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PSYCHOLOGICAL
TRAUMA AND THE
LEGACIES OF THE
FIRST WORLD WAR

Edited by
Jason Crouthamel
and Peter Leese
Psychological Trauma and the Legacies
of the First World War
 Jason Crouthamel • Peter Leese
Editors

Psychological Trauma
and the Legacies of
the First World War
Editors
Jason Crouthamel Peter Leese
Grand Valley State University University of Copenhagen
Allendale, USA Copenhagen, Denmark

ISBN 978-3-319-33475-2 ISBN 978-3-319-33476-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33476-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954974

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Tony Cappucino / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume has its origins in scholarship presented at the conference

“Aftershock: Post-Traumatic Cultures since the Great War” held at the
University of Copenhagen in May 2013. The conference and a follow-up
event were funded by Danish Council for Independent Research (FKK)
and the Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark. We received additional grants
from the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and the
Centre for European Studies, both at the University of Copenhagen, and
we are most grateful to the University of Copenhagen for its support. We
would like to thank Andrew Miller for his herculean work in organizing
the conference. At the conference, we received invaluable and stimulating
contributions from a wide range of colleagues who shared their expertise.
Jay Winter’s generosity in offering critical analysis and synthesizing ideas
at the conference was an inspiration. Allan Young, Simon Wessely, Edgar
Jones, Raya Morag, Mette Bertelsen, Stefan Schilling, and Anne Freese all
posed questions, critiques, and observations that helped enrich our think-
ing and approaches to trauma in the 20th century. At the last stage of com-
pleting the manuscript, we had the tremendous opportunity to present
our ideas, joined on a panel with Julia Barbara Köhne and Ville Kivimäki,
at a seminar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and
Research Center on the History of Emotions. We are grateful to Ute
Frevert and scholars at the center who formulated illuminating questions
about our fundamental arguments that helped us define our approaches to
trauma studies and emotions. Ville Kivimäki made that event at the Max
Planck Institute possible and we are most grateful to him. We would also
like to thank Garry White for his expertise as a translator whose advice and

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

attention to detail is much appreciated. Further, we would like to thank

our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Kristin Purdy, who patiently ushered
the project through the process of review and revision; Michelle Smith for
her editorial advice and expertise; and Chris Chappell who invited us to
submit the manuscript. Jordan Cloud provided insightful questions that
helped with editing the final manuscript. Thanks also to the anonymous
peer reviewers who provided insightful critical comments that helped us
revise and improve the essays.
The Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence, and its director
Robert Smart, at Grand Valley State University kindly provided funding
that helped produce this project. We are also grateful to several institutions
that provided permission to reprint images and texts included in this vol-
ume, including the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde and Bundesarchiv-
Militärarchiv Freiburg, the Gillies Archive (previously held at the Frognal
Centre for Medical Studies), and the National Library of Ireland.
This volume, Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World
War, is intended to be a companion to a second volume, Traumatic
Memories of the Second World War and After. Both volumes argue that
the traumatic effects of the world wars have been substantially underesti-
mated, and the contributors seek ways to think beyond the strictly medi-
cal definitions of what constituted traumatic experience. Further, both
volumes search for a broader definition of ‘mental trauma’ by examining
wider groups of war victims, including women and children, who were
shattered by the experience of total war that engulfed combat and home
fronts. By examining varied 20th century social, political, and cultural sites
of trauma, we hope to illuminate the genealogy of trauma at a time when
Western societies in the early 21st century are asking critical questions
about the usefulness of the PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) diag-
nosis. It is vital that the historical context for the experience, diagnosis,
and treatment of trauma is fully explored before we can understand the
experiences of patients, caregivers, and their families today.

(Grand Valley State University) Jason Crouthamel

(University of Copenhagen) Peter Leese
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1
Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese

Part I Battles over Representations and Perceptions

of Traumatized Men 23

2 Losing Face: Trauma and Maxillofacial

Injury in the First World War 25
Fiona Reid

3 Screening Silent Resistance: Male Hysteria

in First World War Medical Cinematography 49
Julia Barbara Köhne

4 “Always Had a Pronouncedly Psychopathic

Predisposition”: The Significance of Class
and Rank in First World War German
Psychiatric Discourse 81
Gundula Gahlen

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part II Traumatized Civilians in the Wake

of the Great War 115

5 Violence, Trauma and Memory in Ireland:

The Psychological Impact of War and Revolution
on a Liminal Society, 1916–1923 117
Justin Dolan Stover

6 Gender, Memory and the Great War:

The Politics of War Victimhood in
Interwar Germany 141
Silke Fehlemann and Nils Löffelbein

7 Subjectivities in the Aftermath: Children

of Disabled Soldiers in Britain After the Great War 165
Michael Roper

8 “Entrenched from Life”: The Impossible

Reintegration of Traumatized French Veterans
of the Great War 193
Marie Derrien

Part III Traumatized Medical Cultures 215

9 Making Sense of War Neurosis in Yugoslavia 217

Heike Karge

10 “Everything Ruined, Which Seemed Most

Stable in the World…”: The German
Medical Profession, the First World War
and the Road to the “Third Reich” 237
Livia Prüll
 CONTENTS ix

11 Violence and Starvation in First World War Psychiatry:

Origins of the National Socialist ‘Euthanasia’ Program 261
Philipp Rauh

Part IV A Coda on Trauma 287

12 Toward A Global History of Trauma 289

Mark S. Micale

Suggestions for Further Reading for Chapter 12 305

Bibliography 311

Index 329
 LIST OF FIGURES

Image 2.1 Another Russian Mystery, 1917 (Image provided by

Dr Andrew Bamje and reproduced with his kind permission) 38
Image 2.2 Thespian Society program, 1919 (Image provided by
Dr Andrew Bamje and reproduced with his kind permission) 39
Image 3.1 Ferdinand Kehrer as a doctor with magical hands
(Reserve-Lazarett-Hornberg im Schwarzwald, 1917,
reproduced with permission by the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum Dresden) 52
Image 3.2 Verbal suggestion and military drill (Reserve-Lazarett-
Hornberg im Schwarzwald, 1917, reproduced with permission
by the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden) 53
Image 3.3 Ideal of verticality and motionlessness
(Reserve-Lazarett-Hornberg im Schwarzwald, 1917,
reproduced with permission by the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum Dresden) 54
Image 3.4 Max Nonne treating a soldier (Funktionell-motorische
Reiz- und Lähmungs-Zustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern
by Max Nonne (1918), reproduced with permission
by the Bundesarchiv, Filmarchiv, Berlin/
Transit-Film-Gesellschaft MBH) 61
Image 3.5 The slanted patient (Funktionell-motorische Reiz- und
Lähmungs-Zustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern by Max Nonne
(1918), reproduced with permission by the Bundesarchiv,
Filmarchiv, Berlin/Transit-Film-Gesellschaft MBH) 63
Image 3.6 The Battle of Seale Hayne (WAR NEUROSES by Hurst/Symns,
circa 1916-1918, reproduced with permission by the
Wellcome Library, London) 69

xi
xii LIST OF FIGURES

Image 3.7 Re-enacted military formation with stretcher bearer

(WAR NEUROSES by Hurst/Symns, circa 1916-1918,
reproduced with permission by the Wellcome
Library, London) 70
Image 3.8 War parade: Playing the war game again (WAR NEUROSES
by Hurst/Symns, circa 1916-1918, reproduced
with permission by the Wellcome Library, London) 71
Image 3.9 The ‘lucky shot’ as an illusory happy ending (WAR NEUROSES
by Hurst/Symns, circa 1916-1918, reproduced
with permission by the Wellcome Library, London) 72
Image 11.1 The original survey form of the ‘T-4 Aktion Program’,
1940 (Source: Federal Archive Signature R179/18427,
reproduced with permission by the Institute for the
History of Ethics and Medicine, University of Erlangen) 277
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Jason Crouthamel is an Associate Professor of History at Grand Valley State

University in Michigan. He has published on the history of psychological trauma,
memory, and masculinity in Germany during the age of total war. He is the author
of An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality and German Soldiers in
the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and The Great War and German
Memory: Society, Politics and Psychological Trauma, 1914–1945 (Liverpool
University Press, 2009). He is also the co-editor, with Peter Leese, of Traumatic
Memories of World War Two and After (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Marie Derrien is an associate member of the Rhône-Alpes Laboratory of
Historical Research in Lyon and teaching assistant at the University of Savoie
Mont Blanc (France). She graduated in 2011 from the École Normale Supérieure
de Lyon (France). She received her Ph.D. degree in 2015 from the University of
Lyon for her work on the soldiers of the Great War institutionalized in French
mental hospitals (1914–1980), under the supervision of Pr. Isabelle von
Bueltzingsloewen.
Silke Fehlemann is a research associate at the Heinrich Heine-University of
Düsseldorf in the field of history of psychiatry. Her research specializes in the
social and cultural history of the First World War, gender, and history of medicine.
Her publications include: “Bereavement and Mourning (Germany)”, in:
1914–1918–online–International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by
Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, et.al., issued by Freie Universität Berlin,
and Armutsrisiko Mutterschaft: Mütter-und Säuglingsfürsorge im rheinisch-west-
fälischen Industriegebiet 1890–1924 (Essen: Klartext, 2009).

xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gundula Gahlen is a research scholar at the Free University (Freie Universität) in

Berlin. She specializes in modern military history, the history of psychiatry, and the
history of the Balkans. Her most recent publications include Das bayerische
Offizierskorps 1815–1866 (Paderborn: Schoeningh 2011) and, as co-editor with
Daniel Marc Segesser and Carmen Winkel, Geheime Netzwerke im Militär
1700–1945 (Paderborn: Schoeningh 2016).
Heike Karge is an Assistant Professor at Regensburg University. She specializes in
the social and cultural history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the history of
remembrance cultures, and the social history of medicine. Her publications include
Steinerne Erinnerung—Versteinerte Erinnerung? Kriegsgedenken im sozialistischen
Jugoslawien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010, revised and translated into Serbo-
croatian: Sećanje u kamenu—okamjeno sećanje? [Beograd: Biblioteka XX Vek, 2014])
and a co-edited volume, with Sara Bernasconi and Friederike Kind-Kovács, Beyond
Medicine: The Politics of Public Health in 20th Century Europe (forthcoming in 2016).
Julia B. Köhne is a research scholar at Humboldt-University Berlin and
Privatdozentin for Contemporary and Cultural History and Media Studies at the
University of Vienna. She is the author of Kriegshysteriker: Strategische Bilder und
mediale Techniken militärpsychiatrischen Wissens, 1914–1920 (Husum: Matthiesen,
2009) and Geniekult in Geisteswissenschaften und Literaturen um 1900 und seine
filmischen Adaptionen (Wien: Böhlau, 2013). She has edited and co-edited, among
others, Trauma und Film. Inszenierungen eines Nicht-Repräsentierbaren
(Berlin: Kadmos, 2012) and, with Ulrike Heikaus, Krieg! Juden zwischen den
Fronten 1914–1918 (Munich: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2014).
Peter Leese is Associate Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen. His
publications include Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the
First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Revised paperback, 2014) and Britain
Since 1945: Aspects of Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). He has also co-edited
Migration, Narration, Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives (Peter Lang, 2012).
Together with Jason Crouthamel, he is also the co-editor of Traumatic Memories
of World War Two and After (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Nils Löffelbein is an Assistant Professor at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am
Main. His research deals with the history of the First World War, the cultural his-
tory of National Socialism, the history of migration, and the history of European
administration. His publications include Ehrenbürger der Nation. Die
Kriegsbeschädigten des Ersten Weltkriegs in Politik und Propaganda des
Nationalsozialismus (Essen: Klartext, 2013).
Mark S. Micale is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-
Champaign. He specializes in modern European intellectual and cultural history, the
history of medicine, and the history of gender and sexuality. He has published
extensively on the history of psychiatry, and his work includes Hysterical Men:
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Harvard University Press, 2008). He is
the editor of The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in
Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Stanford University Press, 2003) and, with Paul
Lerner, he is the co-editor of Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and Trauma in
the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Livia Prüll is Lecturer at the Medical Faculty of the University of Mainz. Her
work focuses on the social and cultural history of 19th- and 20th-century medi-
cine, including the history of pathology and pharmacology, the history of military
medicine, and the relationship of medicine and the public in West Germany after
1945. Her publications include “The exhausted Nation—Psychiatry and the medi-
cal Homefront 1914–1918: The Case of Robert Sommer and the City of Gießen,”
in Hans-Georg Hofer, Cay-Rüdiger Prüll, Wolfgang U. Eckart, eds, War, Trauma
and Medicine in Germany and Central Europe (1914–1939) (Freiburg: Centaurus,
2011), and (with Philipp Rauh) “Other Fronts, Other Diseases? Comparisons of
Front-specific Practices in Medical Treatment,” in Joachim Bürgschwentner,
Matthias Egger, Gunda Barth-Scalmani, eds, Other Fronts, Other Wars? First World
War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial (Boston: Brill, 2014).

Philipp Rauh is a research associate at the Institute for the History and Ethics
of Medicine, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. His specialties include medi-
cine and war, history of psychiatry and medicine, and National Socialism.
Currently he is working on a DFG-funded project about concentration-camp
physicians. His publications include (as co-editor with Livia Prüll) Krieg und
medikale Kultur. Patientenschicksale und ärztliches Handeln in der Zeit der
Weltkriege, 1914–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014) and (as co-editor with
Babette Quinkert and Ulrike Winkler), Krieg und Psychiatrie, 1914–1950
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).

Fiona Reid is a historian at the University of South Wales where she teaches mod-
ern European history. She has previously published on the history of shell shock
and on PTSD and is the author of Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery
in Britain, 1914–1930 (London: Continuum, 2010). Her current interests include
humanitarian relief and medical pacifism, and she is currently working on a social
history of medicine in Europe throughout the First World War.
Michael Roper is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He has pub-
lished extensively on family life, emotions, and the transmission of trauma across
generations in modern Britain. His book The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in
the Great War (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2009) explores letters
and diaries of British soldiers and their emotional experiences on the Western
front. He is also undertaking a personal history of the long-term aftermath of the
Great War, looking across the twentieth century and three generations of family
life in Australia as part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council/Heritage
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Lottery Fund First World War Engagement Centre project, “Everyday Lives in
War—Experience and Memory of the First World War.”
Justin Dolan Stover is Assistant Professor of transnational history at Idaho State
University where he teaches on modern Europe, nationalism, war, and conflict. He
was conferred with a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin and has held distinct
research fellowships in Dublin, New York, and Paris. His research examines the
formation and interpretations of loyalty and allegiance in Irish society, as well as
the broader social and environmental impacts of the Irish Revolution. His recent
publications include “Redefining Allegiance: Loyalty, Treason and the Foundation
of the Irish Free State 1922–32” in Mel Farrell, Jason Knirck, and Ciara Meehan,
eds, A Formative Decade: Ireland in the 1920s (Kildare: Irish Academic Press,
2015) and “Irish Political Prisoner Culture, 1916–1923” in Crosscurrents, 64:1
(2014). He is currently working on a history of environmental damage during the
Irish Revolution.
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese

On the centenary of the Great War, the psychological aftershocks of the

trenches still haunt our own society. ‘Shell shock,’ the most well-known
term for the complex mental wounds suffered by men who emerged from
the trenches, became national news in Britain in 2006, when Defense
Secretary Des Browne announced that 306 soldiers who had been exe-
cuted for desertion or cowardice in the Great War were to be officially
pardoned. Browne observed that the pardon was given out of recognition
for the “horrific circumstances” of the military court proceedings, where
soldiers were not given a chance to produce their own evidence or call on
witnesses.1 The British government had been under pressure by families
of the executed men to review these cases. The 93-year- old daughter of
one particular soldier, Private Harry Farr, who was executed for cowardice
during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, fought over a decade to clear her
father’s name. Harry Farr’s execution meant that his wife and daughter,

J. Crouthamel ( )
Department of History, Grand Valley State University,
MAK D-1-160, 1 Campus Drive, 49401 Allendale, MI, USA
P. Leese
Institute of English, Germanic and Romance Studies,
University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 128, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 1

J. Crouthamel, P. Leese (eds.), Psychological Trauma and the Legacies
of the First World War, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33476-9_1
2 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

Gertrude, were left with no pension and, in addition to economic hard-

ships, had to deal with the stigma of shame. After her father was pardoned
in 2006, Harry Farr’s daughter told journalists:

I am so relieved that this ordeal is now over and I can be content knowing
that my father’s memory is intact. I have always argued that my father’s
refusal to rejoin the frontline, described in the court martial as resulting
from cowardice, was in fact the result of shell shock, and I believe that many
other soldiers suffered from this, not just my father.

The popular British newspaper The Guardian reported that lawyers for
Farr’s family suggested that today the private would have been given much
greater empathy, as he was “obviously suffering from a condition we now
would have no problem in diagnosing as post-traumatic stress disorder or
shell shock as it was known in 1916.” Defense Secretary Browne observed
that the execution of soldiers as “cowards” was an injustice and that these
306 men should be regarded as victims of the First World War.2
The revelation in today’s popular media that descendants of trauma-
tized men were still fighting to rectify the memory of the war highlighted
the long-term aftershocks of the war on not only soldiers, but also women
and children who still lived in the shadow of stigmatization from psycho-
logical trauma. Further, the official pardon of soldiers like Private Farr
highlights how mental trauma was a contested illness, as military authori-
ties, doctors, soldiers themselves and their dependents fought to define it,
explain its origins and cope with its effects. Though Private Farr’s lawyers
argued that in today’s society soldiers would have been recognized as war
victims rather than criminals, modern diagnoses like Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD) still fall short in describing the complex nature of psy-
chological wounds and, as psychologists have asserted, still stigmatizes
men and women with the term ‘disorder’ when psychological trauma is
arguably a natural response to the horrific violence encountered in mod-
ern war.3
Even a century after the Great War, which first saw terms like ‘shell
shock’, ‘war neurosis’ and ‘war hysteria’ to describe the symptoms of
trench warfare, there is much that needs to be investigated about how
modern industrialized war shattered human minds and bodies. Traumatic
responses to war are complex and they often elude state and medical
attempts to define and control psychological wounds. There is still a need
 INTRODUCTION 3

