Hattin

Among the photographs of family members that I have on my desk is one of two half-brothers of my paternal grandmother. Their names were Louis and Douglas Solomon. The photograph was taken in October 1915 in the Strand Studio, London.

At the time, the brothers were in England recuperating from injuries sustained in the Gallipoli debacle. In the photograph the two boys appear young, fresh-faced, but pensive and somewhat subdued; rather different, I would imagine, from how they might have appeared in a photograph taken a year earlier, before they had experienced the horrors of war. Louis served in the 2nd Field Ambulance and was wounded on August 22, 1915. He may have participated in the Battle of Hill 60 that had been launched the day before. It was the last major assault of the Gallipoli Campaign. On the day he was wounded, the attack had been reinforced by the Australian 18th Battalion, which consisted of newly arrived troops that were inexperienced and ill-equipped. Attacking at dawn and using only bayonets, they suffered 383 casualties. After his recuperation Louis remained in service. He subsequently served in France where he was injured again on March 23, 1918. Douglas was a reinforcement in the 10th Battalion. He is recorded as having fallen ill, probably with dysentery or typhoid fever, both of which were rife among members of the battalion, and on July 13, 1915 he suffered a back injury. But his early discharge in 1916, at which time he is recorded as suffering from “shell-shock and loss of power of limbs,” is rather more telling. Shellshock was a new “disease” in 1915, increasingly recognized but hardly understood. The term first appears in February that same year in an article by Charles Myers the consulting psychiatrist of the British Expeditionary Force published in The Lancet. Soldiers suffering from it were often returned to the battlefield, and on occasion were put on trial and even executed, for cowardice or desertion. The horrific physical outcome of this misunderstood malady, suggested by the words “loss of power of limbs” can be observed in films of inflicted soldiers taken at the time.