"NERVES"

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3152, 2 August 1917, Page 8

"NERVES"

CURIOUS EFFECTS OF WAR (Bv Vernon Bartlett in the "Daily vy ' Mail.") , ~, , If you were to use a finely justed chemical balance and. were,to.tor, on the floor, three things might happen when vou came to use it again. It might -and ms » very improbable-contanuo to wei'h accurately; it might not work at all; or it might give you distorted bights-tell you that a gra*™ *«& phur weighed an ounce or that a blocs nf wood could double its weight in tha ™ of a minute. All over the world fterTare line, strong spente weeks or months in "nerve' hospital*. &£«minds distorted, by the mpbUuw sights and shocks of war. . There are hundreds upon hundreds ot these "nerve" cases, and there. are hundreds upon hundreds of -anetws -o* own friends; there are strong men who ween all day; there are men who dare not bo left alone; there are men who lau-h inanely; there are men who tremWe as though they were lunatiCßut the vast majority of men wifli "nerves" aro to all appearances orduia?, 6 human, beings-they .hf° b^ 0 ° n * small distortion of the mind. I »j»»» * man who is perfectly fat aid w". tat he has a peculiarity-it is impossible 101 to to'fofce himself into a room «here there is a cosed drawn-... J. na\e seeu him chan\ in tho fraction of asecond from an ordinary cheerful individual into a trembling wreckjus.becausesomej one in tno room had thoughtless .J closed i drawtt. Be tho drawer but a lute bit operand he is all right; |* the drawer shut and he clings, terrified this cha£ while drops of perspiration bicak out on h !fe^n-grow inordinately.nsiftve to sounds. The most staid and stolid n»at I have ever met now twrtches with au insane desire to dance at the someoue else in the trench wa» , the slamming ot a door, ™Um*»* men who cannot support the °JggffISESSS mZ who are convinced that they will So if the? dream the sme dream a certain number of times, men who hare l frm belief that an awful struggle Gainst the black power of death is goin*onaround them all the time. I know' a man, too, who itfll not sleep in a worn SiSont flowers-summer or wm«r he must have flowers by him or •else t would get him." The commonest of all form of "nerves" is, perhaps, thtong-in-to be alone. It would be difficult to ea? 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, ;tho proximity to people in a train or in an omnibus become tortures that are almost unbearable. Thoro are men who have taken to solitary huts in the forests, to tiny houses by the sea, where they will live like primitive men until something happens in their brains to jerk them back into the old routine of life. There are, then, hundreds of varieties of nenes. 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 m the shambles of war it s sometimes a matter of wonder that there are.anj- of tha combatants of any of the armies who aro not suffering from nerves.