for historians to explore personal experiences with trauma and diverse

social, political and cultural conditions that shaped perceptions of the
traumatized, as well as victims’ perceptions of culture, society and the
memory of the First World War.
The goal of this book is to broaden our definition of ‘mental trauma’
in the Great War by examining wider groups of war victims in diverse
social, political and cultural contexts who were shattered by not only the
trench experience, but also the long-term physical, political and economic
effects of the war. As Jay Winter noted at the conference where this vol-
ume originated, the numbers of people, both on the battlefields and the
home fronts, who suffered from psychological trauma have been substan-
tially underestimated, and medical diagnoses only scratch the surface of
the mental toll inflicted by modern war.4 Our aim is to uncover ‘hidden’
forms of trauma using varieties of sources that reveal individual, subjective
experiences with psychological trauma. This volume explores the following
interrelated questions: what forms of hidden trauma existed in addition to
the medically diagnosed illnesses of ‘shell shock’ and ‘war neurosis’? How
do we uncover and interpret hidden layers of trauma in individuals, fami-
lies and cultures? How can we use personal as well as medical and political
sources to enrich our understanding of traumatic illness?
The central argument of this volume is that the traumatic impact of
the Great War was subjective and its meanings were divided along gender,
political and experiential lines. Historians can reconstruct these subjec-
tivities by being sensitive to sources produced by wider groups beyond
medical and political authorities that have been the epicenter of recent
scholarship.5 Subjective approaches to trauma require historians to utilize
more diverse sources, including family archives, documents from film and
photography, and memoirs of soldiers and civilians, all of which challenge
hegemonic notions of trauma defined by political and medical authorities.
In particular, the notion that mentally ill soldiers were not war victims at
all, but rather unmanly fakers and malingerers who were trying to evade
service or gain a pension, was fiercely contested by traumatized men and
their dependents. In order to reconstruct the history of ‘shell shock,’ his-
torians must integrate the histories of doctors, patients and civilians as
symbiotic rather than separate entities whose narratives of trauma evolved
in long-term battles over the war’s social and psychological effects.
War victims were not simply objects of military, medical and politi-
cal categorization and treatment. They exerted agency by trying to shape
4 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

the narrative of psychological trauma. The voices of men, women and

children who were mentally shattered by war reveal a wide range of emo-
tional problems in the wake of mass violence, which require sensitivity
to the different ways in which survivors experienced trauma.6 While men
suffered under the artillery and machine-gun fire of modern war, their
dependents endured economic deprivation and psychological stress on
the home front.7 When men returned home, women and children’s roles
as dependents reversed as families had to cope with damaged men, both
physically and emotionally. As military doctors and state health providers
often stigmatized ‘hysterical’ men as unmanly burdens who failed the test
of the warrior ideal, and accused them of shirking their duty and becom-
ing drains on the welfare state, wives and children became breadwinners
and caregivers.8 The traumatic wounds suffered by men were often trans-
mitted to their families who witnessed the effects of war up close and
who internalized these emotional scars with feelings of guilt, anger and
resentment.9
Instead of studying traumatized populations in isolation, or construct-
ing a hierarchy of trauma, it is important for historians to recognize that
men, women and children were often caught up in a net of traumatic
experiences that both intersected and diverged.10 The traumatic memories
that haunted men led to outbursts of domestic violence, withdrawn behav-
ior and feelings of inferiority and shame that left their families emotion-
ally traumatized. At the same time, women who had to cope with these
damaged men, and the ‘second generation’ of children raised in these
shattered households, were not simply side-effects of a central trauma or
part of a collective experience. In the postwar period, women’s memories
and experiences with trauma were relegated to a secondary status as the
patriarchy reasserted itself. They fought for recognition of the particularity
of their wounds as well as the sacrifices and responsibilities demanded of
them as they became caretakers of damaged men and, more than symbols
of mourning and bereavement, became an essential part of the emotional
and physical recovery of individuals and the nation.11
The psychological trauma of the war also includes the brutalization
of doctors’ consciences, as evidenced by the distortion of ethics, values
and conceptions of not only the mentally disabled, but human life in
general. Thus, as historians examine the traumatic impact of the war on
civilian populations, doctors also need to be included in this paradigm.
Doctors developed a relationship with patients as they struggled to for-
mulate a diagnosis and treatment within the context of prevailing cultural
 INTRODUCTION 5

expectations.12 Just as traumatized men coped with representations of their

wounds as unmanly, shameful and pathological, doctors were often trau-
matized by their failures to heal these wounds and their anxieties about
‘hysterical’ men as ‘degenerate’ threats to not only the medical establish-
ment’s self-image of control, but also the nation’s health and survival. The
aim here is not to portray doctors as ‘victims’ comparable to traumatized
soldiers, but rather to highlight the chain reactive effects of psychologi-
cal traumas, which brutalized psychiatrists’ responsibilities to individuals
and perceptions of human life. The war ultimately created an atmosphere
of pervasive violence in which doctors rationalized further brutality on
traumatized men in the form of neglect, condemnation and, especially in
the context of National Socialist ideology and policy, ultimately murder.13

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND AND METHODOLOGIES

Historians included in this volume are inspired by, and attempt to build
on, recent scholarship that has tried to advance trauma studies beyond
the history of medicine, welfare and treatment into the direction of prob-
lems of reintegration, cultural representations and perceptions of the trau-
matized.14 The essays here propel the field of trauma studies forward by
examining not only men who were mentally shattered on the battlefield,
but also the ‘second generation’ of civilians traumatized by war. This vol-
ume aims to expand our understanding of trauma to include wider groups
and different generations affected by the Great War and to examine dif-
ferent social and political groups who appropriated and applied different
interpretations of traumatic experience to postwar contexts.
Scholarship on trauma has exploded since the 1990s, with a vast, inter-
disciplinary body of work from specialists who have fundamentally changed
the ways in which we approach the history of psychological illness and the
effects of war. Anthropologist Allan Young pointed to the experience and
diagnosis of shell shock in the Great War as essential to understanding the
cultural construction of psychological trauma in the twentieth century.15
Over ten years ago, a definitive work in the field emerged, Traumatic
Pasts—History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930,
edited by historians Mark Micale and Paul Lerner. This collected volume
with essays by leading scholars demonstrated that trauma is a key site of
understanding the social and cultural history of modern Western societies.
Micale and Lerner’s volume focused primarily on how medical authorities
and welfare policy makers theorized trauma. They argued with convincing
6 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

evidence from a wide range of contexts that trauma was not only an event,
but also the act of remembering that event through the prism of social,
medical and military interests.16
Building on the significance of Micale and Lerner’s seminal volume, we
aim to utilize scholarship from the last ten years that has expanded the field
to include subjective experiences of diverse traumatized groups, further
source bases reflecting war victims’ agency and perspectives, and new theo-
ries on the history of emotions and cultural representations of trauma. One
of the pioneers of medical history ‘from below,’ Roy Porter, emphasized
the importance of looking at the history of medicine from the point of view
of patients, but uncovering and analyzing their perspectives is still challeng-
ing for historians.17 Even more challenging is uncovering the traumatic
impact of the war on civilians, including women and children who had to
cope with the emotional impact of not only home front deprivation, but
also the ongoing psychological problems of their fathers and husbands who
returned from the trenches. This volume is influenced by psychologist Ruth
Leys’ scholarship on trauma (especially in the context of the Holocaust),
which emphasizes ‘secondary trauma’ experienced during the return from
traumatic experiences.18 Sources dealing with the long-term impact of the
war, especially narratives by families who had to deal with problems of
reintegration, reveal the degree to which the trench experience was only
the epicenter of ongoing traumas that included stigmatization and margin-
alization in postwar society. The voices of war victims, including children
of traumatized men, and women shattered by grief, mourning and socio-
economic upheaval, are challenging. They reveal that traumatized soldiers
who witnessed the trenches are only one population mentally scarred by
the war experience. The voices of war victims also highlight the subjectiv-
ity of ‘shell shock’ or ‘war neurosis,’ as trauma victims contested medical
and military efforts to conceal the reality of the war’s horrific effects. The
agency of war victims in trying to shape the diagnosis and meaning of men-
tal wounds suffered by men, women and children is evident as we examine
post-1918 battles over the traumatic legacy of the war.
The emotional effects of the war are difficult to evaluate. Recent schol-
arship on the history of emotions has influenced our approach, as sources
by traumatized individuals reveal complex layers of anxiety, resentment,
anger and other responses to trauma that require nuanced interpretations
of subjective feelings and experiences. The new layers of sources utilized
 INTRODUCTION 7

in our volume enable us to reconstruct the complex emotional reactions

to trauma and the experiences of successive generations coping with the
legacy of the Great War. Ute Frevert’s work has been instrumental in show-
ing historians the powerful role of emotions in social, cultural and political
life.19 Her analysis of how individuals repress or release emotion, and the
complex ways in which individuals respond emotionally to psychological
stress and trauma, influences this book. In particular, the history of emo-
tions is key to expanding our approach to psychological trauma because
it pushes us to understand trauma as not just a singular event, but as the
epicenter of a chain reaction of emotional responses (mourning, guilt,
resentment) that encompass not only soldiers who experienced the pri-
mary traumatic event, but also everyone who comes into contact with that
individual and tries to cope with their repressed and revealed reactions to
traumatic violence.20
The history of traumatic neurosis is inextricably linked to the history
of memory. Scholars have demonstrated that shell shock was a key site
of debate over the memory of the war, and the subjective voices of trau-
matized groups reveal that, despite the efforts of authorities, hegemonic
or collective memories of trauma were fiercely contested, politicized and
appropriated by competing groups.21 Battles over the legitimacy of psy-
chological wounds were not confined to tensions between doctors and
patients fighting over pensions. For postwar groups pushing their political
agendas, the memory of the war, and perceptions of victimhood caused
by psychological trauma, was instrumental in asserting their interests.
Scholars in this volume demonstrate that ‘war neurosis’ entered the lan-
guage of interwar battles on the national level, including which social-
political groups deserved recognition for their sacrifices, escalating tensions
between women and men over who suffered in the war. Psychological
wounds also became a touchstone for national movements seeking rec-
ognition and self-determination in the wake of wartime trauma. Studies
dealing with trauma and memory paved the way for research into the
subjective nature of trauma because they highlighted the degree to which
trauma was constructed by doctors, patients and civilians who were driven
by particular socio-economic and political agendas.22 The constructed
nature of ‘shell shock,’ and postwar debates over the memory and mean-
ing of mental trauma, is a central theme that runs through the diverse
contexts analyzed by historians in this volume.
8 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

