the line between shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well
as mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues by
concussion, or actual physical damage to the brain; sometimes it is a
shock of horror unbalancing the mind, but that is more rare. It is not
generally the slight, nervous men who suffer worst from shell-shock.
It is often the stolid fellow, one of those we describe as being
utterly without nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him.
He has no resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained
himself in nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the
nervous man, the cockney, for example, is always training himself in
the control of his nerves, on 'buses which lurch round corners, in the
traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which
demand self-control in a 'nervy' man. That helps him in war; whereas
the yokel, or the sergeant--major type, is splendid until the shock
comes. Then he may crack. But there is no law. Imagination--
apprehension--are the devil, too, and they go with 'nerves.'"

It was a sergeant-major whom I saw stricken badly with shell-shock in
Aveluy Wood near Thiepval. He was convulsed with a dreadful rigor like
a man in epilepsy, and clawed at his mouth, moaning horribly, with
livid terror in his eyes. He had to be strapped to a stretcher before
he could be carried away. He had been a tall and splendid man, this
poor, terror-stricken lunatic.

Nearer to Thiepval, during the fighting there, other men were brought
down with shell-shock. I remember one of them now, though I saw many
others. He was a Wiltshire lad, very young, with an apple-cheeked face
and blue-gray eyes. He stood outside a dugout, shaking in every limb,
in a palsied way. His steel hat was at the back of his head and his
mouth slobbered, and two comrades could not hold him still.