Over 200,000 Irish soldiers fought in the First World War, and an estimated 40,000 died in it. Many more were deeply scarred by their experiences, with physical and psychological injuries that impaired their ability to return to military service or participate in civilian life. This book examines the largely forgotten group of Irish soldiers who suffered from shell shock and other mental troubles as a result of the war. In 1916, just two months after the Easter Rising, the Richmond War Hospital was established at Grangegorman in Dublin, on the grounds of the Richmond Asylum, to treat these soldiers. Stammering, mute and paralysed, depressed and haunted by voices and explosions in their minds, 362 soldiers were treated at the War Hospital between 1916 and 1919. This book tells their stories, based on their medical case histories drawn from previously unseen archives of the Richmond War Hospital. These are stories of shell fire and trauma, shell shock and despair, and intense human suffering.
But these are also stories of treatment and recovery, stories not just of war and pain, but also of hope - stories that demonstrate the resilience of so many Irish soldiers in the face of the unimaginable trauma of the First World War.