weighed an ounce or that a block of -wood could double its weight in the course of a minute.

And all over the world there are fine, strong, soldiers spending weeks or months in “ nerve ” hospitals, their minds distorted by the appalling sights and shocks of war. There are hundreds upon hundreds of these “nerve” cases, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of varieties of “ nerves.” There are men who have been paralysed for months; there are men whom the Inst to kill has seized suddenly so that they would rnnrdertheir own friends; there are strong men who weep all day; there are men who dare not be left alone; there are men who laugh inanely; there are men who tremble and shake as though they were lunatics.

But the vast majority of men with “nerves ” are to all appearances ordinary human beings - they have but oue small distortion of the mind. I know a man who is perfectly tit . and well, hut he has a peculiarity it is impossible for him to force himself into a room where there is a closed drawer. I have seen him change in the fraction of a. second, from an or-' dinary cheerful individual into a trembling wreck, just because someone in the room had thoughtlessly closed a drawer. Be the drawer but a little bit open and he is all right ; he the draw shut and he clings, terrified, to his chair, while drops of perspiration break out on liis forehead, sensitive to sounds. Men often grow iimi’dilmtely sensitive to sounds. The most staid and stolid individual I have ever met now twitches with an insane desire to dance at the first notes of a waltz, and another man is nearly sLk with horror at the strains of a very well-known music-hall tune —his own brother was blown to bits one day when someone else in the trench wfis playing the melody on a mouth-organ. Nearly everyone home from the front will iutnp at the backfiring of a motorengine or the slamming of a door, but there are men who cannot snpport the ticking of a clock or a watch ? while other regular sounds, such as the tolling of a church bell, will turn them pale with . agony. And there are very many men for whom the sound of guns has a very wonderful fascination —the fascination of the snake for the rabbit. There are touches of “ nerves ” that sound singularly like superstitions—men who will not pass through an archway, men who are convinced that they will die if they dream the same dream a certain number of times, men who have a firm belief that au awful struggle against the black power of death is going on around them all the time. I know a man, too, who will not sleep in a room without flowers -summer or he must have flowers by him or else “ it would get him.”

The commonest of all forms of “ nerves ” is, perhaps, the longing to be alone. It would be difficult to say how many men have had to be invalided out of the Army because they cannot live near other people.

To such, theatres, crowded streets, the buzz of conversation in a room, the proximity to people in a train or in an omnibus become tortures that are almost unbearable. There are men who have taken to solitary lints in the forests, to tiny houses by the sea, where they will live like primi five men until something happens in their brains to jerk them back into the old routine of life. There are, then, hundreds of varieties of “ nerves ” ; hundreds of ways by which strong men may be, mentally as well as morally, crippled ; hundreds of strange terrors and eccentricities which obsess the brain —and to the man who has lived in ' the shambles of war it is sometimes a matter of wonder that there are any of the combatants of any of the armies who are not suffering from “ nerves.”