http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/01/21/soldiers-the-war-within/
From ‘Weeping tears of blood’: Exploring
Italian soldiers’ emotions in the First
World War
Vanda Wilcox
Soldiers, both men and women, often keep their deepest struggles in waging war to themselves. But as a public, we, too, need to know how war feels, for war’s residue should not just be a soldier’s private burden. It ought to be something that we, who do not don the uniform, recognize and understand as well.
fear, horror, anger, grief and shame
as well as love, friendship, loyalty, even excitement
emotion as including not only ‘feelings’ (the subjective interior reaction component)
but also the process of situational appraisal, judging events or objects; physiological
responses such as heightened heart-rate, sweating or tears; and some kind of communication of both reaction and intent such as facial or verbal expression (including in writing)
men found it risky (as well as potentially embarrassing)
to express emotions openly under this disciplinary regime
A final consideration on sources is the psychological difficulty,
perhaps even impossibility, of accurately turning emotion into a narrative.
Contemporary notions of masculinity based on courage, determination, virility, were
similarly important in legitimising certain forms of emotional expression, while
undermining those that seemed weak or effeminate. As in other societies, manliness and
patriotism required emotional control, suppressing the outward expression of fear or distress\\
express their fears in a variety of ways, using familiar mental markers of
civilian life to communicate their feelings through evocative metaphors. Men ‘bled like
goat[s]’ or else advanced enthusiastically ‘like goats going after salt’ (Revelli 1977, 101,
255); one compared himself to a huntsman pursuing the Austrians for sport, while another
used familiar images to describe unfamiliar scenery: ‘our artillery has been aiming their fire
at the Podgora [mountain] for two months and they have plucked it like a chicken’ (Bellosi
and Savini 2002, 377, 404).
bodily manifestations of feeling
mentioned in the written record, including reports of trembling legs and hands, and above
all of tears.
From ‘Weeping tears of blood’: Exploring
Italian soldiers’ emotions in the First
World War
Vanda Wilcox
Soldiers, both men and women, often keep their deepest struggles in waging war to themselves. But as a public, we, too, need to know how war feels, for war’s residue should not just be a soldier’s private burden. It ought to be something that we, who do not don the uniform, recognize and understand as well.
fear, horror, anger, grief and shame
as well as love, friendship, loyalty, even excitement
emotion as including not only ‘feelings’ (the subjective interior reaction component)
but also the process of situational appraisal, judging events or objects; physiological
responses such as heightened heart-rate, sweating or tears; and some kind of communication of both reaction and intent such as facial or verbal expression (including in writing)
men found it risky (as well as potentially embarrassing)
to express emotions openly under this disciplinary regime
A final consideration on sources is the psychological difficulty,
perhaps even impossibility, of accurately turning emotion into a narrative.
Contemporary notions of masculinity based on courage, determination, virility, were
similarly important in legitimising certain forms of emotional expression, while
undermining those that seemed weak or effeminate. As in other societies, manliness and
patriotism required emotional control, suppressing the outward expression of fear or distress\\
express their fears in a variety of ways, using familiar mental markers of
civilian life to communicate their feelings through evocative metaphors. Men ‘bled like
goat[s]’ or else advanced enthusiastically ‘like goats going after salt’ (Revelli 1977, 101,
255); one compared himself to a huntsman pursuing the Austrians for sport, while another
used familiar images to describe unfamiliar scenery: ‘our artillery has been aiming their fire
at the Podgora [mountain] for two months and they have plucked it like a chicken’ (Bellosi
and Savini 2002, 377, 404).
bodily manifestations of feeling
mentioned in the written record, including reports of trembling legs and hands, and above
all of tears.
. ‘Often we look one another in the face seeing each other shattered with hunger and sleep – tears fill our eyes, crying like babies’, wrote an infantryman to his fiance ́ e in April 1916 (Procacci 2000, 425).
fear was not necessarily at its most intense during combat itself but was exacerbated by immobility: long hours in the trenches, especially under bombardment, left men with plenty of time to reflect and think about the future, whereas during assaults or the mental concentration of some activity there was no time to focus on danger or feel one’s terror
Men slept ‘underground like toads’ or ‘inside the ground like animals’ (Bellosi and Savini 2002, 245, 398) and compared themselves to foxes and moles living in lairs: men felt reduced to the level of beasts, dehumanised not by the mechanical, industrialised features of the war so much as its primitive aspects. Since life in the trenches was literally delimited by walls of earth, mud or stones, these came to define both physical and mental horizons
‘entombed’: burial alive was a recognised psychological obsession for soldiers in modern war
Some felt as if death was not just on its way but had already taken them, as another infantryman reported: ‘In the trenches during a bombardment you think of nothing – I can’t even think about my wife and children . . . it’s as though I was already dead’
a lonely death far from home and friends, with none of the idealised consolations of heroism or comradeship
At night I can’t sleep because my whole body is shaking with nerves and the beat of my heart: no no no. There are all those dead, who will never go home again; or those who return without their legs, without their eyes, and will never see the sun again. Isn’t it true? Tell me I’m right, I know I’m right to weep. (Spitzer 1976, 126)
traumatic requirement to kill, which most acutely embodied the transformation in status and identity from civilian to military life.
‘the pain of loss threatens to be rationalized away’ (Roper 2009, 26–27
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