A unique investigation of the impact of the Great War on the lives of the soldiers who survived

Casualty Figures is not about the millions who died in the First World War; it is about the countless thousands of men who lived as long-term casualties—not of shrapnel and gas, but of the bleak trauma of the slaughter they escaped. In this powerful new book, Michèle Barrett uncovers the lives of five ordinary soldiers who endured the “war to end all wars,” and how they dealt with its horrors, both at the front and after the war’s end. Through their stories, Barrett sheds new light on the nature of the psychological damage of war, which for the first time became both widely acknowledged and profoundly misunderstood.

“I shall never forget my first sight of him — a long emaciated creature, with great hollow eyes, a greenish-yellow skin and limbs that were all sticks and knobs. He had an expression of dumb horror, under his usual smile-disguise and he was willing to talk of how the King had been to see them and he had been chosen as spokesman for the ward; of the wonder of English grass and trees … but not of anything else.” — Lt. Willis Brown’s sister Margaret, on his return from Gallipoli, Summer 1915

Michèle Barrett is Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author, among other works, of Women’s Oppression Today, The Anti-Social Family, and Politics of Diversity (co-authored with Roberta Hamilton).

174 pages

Cloth
ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 230 1
US$24.95 / £14.99 / CAN$27.50