ORGANIZATION AND THEMES

The essays in this volume concentrate on several overlapping themes,
including representations of trauma, contested authority over who defines
trauma, agency of traumatized men and women, the impact of trauma on
memory and culture, the long-term impact of trauma on caregivers and
families, and violence inflicted on survivors of trauma after 1918. Part I
examines how traumatized veterans were represented, perceived and stig-
matized by not only medical officials, but also civilians. This section ana-
lyzes the emotional impact of the war beyond just combat trauma but
also the trauma of ostracization, difficulties with recovery, the emotional
impact of the war on both soldiers and civilians coping with their return,
and the impact of psychological trauma on gender roles and social class
status. Part II explores the immediate legacy of trauma in several different
interwar national settings that reveal how trauma was politicized in the
context of nationalist sentiment (Ireland), hierarchized according to gen-
der and the nature of trauma (Germany), and remembered, or forgotten
and neglected (as in the case of Yugoslavia) by the ‘second generation’ of
survivors, wives and children, who experienced the emotional effects of the
war through their husbands and fathers (Great Britain). Using contempo-
rary memoirs, records of competing political groups and, most unique for
this volume, interviews with the generation of children born during the
war, this section reconstructs the complex, multi-layered effects of trauma
as it caused debate, resentment and anxiety in the interwar years.
Part III examines some of the long-term legacies of trauma in old con-
texts (problems with re-integration, treatment of war disabled in medical
institutions) but with a new approach. Instead of focusing on the impact
of shell shock on welfare and health care policies, the three essays in this
section examine the impact of trauma on cultures of treatment. This
section traces the marginalization of traumatized men in French medi-
cine and culture, as well as the catastrophic violence aimed at ‘degener-
ate’ men, including ‘hysterical’ veterans of 1914–1918, under the Nazi
regime. The essays in Part III analyze the war’s long-term effects on
how societies perceived human life, the mentally ill and responsibilities
to psychological victims of war. These historians uncover new sources
that reveal how individuals and their families responded to escalating
attacks, highlighting how ordinary people reacted to medical and politi-
cal authorities’ attempts to control and even destroy reminders of the
war’s devastating violence.
 INTRODUCTION 9

One of the ways in which traumatized men exerted agency was by

resisting sterilized representations of their horrifying wounds. Images
of traumatized men were made famous in interwar art by Otto Dix and
George Grosz. In their expressionist representations of mutilated men,
they highlighted the emotional scars that persisted after the war, and they
shocked audiences with the brutal reality of the war’s physical and psy-
chological wounds.23 Men with terrifying facial injuries were even part
of the French delegation of war victims at the Treaty of Versailles, where
they served as visual evidence of the nation’s trauma. However, the voices
of these men, and the emotional-psychological impact of these horrific
facial wounds, have remained largely unexplored. This is rectified by Fiona
Reid in Chap. 2, as she draws on the writings and testimonies of facially
wounded men to analyze the lingering stigma that haunted these men,
despite medical breakthroughs and political affirmations of the symbol-
ism of these wounds. Reid uncovers the ‘hidden history’ in British sol-
diers’ narratives, and she highlights their subjective experiences as they
tried to find a place in the postwar social fabric. Further, Reid broadens
our understanding of this site of trauma by examining the emotional toll
these wounds had on the families of damaged men who also had to cope
with the visual and psychological impact of traumatized bodies and minds.
War victims resisted not only social marginalization, but also doctors’
attempts to control them and the representation of their wounds. In Chap. 3,
Julia Barbara Köhne offers comparative analysis of cinematic depictions of
war victims in Germany, France and Britain, where doctors imagined they
could exert control over the diagnosis and treatment process in carefully
choreographed, theatrical revelations of ‘healing’ so-called ‘hysterical’
men who threatened military fitness.24 Employing film theory and feminist
film theory to interpret soldiers’ gazes and gestures, Köhne uncovers sub-
texts of resistance and disobedience. Men refused to be simply objects that
played the assigned role of effeminate men who recovered with the ‘magic’
touch of the medical establishment and its propagandistic vision of restor-
ing traumatized men while extolling doctors. In visual representations of
war neurosis we find men who, though treated as objects under medical
control, subtly rebelled against the authority of doctors. Doctors’ images
of themselves as authoritative healers were largely a façade. Köhne’s work
reveals that in studies of visual culture and shell shock, which have focused
largely on the haunting psychological impact of the war on Weimar cin-
ema in particular, a history of ‘shell shock cinema’ must also incorporate
the history of doctors who first attempted to put mental trauma on film.25
10 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

Traumatic injuries also undermined prewar authority by eroding social

class barriers. Doctors tried to assert their authority in maintaining class
hierarchies by characterizing ‘war hysteria’ as emblematic of working-class
mental and physical inferiority. Scholars dealing with shell shock have
pointed to evidence that the ‘hysteria’ diagnosis was often determined by
social class, as middle-class doctors reserved a less stigmatizing ‘neuras-
thenia’ or ‘exhaustion’ diagnosis for middle-class officers, while working-
class men, whose bodies and minds were perceived to be inferior, received
the label ‘war hysterics’ from prejudiced doctors.26 However, as Gundula
Gahlen shows in Chap. 4, class barriers broke down as doctors scrambled
to treat the massive influx of traumatized men and fought over whether
the war, or inborn characteristics, caused symptoms. Psychological trauma
did not discriminate along class lines and, while doctors still perceived
officers as superior, especially in their alleged willpower to recover, officers
were nevertheless diagnosed and treated for ‘hysteria.’ Despite the social
leveling caused by the war, social class persists as an important category of
analysis for historians of shell shock. This is not only because social class
shaped the language of trauma and perceptions about men’s capacities
for recovery, but also because social hierarchies shaped how trauma was
experienced and defined. The subjective nature of the trauma diagnosis
can thus be read in the perceptions of doctors, who were often driven by
cultural prejudice rather than scientific objectivity.
On one hand, trauma was collective in that it affected virtually every
social group and it challenged prewar hierarchies, in particular categories
of class and gender. At the same time, memories of trauma were also sub-
jective, distorted and re-defined by increasingly fragmented cultural and
political agendas.27 Instead of focusing on collective traumas as defined
by political groups, or categories of illnesses that can be diagnosed and
treated by doctors, historians need to be sensitive to subjective ‘rival’
traumas articulated by competing communities. Subjective narratives of
trauma reveal that hegemonic political and medical institutions could
not claim authority over traumatic neurosis. This can be seen in Justin
Stover’s analysis in Chap. 5 of overlapping, contested forms of trauma
that overshadowed the Irish revolution. The Great War was only the
first part of a chain reaction of traumas continued by political violence in
postwar Ireland, where demobilized Irish veterans, civilians and political
activists in Ireland’s independence struggle all used the traumatic impacts
of war and revolution to define the nation and perceptions of persecu-
tion. ‘Traumatic injury’ was defined not only in the context of wartime
 INTRODUCTION 11

violence, but also in the context of street fighting, hunger strikes, sexual
violence and poverty. Thus, while traumatic experiences were layered and
diverse, they also became part of a collective memory, albeit fragmented,
constructed by soldiers and civilians, combatants and revolutionaries,
under the rubric of loyalty to Irish independence. The dominant nar-
rative of shell shock constructed by British doctors and politicians, who
stigmatized weak men as malingerers in the face of war, was replaced by
Irish soldiers and civilians who embraced narratives of victimhood in the
face of British colonial oppression.
Experiences with trauma, and memories of its meaning, were also
subjective and fragmented along experiential lines. Traumatic experi-
ences shattered soldiers in the trenches, but civilians on the home front
were also traumatized by economic crisis, deprivation and bereavement.
Trauma was ‘collective’ in that it was a national experience, but compet-
ing social groups fought over how it was to be remembered and who
would be included in trauma narratives, memorials and sites of mem-
ory. This is explored by Silke Fehlemann and Nils Löffelbein in Chap.
6, as they trace how Germany in the 1920s wrestled with the meaning
of psychological trauma that overshadowed Weimar society. Fehlemann
and Löffelbein demonstrate that there was no consensus on trauma as
a collective experience in interwar Germany. Rather, trauma was hier-
archized and its meaning was fractured along social and political lines.
Fehlemann and Löffelbein move beyond studies of battles between doc-
tors and traumatized men that have dominated existing scholarship, and
they expand their study beyond ‘war neurosis’ to look at psychological
trauma in terms of mourning and bereavement through the perspectives
of psychologically stressed widows, mothers of soldiers and other civilians
who were largely ignored in the public sphere of commemorations and
remembrance. In this context, gender was more significant than politics
in fragmenting memory, as men and women battled over whose wounds
were more exceptional and worthy of remembrance.
The experiences of civilians traumatized by war are a ‘hidden history,’
but scholars are developing new methods for approaching the complex
psychological effects of war on civilians. One of the most underrepre-
sented groups in trauma studies is children. As the ‘second generation’ of
traumatized individuals, children had to cope with the psychological and
physical disabilities of their fathers, as well as the socio-economic disloca-
tion caused by war.28 Because sources by children are so scarce, historians
have often had to rely on evidence that provided a glimpse into children’s
12 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

lives through the eyes of their parents. However, in Chap. 7, Michael

Roper has found a vein into the subjective experiences of second genera-
tion war victims through interviews with British men and women, many
of them working-class, who grew up in the households of disabled Great
War veterans. These interviews reveal that children became ‘containers’
for their parents’ traumas, and they suffered their own psychic damage
when their mothers and fathers projected their pain and frustration on
to their children. Thus, children internalized the traumatic experiences
of their parents. Households became sites of tension, fear and despair as
children lived with their fathers’ haunted memories and damaged bod-
ies. Further, children witnessed the upending of gender roles as they saw
their fathers become dependent on their mothers, and even their sons and
daughters, for not only economic security, but also the most basic daily
needs. Children struggled with feelings of guilt, anger and resentment,
but their recollections were not dominated solely by negative memories.
Some also recall the sense of responsibility they derived from becoming
emotional and physical caretakers at such a young age.
By closely examining the history of dependents traumatized by war,
our perspectives on disabled veterans expand beyond historiography that
focuses on economic restitution and politicization of war disabilities.29
After the psychological wounds experienced in the trenches, men con-
tinued to suffer emotional damage in postwar society, where they were
stigmatized by civilians who did not know how to cope with their invisible
injuries.30 Wives and children had to deal with traumatized men on a daily
basis, but postwar societies in various national contexts ignored or reviled
men who were psychologically shattered by war. The secondary trauma
of marginalization is explored in Chap. 8 by Marie Derrien, who analyzes
mentally disabled soldiers’ experiences in postwar French society, building
on, but also moving beyond, scholarship that has so far mostly focused on
1914–1918.31 Derrien demonstrates that because doctors did not come to
terms with the reality of war-induced traumatic neurosis, they continued
to treat ‘hysteria’ as a hereditary illness, and thus men were stigmatized
as chronic burdens. Further, ‘hysterical men’ were institutionalized not
only because of the symptoms incurred in the war, but also because they
were unable to reintegrate into the postwar fabric of work and family,
which doctors held up as evidence of veterans’ inherent psychopathology.
Derrien’s essay delves beyond just the medical and political battles over
recovery and treatment. She finds their voices through veterans’ newspa-
pers, which document how men rebelled against how they were treated.
 INTRODUCTION 13

At the same time, like Michael Roper, she examines reintegration from the
point of view of families who had to cope with these stigmatized veter-
ans. Family archives and interviews with descendants of disabled veterans
enhance our knowledge of the emotional stress experienced by caregivers,
providing a glimpse into secondary trauma as well as trauma experienced
by the second generation.
In examining interwar experiences with trauma and memory, there is
another site that has been largely overlooked and yet deserves attention:
silence. Despite the presence of shell-shocked men in postwar societies,
there was a tendency to conceal their existence by not recognizing the
reality of their wounds. This is explored by Heike Karge in a regional con-
text, Yugoslavia, that has not yet been analyzed by historians. In Chap. 9,
Karge examines the sociological and cultural framework of Yugoslavian
mental medicine and tries to uncover the reason why the war’s psycho-
logical impact was not recognized by military, medical and political insti-
tutions. Building on scholarship that examines different cultural forms
for expressing war injuries,32 Karge argues that there was a huge gap in
how social welfare legislators, doctors and soldiers defined mental trauma.
While war neurotics were largely absent from military psychiatric discourse
on the war, mentally traumatized men did finally begin to appear in 1920s’
medical journals when they served a purpose in nationalist debates, partic-
ularly in the wake of the Balkan Wars, where debates over Serbian national
values began to see the appropriation of traumatized men as tools in social
and political battles over identity, victimhood and history.
As historians examine the long-term impact of trauma on culture and
society, there is a population that has been largely overlooked: the trau-
matic effects of the war on doctors. Historians have explored in depth doc-
tors’ theories on mental illness, and their assumptions about gender, class
and the politics of welfare. However, the war also brutalized psychiatrists
themselves. Historians need to consider trauma not only as a phenomenon
that inflicted injuries on soldiers, but also as an event that damaged those
involved with ‘processing’ traumatic wounds. Livia Prüll offers in Chap.
10 a fresh angle on the ways in which wartime trauma shattered caregiv-
ers whose ethics, morals and assumptions about human life were altered
by the seismic trauma of war.33 As a result of not only the war, but also
the humiliation of defeat and revolution, ‘traumatized’ German physicians
began to see themselves as more than just healers of mentally disabled sol-
diers. German doctors also saw themselves as combatants against civilians
and those they saw as responsible for defeat (the ‘stab-in-the-back’) on
14 J. CROUTHAMEL AND P. LEESE

the home front. In the context of brutalization and militarization, physi-

cians saw themselves as fighters on the front lines of a Darwinistic struggle
against ‘degeneracy’ that allegedly weakened the nation. Thus many psy-
chiatrists became enthusiastic supporters of National Socialism and the
preparation of medicine for a new war against those they saw as respon-
sible for defeat in 1918.34
In studies of continuity between the First and Second World Wars,
much of the scholarship on trauma has focused on how medical institu-
tions and theories changed between 1914 and 1945.35 However, there has
been less attention focused on violence suffered by traumatized victims of
1914–1918 in the decades after the war. Long after they emerged from
the trenches, many men encountered further violence, as essays in the vol-
ume demonstrate, after the initial wounds suffered in the trenches, as they
faced ostracization, fear and even violence at the hands of postwar societies
that castigated them as chronic ‘degenerates’ who could not recover from
the war. The most horrific example of postwar violence directed at the
victims of the Great War can be found in the case of the T-4 ‘Euthanasia’
program, organized by Nazi doctors and ideologues who targeted the
mentally ill, including war veterans, as ‘enemies of the nation.’ In Chap. 11,
Philipp Rauh offers a new perspective on this event. He uncovers previ-
ously unexplored sources that reveal the perspectives of traumatized vet-
erans of the First World War who were murdered in the T-4 program.
Though treated as objects by Nazi psychiatrists, Rauh also gives these
victims a voice as subjects who engaged in an ongoing battle with doc-
tors over their status as war victims, the legitimacy of their wounds, and
the immorality of the ‘euthanasia’ program. Further, building on Prüll’s
scholarship, Rauh demonstrates that the racist mindset and motivations of
psychiatrists who collaborated with the Nazi regime to murder disabled
veterans can only be understood in the context of the First World War.
In a coda to the volume, Mark Micale, a leading scholar in trauma
studies whose co-edited volume Traumatic Pasts is a seminal study in the
field, reflects on the global cultural context of PTSD. Helping us to find
new paths for understanding traumatic experience outside medicalized
categories, Micale argues that writings by scholars in Japan, Korea, Russia
and Australia can enrich our understanding and conceptualization of
trauma and trauma studies. Micale encourages Western scholars to tran-
scend international and cultural boundaries in order to point the way
towards a next generation of historical thinking on trauma in a global-
ized context. Trauma scholarship, like the diagnostic entity PTSD, Micale
Another random document with
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 “I am glad I have not such a fearful temper.—Miss Endicott, you
play croquet, of course. I challenge you to a game.”
Fanny tripped gayly down the path. But mamma, I noticed, looked
very grave.
 CHAPTER IV.

