The Aftermath: Memory, Trauma and Legacy

The First World War did not end on 11 November 1918. Its physical, psychological, and cultural consequences shaped the decades that followed and continue to resonate today. For AQA A-Level English Literature, understanding the aftermath is essential: many of the texts you study were written not during the war but in its wake, and their meaning is shaped by the experience of living with what the war had done.

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Shell Shock and PTSD

The psychological consequences of the war were massive, poorly understood, and inadequately treated. The term "shell shock" — coined by Dr Charles Myers in 1915 — covered a wide range of symptoms:

Symptom	Detail
Physical symptoms	Trembling, paralysis, blindness, deafness, mutism — with no apparent physical cause
Nightmares	Recurring, vivid dreams of combat; inability to sleep
Flashbacks	Involuntary reliving of traumatic events, triggered by sounds, smells, or situations
Emotional numbing	Inability to feel emotion; detachment from others; sense of unreality
Hypervigilance	Constant alertness; inability to relax; exaggerated startle response
Survivor's guilt	Anguish at having survived when comrades did not

Treatment

Method	Detail
Rivers's "talking cure"	Dr W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglockhart used a precursor of psychotherapy, encouraging patients to recall and process traumatic memories. This is the method depicted in Barker's Regeneration
Yealland's electrotherapy	Dr Lewis Yealland used electric shocks to treat "hysterical" symptoms. His method was coercive and sometimes brutal — patients were told they would not leave the treatment room until they were "cured." Barker depicts this in Regeneration as a counterpoint to Rivers's humane approach
Discipline	Many ordinary soldiers with shell shock symptoms were punished rather than treated. Some were shot for "cowardice" or "desertion" — men who were, in modern understanding, suffering from PTSD. Between 1914 and 1920, the British Army executed 306 soldiers for military offences, many of whom were almost certainly suffering from psychological trauma

AO3 Significance: The treatment of shell shock reveals the intersection of medicine, class, and military authority. Officers were treated therapeutically at hospitals like Craiglockhart; ordinary soldiers were more likely to face punishment. The distinction between "genuine" illness and "malingering" or "cowardice" was a class distinction as much as a medical one.

Shell Shock in Literature

Text	How Shell Shock Is Represented
Barker, Regeneration	The central subject: Rivers treats Sassoon, Prior, and other officers. The novel explores how trauma manifests in different individuals and the ethical dilemmas of treatment
Owen, "Mental Cases"	Describes shell-shocked soldiers: "These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished." The poem uses surreal, hallucinatory imagery to convey the internal landscape of trauma
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway	Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, hallucinates and eventually commits suicide. His suffering is set against the superficial social world of post-war London
Sherriff, Journey's End	Stanhope's alcoholism is a form of self-medication for what is clearly PTSD. His deterioration over the play's four days represents the cumulative effect of sustained combat stress

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Memorialisation

The scale of the war's casualties demanded new forms of remembrance. The culture of memorialisation that developed in the 1920s and 1930s shaped — and was shaped by — the literature of the period.

The Cenotaph

Designed by Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1920, the Cenotaph in Whitehall became the focal point of national mourning. Its name — Greek for "empty tomb" — is itself significant: it contains no body, representing all the dead through the absence of any specific individual.

War Cemeteries

The Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) established cemeteries across the Western Front. Each grave is marked by a uniform headstone — officer and private alike — inscribed with name, rank, regiment, date of death, and (if desired by the family) a personal inscription.

Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915, served on the Commission. He chose the inscription for graves of unidentified soldiers: "A Soldier of the Great War — Known unto God." Kipling also selected the biblical phrase inscribed on the Stone of Remembrance in each cemetery: "Their name liveth for evermore."

The Two-Minute Silence

Introduced on 11 November 1919, the two-minute silence at 11 a.m. on Armistice Day was a radical act of collective remembrance — an entire nation falling silent simultaneously. The silence enacted absence: the missing voices of the dead.

Literary Responses to Memorialisation