The Soldier at the Western Front – Military Psychiatry
Source 7: Andreas Latzko: The Decampment
The writer Andreas Latzko served in the Austrian-Hungarian army during the First World War and suffered from severe mental trauma. He dealt with his experiences by writing – among other works – in his novella collection “Humans in War”, where the symptoms of CSR are described before he turns into an ardent denouncer of the population’s war fever. Because of his pacifistic attitude the collection, which was published in 1917 for the first time, was banned in all combating nations.
„The three of them had the conversation with the two ladies on the bench by themselves because the fourth of them, a lieutenant of the territorial forces who was getting bold at the back of his head, a renowned composer of operas in civil life, just sat there immersed with shacking limps and unsteady mad eyes on our bench without participating in the conversation. He had come in just last week, with a severe mental disorder that he had caught on the Doberdo Plateau. In his eyes was only the horror left. Gloomily immersed in his own he had no own will and just led anything happen to him, he went to bed, or sat in the garden, departed from the rest by an invisible wall he was staring at.” Andreas Latzko: Der Abmarsch, in: Menschen im Krieg, Zürich 1918, pp. 9-35, here pp. 15 f.