AN, Nelly, and Stuart played croquet until it was fairly

dusk. There were shouts of laughter, and much hurrying
around, as if no time was to be lost. Mamma and I went
quietly about our duties; and when I had the children in
bed, I came into the nursery and sat down to have a
brief talk with her. By this time the click of the balls had ceased, and
the three were strolling up and down the street.
“How odd it seems!” I said. “I wonder if we shall get along nicely.”
“Don’t begin to fear thus early, Mr. Faint-heart,” returned mamma,
smilingly. “It will not be as nice as having our house to ourselves; but
we are not doing it for pure enjoyment. When we are tired, and
worried, and discouraged we must think of all the nice things we
shall buy in the fall, and be comforted. We shall have papa a new
study carpet, and get his chair freshly covered.”
“And if it could be Russia leather! That would last him all his life. At
all events, we will spend half on him; and I am sure he will deserve it.
He will, likely, be the greatest sufferer by the confusion.”
“The boys will be out of doors much of the time, no doubt. We
must try to improve our invalid as rapidly as possible. Poor boy!”
“Mamma,” I said, “what a great generous heart you have! You
always pity every one. I have a suspicion that Mr. Louis is cross as
well as sick.”
“Then we must minister to the mind as well as the body.”
“I am glad that Stuart is bright and cheerful.”
“O, those children must come in!” she said, starting up. “Fanny is
so thoughtless!”
They answered the summons, but sat down on the porch step,
where Stuart finished a story of boyish school-pranks, which was
very amusing, to say the least. Papa came in time to hear the last of
it, and shook his head rather sagely.
“It is past ten,” announced mamma.
“Country bed-time!” said Stuart, gayly. “I suppose, Mrs. Endicott,
that is a hint for me to go stir up my bear, and listen to a few growls.
A menagerie; ten cents admittance. Who’ll venture in? Don’t all
speak at once, or the place may be crowded.”
“Perhaps, since he is not very well, you had better sleep in another
room to-night,” mamma said.
“Because he might eat me up in the night, since he refused his
supper. I am much obliged, Mrs. Endicott.”
Mamma came around a trifle, so that she faced him, and, standing
in the shaded light, raised her soft, dark eyes to his, and said,—
“This is out of consideration to him, and not the fear of what will
happen to you. That will be the thought for you to go to bed with, and
see if you cannot resolve it into a lesson worth the learning. If I adopt
you into my household, I shall train you as one of my children. And
you will be astonished to see what marvels a little care for the
feelings of others will work.”
Stuart blushed and smiled, said good night, and followed papa to
the best guest-chamber, that I had put in such lovely order. And so
there was quiet through the night.
Louis did not make his appearance at breakfast; but Stuart had
been in stirring him up, for we heard the growls. But he was so merry
and good-natured when he came down, that one had not the heart to
find any fault. Indeed, he kept the children laughing all through the
meal.
“What is there to do in this queer little town, Mr. Endicott?” he
asked presently. “Fishing, I suppose—the staple amusement of lazy
people. Any hunting?”
“Not at this season; and very little at any. There are some nice
rambles, and the fishing, as you say.”
 “Any young fellows that one would like?”
“Yes a number; though some of them keep pretty busy during the
day. And I forgot rowing. There are boats to be had.”
“Thank you. I’ll take a saunter round. I always do have the luck of
finding some one.”
“And there are books in the library. You may like to keep fresh for
fall. So your brother was a good deal disappointed at not passing?”
“Yes. It wouldn’t have troubled me. Steve was not a bit anxious; so
I should have let it go without a sigh. There is nothing like resignation
in this world.”
“You are an admirable pattern of it,” said Fanny. “I feel tempted to
envy you. I have another fortnight of school; and fearful
examinations are hanging over my devoted head.”
“Couldn’t I go in your stead? I am fresh from it all, and might save
you much vanity and vexation of spirit.”
“Especially the vanity. Your kindness is only exceeded by your
great beauty. Shakespeare.”
“Fanny!” said papa.
Mamma rose from the table, and prepared a dainty breakfast upon
a waiter, pouring the coffee in a pretty medallion cup that had been
given her at Christmas. Then she took it herself. Stuart sprang up
with an instinct of gentlemanliness.
“You are not going to carry that up stairs?” he asked, in surprise.
“Why not?”
“If you are not going to send a servant, I will take it.”
“You may carry it for me, if you like; but I wish to make a call upon
your brother.”
He was her attendant as far as the door; but when her summons
was answered, she dismissed him. Then she walked straight to the
bedside, placing her tray on a small table.
 “Are you rested this morning?” she asked, gently. “I think you will
feel better for some breakfast. I am sorry that you should be so
fatigued and ill, for a place seldom looks bright under such
circumstances. But we will do our best for you, and you must try as
well.”
The scowl remained in his forehead. He raised himself on his
elbow, and turned towards her, though his eyes were still averted.
“I am obliged for the trouble, though I do not need any breakfast,”
he said, rather gruffly.
“I think you do need it. Here is a glass of cool spring water, and
some fragrant coffee. A little of both may revive you. Does your head
still ache? If I had known just what to do for you, I should have come
again last night.”
“Was it you who—” and his face flushed a swarthy scarlet.
“Yes;” and mamma looked steadily at him out of her sweet brown
eyes.
He moved uneasily, and in his heart wished she were away.
“Was it you who came last evening?” he asked, in a low,
wondering tone.
“Yes. I felt anxious about you. I knew you were in a strange place,
and, doubtless, feeling awkward and lonesome. That must be my
apology.”
“O,” he exclaimed, “don’t make any—to me. I acted like a boor! I
am sorry and ashamed. And I don’t deserve that you should take all
this trouble for me. But I had been—”
“And I did sympathize with you to the utmost. The disappointment
must have proved great. But I do believe it will be much better for
you to wait. You were not strong enough to take up a college
course.”
“Yet I had said those things over and over again. I knew them fairly
well, at least. And to have all those boobies set up and sneer! I could
have killed them!”
 He looked so at the moment.
“O,” mamma said, “you must not think of this now. Do not try to
keep the angry flames alive. It is a bright, lovely morning; and if you
could make the effort to come down on the porch, you would feel so
much better! Try this coffee—to please me.”
“You are very kind and solicitous.”
There was a little tremble in his voice; but he made no effort to
touch the food.
“If you appreciate it, you will begin your breakfast before
everything gets cold. You will feel more like rising then. Come, I
mean to cheer you up in spite of yourself. This is not Doubting
Castle, and I cannot take in Giant Despair.”
He smiled faintly then, and sipped his coffee.
“There,” mamma said, in her bright, cheery way, “you have made a
small beginning, and that gives me faith in you. Now I must go back
to my flock. Down stairs there is a cool, pleasant library, and a piano,
which always stands open. I want you to feel at home.”
“You are good,” he returned. “Can I have the library to myself, or
only with Mr. Endicott?”
“Yes; or the parlor, either. Indeed, Mr. Endicott has finished his
sermons, and will be out nearly all day.”
“Thank you.”
Stuart was lying in wait at the foot of the stairs.
“Well,” with a gay little laugh, “did you beard the lion in his den? I
must go up and make him roar.”
“No,” said mamma, laying her hand on his arm, “you must not go
up; and I ask, as a personal favor, that you will not tease him this
whole day.”
“Tease him! The baby! Poor little thing!”
“I have promised him a quiet morning. You will not compel me to
break my word?”
 “Then I shall have to go out and hunt up some fun.”
She smiled in her irresistible fashion, that conquered if it did not
convince.
We had made an exception, and done the most of our Saturday’s
work on Friday morning. So now there was only a little dusting, with
the usual making of beds, and all that. I had just finished the other
rooms, when Louis left his, and went quietly down to the study,
shutting himself in. To mamma’s satisfaction, he had eaten nearly all
the breakfast she had prepared.
I put the room in its usual order. Oddly enough, I found a withered
rose under the pillow, and it was still sweet. I remembered that
Stephen was very fond of roses. There were ever so many small
articles strewn about. I thought those big boys were as careless as
the children.
Papa came in just before dinner was ready, and had a little chat
with Louis, though the young man was not disposed to be social. At
dinner he seemed dreadfully awkward and embarrassed, his sallow
cheeks, flushing at the least word. Somehow I was glad Stuart was
not there. Afterwards he went up to his room, and spent the whole
afternoon alone.
We had rather a funny time. Stuart came in late, and insisted upon
having his dinner in the kitchen, telling Ann two or three such
laughable Irish stories, that they were friends straightway. Then he
would insist upon carrying Fan’s basket when she was ready to start
on her visitation, as she called it.
“It was as good as a play,” he said afterwards. “I thought I should
smile audibly at that old lady—Mrs. Means, I believe you called her.
She is an ungrateful wretch, Mrs. Endicott. ‘She did not like such
light, chaffy bread; it had no heart. You might as well eat sawdust.’
And she wanted to know how many eggs were in the custard; and
when people sent currants, she wished they would send sugar, too.
‘Nasty, sour things!’ Why, I had half a mind to hustle the gifts back in
the basket, and bring them home.”
“We are not to get weary in well doing,” said mamma.
 “I’m not sure but a little wholesome hunger would be good. And
then that old Mrs. Bogert! Doesn’t she look funny there in the bed,
with her little, wrinkled face and that flapping cap-ruffle. And her talk,
and the queer way in which she keeps questioning her maid—‘Betty,
how long is it since I was tuck sick?’ in that high, cracked voice,
which sounds like a smashed hand organ with a monkey grinding it.
‘Betty, tell the gentleman how I fell down the cellar stairs. Betty, bring
me my snuff-box; mebby the young gentleman will take a pinch.’”
He imitated Mrs. Bogert’s tone so exactly, that we could not help
laughing.
“Did you take a pinch?” asked Nelly.
“Of course I did. And such sneezing!”
“It was dreadful,” said Fan, with a reproachful look. “And not a bit
in earnest.”
“How did you do it?” Nelly questioned.
“This way.”
There isn’t any method of spelling such terrific sneezing. No
combination of letters would do it justice. I thought I wouldn’t laugh;
but I did and the children screamed.
“Good snuff—wasn’t it?” he said, with a droll wink.
“I don’t see how you can do it, all in fun,” said wide-eyed Daisy.
“I do not believe I shall take you out with me again,” commented
Fan, severely.
“But I know the way now. I shall drop in to see the old lady often,
and get a pinch of snuff. O, dear! I am almost worn out with my
arduous duties. Can any one stay me with a glass, and comfort me
with cold water—the literal for apples and love? And then can’t we
dissipate on croquet? If I sit still much longer I shall have the rickets.
My physician prescribed active exercise.”
“You had better take the baby out in her carriage, if you want
exercise,” said Tiny Tim, having heard the two connected some way.
 He laughed.
“For—

‘Satan finds some mischief still

For idle hands to do.’

