THE SHELL-SHOCK'S FRIEND.

Cromwell Argus, Volume L, Issue 2649, 24 November 1919, Page 7

THE SHELL-SHOCK'S FRIEND.

A DRUG THAT NEVER FAILS TO BRING SLEEP. By George Goodchild. Paraldahide is the neurasthenic's friend. Veronal, bromide, and all the other drugs that induce sleep are relegated to ignominity by comparison to paraldahide. Men from the line, shell-shocked, nervous wrecks, whose eyes have blinked unceasingly for weeks on end, with never a wink of sleep to restore tired Nature, "buckle down" under paraldahide. Shell-shock is usually got by near acquaintance with a 5.9. If you get a shell right on top of you, and escape the thousand-and-one pieces, or the direct blast of the concussion, shell-shock inevitably follows. It also comes as the cumulative effect of constant gunfire and bursting projectiles, and its chief symptom is insomnia —an insomnia accompanied by a nervewrack that develops into chronic tremor and a hideous stuttering speech. A HORRIBLE CONCOCTION. In large hospitals behind the lines there were wards of shell-shocks whose days were long and whose nights were horrible to contemplate. When I went to the shell-shock ward I hadn't slept for fourteen days for up in the forward hospital paraldahide was not used. On my ticket was marked "sleeplessness." The M.O. came in towards evening. "What did they give you at ?" he asked. "Bromide."

"H'm ! And it didn't do you any good ?"

"No." "And you haven't slept since you went sick ?" "No."

"Well, I'll gi'Ve you something that will give you twenty-four hours of it."

I laughed. I had taken bromide in double doses and treble doses, and I thought I had a right to laugh.

At nine o'clock the Sister came up with a- horrible concoction that looked like some disease floating on three inches of water. The appearance of it was only exceeded by its smell.

"Two drachms !" she said dramatically. The man next me had a similar dose, and the man opposite, who said he had spent a fortnight trying

to discover how he had got to hospital, and where his kit was, had a single drachm.

THROATS LIKE FURNACES

I noticed that they both held their noses very firmly and plunged one hand into a chocolate-box before they drank, so I did likewise. We drank' in unison, and yelled as we crowded chocolate down throats that felt like furnaces.

The Sister grinned. She was quite used to it. The man next to me doubled up with a grunt, and slept in less than ten seconds. The man opposite didn't sleep. He sat bolt upright in bed and began to recite some awful ballad about "A Yellow Idol," with his eyes closed and his hands outspread. Then he hunted under his bed for something, and went to sleep with his head on the floor and his lower anatomy under the sheets. Somebody called in the orderly and pointed to our late elocutionist. The orderly went over to him and shook him violently.

"Why don't you go to bed ?" he said. "Am a-bed !"

"Look 'ere, sir, you can't sleep with'yerhead on the floor like that." "What do you mean 'bout head on the floor? You're mad ! Go away !'

What happened after that I don't know. I awoke, to find it broad daylight and the elocutionist sitting up staring across the ward. AFTER-EFFECTS. "No. 9," he said to me, "what was that, you were reciting last night ?" "Me !" I gasped. "It was you !" He looked at the others, then tapped his forehead mysteriously, intimating that I wasn't "all there." Every night he acted in a similar fashion, and every morning he begged me not to recite the "Yellow Idol" any more.

It was the paraldahide. It took men in different ways, but it was a blessing, nevertheless. I have never met a , man who could ' stand up against it, and yet its after effects were practically nil—-a bit of a headache, but nothing more. Some men with an eversion to drugs refused it, and spent the night with a cigarette in their lips, shuddering as the guns boomed further forward ; but in the end paraldahide captured thepi, and they slept the sleep of the just—a perfectly peaceful sleep in which therewas no war, and they awoke fully refreshed, feeling only, as I said before a slight ache in the head. Every night we welcomed our dose of "dope" with open arms. It was our salvation, our staff of life. We gradually worked down from two drachms to less than a drachm, and we were moderately happy. Paraldahide never fails.