Burial: Dissociation of personality.
Case 369. (Feiling, July, 1915.)
The following are some stories told by a “lost personality” under hypnosis.
The patient, aged 24, was a bandsman in the Second Battalion Wiltshire Regiment, who sometime near the end of October 1914, was buried in a trench near Ypres. This is his account:
“I was dug out at night and taken to a dressing station; it was cold and dark. Then I went on to a hospital at Ypres; it was really a convent, and there were a lot of nuns about, dressed in dark robes with white hats; some of them spoke English. I stopped there for a night and a day. There were a lot of wounded there. Then I was sent on by train; I lay down all the way on a seat in the carriage; we took the whole day to get to ——, and kept on stopping at stations. I was at —— about ten days; I don’t know what hospital it was, but there were English doctors and nurses. It was near the harbor. We came over to England in a hospital ship, the Arethusa; I went straight on to Manchester by train. The hospital there was really a school turned into a hospital.”
Here is a brief account of a scrap with some Uhlans.
Q. Did you see any Uhlans? Yes.
Q. What are they like? They’ve got no guts. One time 30 of them were against 8 of us infantry, and they “done a bunk.” Their horses were not bad. They wore helmets with a double eagle on the front.
He was asked to describe the country round the trenches and to give some account of the fighting there: