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Some British casualties were sent to a military hospital near Edinburgh called Craiglockhart. The great war poet, Wilfred Owen, was hospitalised there, as were early 'shell-shock' victims. This illness was new to the doctors and many assumed that soldiers were trying to avoid combat duty by faking the symptoms. To avoid pensioning them, they were designated 'Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous' on admission - thereby delaying swift diagnosis and enabling many of them to be sent back to the front to fight. The 'victim' in this song is delivering his story on 26th June 1917.
POETRY FORM: Song
lyrics
Craiglockhart (Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous)
I kicked over the wheelchair
- couldn’t do the simplest task,
except the epileptic flailing
of my army antimasque.
the hissing gas-lamp
had me reaching for the mask.
You opened up my mind
and you didn’t even ask.
I’m like a marionette
with twisted strings,
my limbs are jack-knifing
and my inner ear sings
of the pain of war
and other perverse things.
I can’t find the peace
a hospital brings.
CHORUS
Sh-sh-sh shut the fuck up,
I think I’m going insane,
I’ve got all these bombs
going off in my brain.
I’m like a rabid dog
at the end of it’s chain
they’re gonna send me back
to the front again.
No matter how obedient
your soldiers of war,
when shells reign down
they’ll be shaken to the core,
until there comes a time
when they can’t take anymore
and their minds shut down
behind a closed door.
You think it might be shock waves,
or poison from the shells
that’s making me withdraw
into this epileptic hell
- sometimes you shrug your shoulders
- say “we just can’t tell,
if it’s lack of moral fibre
that’s making him unwell”.
REPEAT CHORUS
Your treatments are barbaric,
Persuade, Explain, Suggest
- baths, massage, electric shocks
are really for the best,
when all my mind needs
Is aching, morbid rest,
and not feeling like a rat
in a cataclysmic test.
You put me in this chapel
you sit me in this chair
you give me books to read
and feign a sense of care -
but one day I will walk from here
and people will not stare
at the dancing crazy fucker.
The Craiglockhart nightmare.
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