Isn’t that in the hymn book?”

“Not in mine,” returned Fan.
“Well, I am sure it is in the spelling-book. I learned it somewhere;
and it is about a busy bee. Good instructions, like pins, are never
lost.”
“But pins are lost. Your logic is faulty.”
“No they’re always gone before—that is, before you want them.”
“You are too smart for your size,” said Fan. “I am afraid you’ll grow
up a dunce.”
“Well, you cannot have all the virtues for a little money. As it is, I
think of striking for higher wages.”
“You are not worth what you get now,” said Fan, running away.
Stuart did not venture up stairs until just before supper. Louis
declined to come down; so mamma sent him some tea, berries, and
biscuits.
“I am afraid you are beginning in a way to make trouble for
yourself,” papa said, thoughtfully, afterwards.
“I am going to indulge him for a few days. He is nervous, and
really bashful; and I want him to learn to like us. But he cannot be
forced to do anything.”
“I believe I like my girls the best,” said papa, fondly.
Saturday evenings, when no one dropped in, were our choicest
time of all the week. Mamma played, and we all sang. This time no
one came to disturb us. And we never knew, until long afterwards,
that Louis Duncan listened with his eyes full of tears, and had not the
courage to join us. But it always appeared to me like a little bit of
heaven below. Papa’s sweet tenor voice seemed to belong to some
particular hymns, and it took me far above the petty work-day affairs.
How good and lovely he was in his every-day walks and ways!
Louis began to get somewhat acquainted with us on Sunday. He
did not go to church, but lay on the bed reading nearly all day. No
one found any fault with him; and Stuart’s teasing tongue was
hushed. I think he stood a little in awe of my mother, gentle as she
was. It was plain to see that the boys had been brought up with mere
outward forms of religion; that they had no love and very little respect
for it. How different they were from Stephen!
But the enforced quiet was broken on Monday morning, there
were some high words, and then an unmistakable blow, followed by
a struggle and a fall. Papa went up stairs.
“Boys,” he said, with severe but simple dignity, “are you brothers,
and must you quarrel? If you have no respect for yourselves, I
implore you to have a little for my house, that has hitherto been the
abode of harmony. I will not have it.”
The combatants paused, and glared at each other with angry
eyes. Stuart had come off victor, for it was Louis who had fallen. He
was deadly white now, with a blue line about the mouth.
“I won’t be struck as if I was a child,” exclaimed Stuart, with fierce
determination; “and he struck me.”
“I told you to let that brush alone,” said the other, sullenly. “Your
own was there.”
“Stuart, go in the room opposite and finish your toilet. I shall
expect an apology from you both when you come down stairs.
Breakfast is ready.”
It seemed as if we were to have neither of them; but when the
meal was about half over Stuart entered the room. His face was
flushed, and his eyes were still sending out fiery rays; but he went
straight to papa.
 “Mr. Endicott,” he said, making an effort to steady his voice, “I am
truly sorry that I should have been so rude and ungentlemanly in
your house. I ask your pardon.—And yours, Mrs. Endicott.”
“I pardon you on condition that a similar event never happens,
while you are here, at least. You are both too old to fall into such
rough-and-tumble school-boy fights.”
Mamma held out her hand to him as he passed her. He blushed
deeply, but seized it with a thankful eagerness. After that our meal
was very silent.
Ann went up stairs to see if Louis would have any breakfast.
“Sure, he’s crosser than two sticks when the fire is kindlin’. He
doesn’t want sup nor bite; and if he did, it’s little he’d get from me.”
So mamma judged that it was best to pay no further attention to
him. He did not even come down at noon; and then Stuart found that
his door was locked.
Quite late in the afternoon I was hurrying through the hall, when he
opened his door suddenly. His hair was tumbled, his cheeks scarlet,
and his eyes wild and staring.
“For God’s sake, get me a drink of water!” he cried, hoarsely.
I took it up to him, and knocked; but there was no answer. I made
some ado opening the door, and walked in rather timidly. He was
laughing and talking incoherently but clutched at the pitcher of water
and drank great, desperate swallows. Then he sank back on the bed
exhausted.
I ran to mamma in affright.
“Louis Duncan is sick and out of his mind!” I cried. “O, mamma, I
am sorry they came. We shall have our hands full of trouble.”
She went to the room with me. He did not appear to know either of
us, and we could not rouse him to any coherency.
“It is a fever. The doctor must be sent for immediately. Tell Nelly to
go. And, Rose, we must arrange the other room, and take him over
there, since it may be a long illness. Well, we must have patience.
God knows what is for the best.”
I soon had everything in order. Papa coming in, he partly led and
partly carried Louis to the best room. Mamma bathed his head and
put some draughts on his wrists and his feet. Now he lay quietly, with
his eyes half open, breathing heavily.
Dr. Hawley called just before supper.
“A bad case,” he said, gravely, “a bad case! Why, the fellow is
worn to skin and bone already, and looks as if he had had the
jaundice for the last month. But we will do our best. He may be
stronger than he appears.”
Stuart felt pretty sober that evening.
“I suppose I ought not to have stirred him up so this morning,” he
said. “But it is such fun! And it was all about a trifle. I used his hair-
brush; and he is as particular as any old maid. Then I tormented him
a little, and he seized the brush and gave me a box on the ear, which
I won’t take from any one without a row. I am not a baby. And it was
awful mean of him! And so we clinched. But he has been in a
dreadful temper for the last month. He was mad because Stephen
wouldn’t let him go to Lake George with a lot of fellows.”
“It was fortunate that he did not,” returned mamma. “And, Stuart, I
hope, in the weeks to come, you will learn your duty towards him.
God has not given you this tie for you to disregard so utterly.”
Stuart looked at her with wondering eyes, but made no answer.
“Our first experience with boys seems to be rather trying,” said
Fanny, as we were going to bed that night. “I hope and pray that he
may not die—and in our house!”
I thought of what Stephen had asked of me.
 CHAPTER V.

