February 21, 1915, he was evacuated to the Notre Dame Hospital for the insane at Petrograd,—a tall, healthy, agitated-looking youth with a rapid pulse. He explained in poor Russian how he was now among Germans and feared that they were going to hurt him. At first in the hospital he was seclusive and morose. March 9 he became excited, and tried to break through the door. He was placed in the bath, agitated and yelling. An Esthonian interpreter did not quiet him. The Germans were going to make a martyr of him. After an hour of this he grew quieter, and next day complained only of head weakness and malaise, was in good humour, smiling, and reading an Esthonian paper, and well behaved in church, though tired and pale.
He now got better, began to work and wrote letters. It seemed as if he had waked up from a painful dream. He explained how he thought he had been in captivity; that he was going to be hanged. He had thought that the Germans could talk Russian. He had had hard work in his regiment, as he did not understand Russian and had never before left his little village in Livonia. His mental disorder had started in the autumn, but all that was now like a dream. He said that he had had a mental disorder of short duration following some bodily disease, at the age of thirteen. According to Soukhanoff, this is a case of Meynert’s amentia, in a somewhat feebleminded person. The twilight state might well receive (according to Soukhanoff) the term “oniric delirium” invented by Régis.
Shell-shock; burial: Incapacity to rationalize the situation.
Case 51. (Duprat, October, 1917.)
A soldier, 39, a herdsman, was shell-shocked at Hill 304 May 23, 1916, buried twice, slightly wounded in right eye, and carried unconscious to Bar-le-Duc. He was then forty days in a semi-confusional state with headaches and dreams of the Boches wanting to behead him. Some of these dreams came in the waking state, in which state he could recognize them as imaginary. In April, 1917, he said he had always been afraid, even in daytime, that he would be hurt and had been especially troubled by the fear of shells. He was also bothered by nocturnal enuresis which might become an incurable disease and bring impairment of memory and attention. Although not feebleminded the man was of but moderate intelligence, and his emotions, according to Duprat, were such as to defeat any complete resolution of his plight by the intellect.
An affective complex, passing from the surprise of the shell-shock over to a fright based on clear though wrong ideas of what might happen to him, had left him without sufficient power of autocritique.
Weakling, twice buried by shell explosions in one day: Change of character; fear; three fugues (“It is stronger than I am”).