This 1940 book by Charles S. Myers, Consulting Psychologist to the British Armies in the First World War, explains his work on shell shock.

More than 16,000 Canadian soldiers suffered from shell shock during the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Despite significant interest from historians, we still know relatively little about how it was experienced, diagnosed, treated, and managed in the frontline trenches in the Canadian and British forces. How did soldiers relate to suffering comrades? Did large numbers of shell shock cases affect the outcome of important battles? Was frontline psychiatric treatment as effective as many experts claimed after the war? Were Canadians treated any differently than other Commonwealth soldiers? A Weary Road is the first comprehensive study to address these important questions. Author Mark Osborne Humphries uses research from Canadian, British, and Australian archives, including hundreds of newly available hospital records and patient medical files, to provide a history of war trauma as it was experienced, treated, and managed by ordinary soldiers.

In the 1840s, a young cowkeeper and his wife arrive in London, England, having walked from coastal Wales with their cattle. They hope to escape poverty, but instead they plunge deeper into it, and the family, ensconced in one of London’s “black holes,” remains mired there for generations. The Cowkeeper’s Wish follows the couple’s descendants in and out of slum housing, bleak workhouses and insane asylums, through tragic deaths, marital strife and war. Nearly a hundred years later, their great-granddaughter finds herself in an altogether different London, in southern Ontario. In The Cowkeeper’s Wish, Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski trace their ancestors’ path to Canada, using a single family’s saga to give meaningful context to a fascinating period in history—Victorian and then Edwardian England, the First World War and the Depression. Beginning with little more than enthusiasm, a collection of yellowed photographs and a family tree, the sisters scoured archives and old newspapers, tracked down streets, pubs and factories that no longer exist, and searched out secrets buried in crumbling ledgers, building on the fragments that remained of family tales. While this family story is distinct, it is also typical, and so all the more worth telling. As a working-class chronicle stitched into history, The Cowkeeper’s Wish offers a vibrant, absorbing look at the past that will captivate genealogy enthusiasts and readers of history alike.

'Shell Shock Cinema' shows how classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I & the trauma of Germany's humiliating defeat. Anton Kaes argues that even films which do not depict war reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock.

This book provides a thought-provoking exploration into the diagnosis of shell-shock and medical culture in First World War Britain.

This vividly detailed history examines the battles and politics in the final year of WWI—includes trench diagrams, photographs, and maps of battles. Three years into the Great War, Europe found itself in a stalemate on the Western Front. The Russian Front had collapsed and the United States had abandoned neutrality, joining the Allied cause. These developments set the stage for the climactic events of 1918, the year that would finally see an end to the war. In 1918: The Last Act, acclaimed military historian Barrie Pitt “analyses with great lucidity the broad outlines of German and Allied Strategy” (The Sunday Telegraph). With an expert eye, Pitt looks into the policies of the warring powers, the men who led them, and the resulting battles along the Western Front. From the German onslaught of March 21, 1918, to the struggles in Champagne and the Second Battle of the Marne, to the turning point in August and the final, hard-won victory, 1918 The Last Act traces “the blunders at the top and the filth and stench and misery of the trenches” in order to deliver “a compelling narrative” of World War I (Daily Mail).

The notion of battles as the irreducible building blocks of war demands a single verdict of each campaign—victory, defeat, stalemate. But this kind of accounting leaves no room to record the nuances and twists of actual conflict. In Somme: Into the Breach, the noted military historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore shows that by turning our focus to stories of the front line—to acts of heroism and moments of both terror and triumph—we can counter, and even change, familiar narratives. Planned as a decisive strike but fought as a bloody battle of attrition, the Battle of the Somme claimed over a million dead or wounded in months of fighting that have long epitomized the tragedy and folly of World War I. Yet by focusing on the first-hand experiences and personal stories of both Allied and enemy soldiers, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore defies the customary framing of incompetent generals and senseless slaughter. In its place, eyewitness accounts relive scenes of extraordinary courage and sacrifice, as soldiers ordered “over the top” ventured into No Man’s Land and enemy trenches, where they met a hail of machine-gun fire, thickets of barbed wire, and exploding shells. Rescuing from history the many forgotten heroes whose bravery has been overlooked, and giving voice to their bereaved relatives at home, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore reveals the Somme campaign in all its glory as well as its misery, helping us to realize that there are many meaningful ways to define a battle when seen through the eyes of those who lived it.