N awesome quiet settled over the house. I did not

remember a time when any one had ever been very
sick. The children gathered in groups, and spoke in
whispers, and for a day or two Stuart appeared almost
conscience-stricken. But his natural flow of spirits could
not be repressed. Yet his laugh jarred on my nerves. We were used
to caring so much for each other’s welfare and comfort, and
sympathizing with sorrows or trivial illnesses, that his carelessness
seemed to us as something quite dreadful. Yet he was so pleasant
and good-natured, so ready to do anything that was asked of him,
though he never appeared to think that he might volunteer any little
service.
“We must make some allowance for them,” mamma said, in her
kindly fashion. “Remember that they have had no mother. Much of
their lives has been spent at school; and their uncle was a cold and
rather arrogant man, papa thinks. So they have had no chance to
acquire the graces of home life.”
When the tidings became noised abroad through the village, we
were quite besieged. Mamma threw up the fortifications at the hall
door. The old women, who were curious, or anxious, or even kindly-
hearted in their officious way, heard all of the story there, or in the
sitting-room, that it was necessary for them to know. Aunt Letty
Perkins was not last nor least.
“Was it true, as she had understood, that these two young men
came to study with Mr. Endicott? She heard they were going in
college, or something or other. She hoped he would get well paid for
his trouble—young college chaps were always pretty wild. There was
no great loss without some small gain; and if this young fellow was
sick, he couldn’t be kitin’ round the village into all sorts of mischief.”
“No, to be sure not,” returned mamma, with a smile at this sort of
comfort.
 “But what are you to do? You have your hands full already, with
such a houseful of children! I allers say that Mis’ Endicott’s the most
wonderful woman I know. I should think you’d a been worn out long
ago; and here you haven’t scarcely a wrinkle in your face!”
“I do not know why people should wrinkle up their faces when they
have a number of healthy, happy children about them. Why, they
keep you young, Mrs. Perkins. It takes you back to your own
childhood continually.”
“I hope you’re a going to get paid for all this.”
“I do not believe the Duncans will become chargeable to the
parish, since they have fortunes of their own,” said mamma, rather
dryly.
“Rich, now? Well, that’s good! Though rich men’s sons are
exposed to sights of temptations. No one knows!” and Aunt Letty
shook her head solemnly.
“I fancy there will not be many here at Wachusett.”
“Mean to keep them the whole year?”
“No; only through vacation.”
“They have gardeens, I s’pose?”
“Mr. Endicott is their sole guardian now, with the exception of an
elder brother, who acts for them.”
“O!”
Then Aunt Letty fidgeted about.
“If you should want some one to help do the nussin’, I could take
my knitting and sit up stairs. I haven’t much of anything to do, and I’d
as lief.”
“No,” said mamma. “I am much obliged. Mrs. Whitcomb is coming
over this evening.”
So Aunt Letty had to go away without seeing the patient. But she
had considerable news to sow broadcast, which comforted her.
 For the first two days I spent all my time in the sick room, while
papa remained at night. The violent paroxysms were not very long at
a time, and for the rest he only tumbled about and wanted a drink
every few moments. Then Mrs. Whitcomb arrived, and I was partly
released.
By Saturday Dr. Hawley had nearly given up the faintest hope.
Every one knew who was meant when the prayer for the sick was
used on Sunday. Something in papa’s voice touched me in a
peculiar manner. In the great calm of earth and sky, it seemed so
strange that any life should go out into utter nothingness! Why, the
smallest insects were on the wing, and birds and bees went
humming and soaring, with no anxious cares, just brim full of glad,
free life.
If we had been less engrossed, we should have felt quite elated
over Fanny’s successful examination; but, as it was, we were glad to
have her at home, without thinking much about it. So the days
passed until the quivering life seemed to hang by a mere thread.
“If he can go through the next twelve hours!” said Dr. Hawley, in a
low tone. “But there seems so little strength to him. I can’t realize
that he has ever been such a rosy, rollicking boy as that Stuart; and
yet I do not see why he should not have been. Well, we have done
our best, Mrs. Whitcomb, and the good parson has prayed; so we
must leave all the rest in God’s hands. Don’t let him sleep more than
an hour at a time, and then give him a teaspoonful of this, out of the
glass—remember.”
I didn’t want to go to bed. I crept up to the room, and Mrs.
Whitcomb, and the other strange, uncertain presence, standing by
the window and watching the great stars and the little flecks of silver
cloud threading their way in and out like dainty ladies. I was so afraid
of death, too! and yet I wanted to stay. I thought of Stephen’s
perplexity concerning his brothers, and did not wonder at it now. I
was sorry that I had been so ungracious that night; but I had made
all the amends I could. And I prayed softly for the sick boy, that he
might live to a better and less selfish life, that he might see and know
the great things there are for men to do in the world.
 Twelve. The old eight-day clock in the hall told it off in a solemn
way, and went on ticking “forever, never,” and Mrs. Whitcomb
breathed in her chair as if she were asleep; but in a moment she
rose and gave the medicine.
“You had better lie down here on the couch, Rose. Here is a
pillow.”
“No; I am not sleepy.” And crossing my arms on the window sill, I
rested my chin on them, and watched the stars again.
One, two, three; and the summer night began to show signs of
drowsiness. The stars grew dimmer, and there was a peculiar
grayish duskiness in the heavens. Then a faint stirring in the east, a
melting of the gray into rose and gold, a piping of birds in the leafy
trees, and a strange tremulousness in all the air. I turned away from
the window and glanced at the pallid face, put my fingers on the thin
wrist. Had the resurrection of the morning reached him?
“O, Mrs. Whitcomb,” I exclaimed, “his pulse is stronger! I believe
he will live. I am so thankful!”
“Now run to bed, dear. You have had your way, and sat up all
night.”
I did fall asleep, and never woke until the breakfast bell rang. Dr.
Hawley came in bright and early, and the verdict was favorable.
“Now you must feed him on beef tea, and I’ll feed him on iron,” he
said to Mrs. Whitcomb. “We will run a race to see which can get the
most fat on his bones. Goodness knows there’s need enough of it.
He seems to have put into practice some one’s suggestion, to take
off his flesh and sit in his bones a space. Cool, for this hot weather.”
“I suppose we can venture to be a little jolly now,” Stuart said, that
afternoon, as we were all on the porch. “We have been going about
this whole week like a funeral procession.”
“There might have been one—very easily,” I replied, with as much
sternness as I could put in my voice.
“But when you are through the woods, what is the use of
frightening yourself with the darkness and the ‘bug-a-boos’? Isn’t that
what you tell children? I never really believed that he was going to
die. It is only your good people—”
“Then there is not much fear of you,” said Fan.
“Thank Goodness, no. I mean to have a deal of fun out of life yet.
Just wait until I can get my hands into the money. There will be larks
then, I can tell you. Meanwhile, may we not dissipate harmlessly on
croquet?”
“I think not,” was my answer. “Your brother is very weak and
nervous; and I have sometimes found the click of the balls hard to
bear myself.”
“Hang it! I wish he was in—England with Stephen. He is always
putting on airs of some kind. Before I’d be such a Molly-fuss-budget
I’d go off and hang myself, and leave my money to the nearest of
kin.”
“O, Stuart,” I exclaimed, “you are perfectly—”
“There, don’t preach to me, you small midget! I hate girls’
preaching. It’s hard enough to have it on Sundays. Can a leopard
change his spots? Yes, he can go off to another spot. So I’ll go.
Adieu, little grandmother.”
He caught his hat, and walked down the garden path as if
whistling for a wager.
“There, you have made him angry,” declared Fan.
“I cannot help it. He doesn’t seem to care for anything. O!”
I was after him in a minute, for there he had Tabby by the nape of
the neck, holding her up high to see her draw up her feet and curl
her tail between her legs like a dog.
“Put her down!” I cried, authoritatively.
He held me off with one arm.
“Why, she likes it,” he said. “Look! what an angelic smile illumines
her countenance!”
 “Mia-o-o-ow!” was kitty’s answer, in a prolonged wail; but she
managed to twist herself out of his grasp, and bounded off.
“You are a cruel, hateful boy!” I exclaimed, angrily.
But he only laughed, and went on his way whistling. Fan glanced
up from her embroidery.
“It is tit for tat,” she said, laughingly; “preaching and practice.”
I was quiet for some minutes.
“Do I preach much, Fan?” I asked, rather soberly.
“Not very much. But it may be as dangerous a habit as scolding, if
one gets confirmed in it. And I suppose it isn’t entertaining to boys.”
“But what are you to do when they are just as bad as they can
be?”
“Bear it with Christian fortitude and resignation. I am not sure but it
will be good for us to have something that takes us out of the one
groove, and shows us that the world is wider than the little space just
around us.”
There was much truth in that, to be sure.
“You see we have had everything pretty much one way; and now
we have come to a change in the current. I rather like the stir and
freshening up.”
“But if Tabby was yours—”
“You remember the old lady whose idea of heaven was to ‘sit in a
clean checked apron, and sing psalms;’ and I think yours must be to
sit here on the porch, in a clean white dress, and nurse that sleek
Maltese cat.”
“O, Fan, how can you be so irreverent?”
I heard the faint tinkle of a bell; so I ran up stairs. Mrs. Whitcomb
asked me to sit there while she went out for a walk. I took up some
crocheting, and, as I worked, watched the wind blowing about the
high tree-tops, and making picturesque backgrounds of the blue sky.
Then a wood robin came and sang his sweet song almost in my ear.
 The sick youth stirred and opened his eyes wide. How strange and
sunken they looked!
“Where am I?”
I started at the question, and collected my wandering senses.
“At the rectory. At Mr. Endicott’s.”
“O! Have I been sick? How long since—I can’t seem to remember
—”
“It is almost a fortnight since you were taken ill. But you are out of
all danger, and have only to get well.”
“I suppose I have been a great deal of trouble. Did I talk much?”
And he glanced sharply at me.
“No; that is, it was not of much account.”
“Where is Stuart?”
“Out somewhere.”
“May I have a drink?”
I gave him that.
“And you have been taking care of me—all the time?”
“Not all. Mamma and Mrs. Whitcomb have done the most of it.”
“Was I near dying?”
“We thought so, at one time,” I answered, rather slowly, not feeling
quite sure that the admission was right.
“It wouldn’t have been much loss. Both Stephen and Stuart would
have been glad, no doubt, or, at least, relieved. Don’t look so horror-
stricken.”
“I think you are unjust to both your brothers,” I said. “But perhaps it
is best not to talk any more. You are still weak.”
He turned his face over on the pillow, and was silent until mamma
came in and spoke in her cheerful fashion.
 “You have all been very kind, much kinder than I deserve. How
long will it take me to get well?”
“That depends a good deal upon yourself,” returned mamma.
“When you feel like it, you may begin to sit up. And you must keep
as cheerful as possible. Are you not hungry?”
He thought he was presently; but he made a wry face over the
beef tea.
“Can’t I have something besides this?” he asked. “I am so tired of
it!”
“Then you may take it hereafter as medicine, and we will find a
new article of diet. I am glad that you are sufficiently improved to
desire a change. I will see what I can find for you.”
She was as good as her word; and Mrs. Whitcomb brought him up
the cunningest tea in the old-fashioned china, and a fresh nosegay
of spice pinks lying beside his plate.
“O, how delightful they are! I am very much obliged,” he said,
gratefully.
That evening Kate Fairlie and her brother Dick came over to call
upon us.
“I heard your invalid was out of danger, or I should not have
ventured,” she began, after the first greetings were over, “for it is not
a call of condolence merely. Fan, aren’t you glad school is over? But
what can you find to occupy yourself with? I am actually bored to
death already. We are to have some company from the city next
week, and we want to get up a picnic to go to Longmeadow. Won’t
you two girls join, and the young Mr. Duncan who isn’t sick? Dick
thinks him such a funny fellow. Where is he? Can’t I have an
introduction? The boys all seem to know him very well. And is it true
that they are so rich?”
“They are very well provided for,” said Fan, quietly.
“And was that handsome man who came to church with you one
Sunday, not long ago, their brother? Has he gone to make the grand
tour of Europe? O, how I do envy people who can go abroad!”