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A War of Nerves is a fascinating and harrowing book. It is a history of what
in the First World War was called “shell shock”, that easy name for the complete
“moral” and physical collapse of an individual soldier, and its reception by the
military. The British were apt to treat it with an accusation of cowardice and
treat it with prison or sometimes a firing squad. During the Second World War
the US’s General Patton slapped a soldier who was in hospital with a similar
diagnosis— and malaria. But Ben Shephard shows that most of the 20th
century saw…