Casualty Figures
Verso, March 2008
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 men 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 and profoundly controversial through the term “shell shock”. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Casualty Figures is a moving and original account of the psychological havoc caused by war. (Publishers description)
“Through interviews with the soldiers’ descendants and a careful reading of archival material buried in the Imperial War Museum, Barrett evokes the bloody crucible these five men passed through. … Sadly, this is a timely work. A worthy addition to the extensive literature on the mental health of combat veterans; recommended for all libraries”
Reviewer: Jim Doyle, Library Journal, Jan 2008 p113
Titled ‘Stephen Lamport is moved by the vivid, shocking stories of five servicement’ this review appeared in the Telegraph 1st March 2008.
“Even today, nearly 90 years after the Armistice, the First World War remains the supreme icon of the horror and inhumanity of armed conflict…. Michèle Barrett’s Casualty Figures is an account of five servicemen who who survived the hell, scarred and damaged for the rest of the lives, but the sub-text of this short, vivid book is a wider account of the psychological damage inflicted, and of what was then the new and much disputed issue of shell-shock…. It is little wonder that men should be damaged by then ever-present sense of death in a place where the macabre became a fact life. Lieutenant John Willis Brown, one of the five, described in his diary one trench he occupied in Gallipoli: “Still a lot of stiffs in it. There’s one chap the Manchesters use as sort of sideboard to keep their jam tins on”…. This is not a book for the squeamish or the faint-hearted. The stories of these five men are real, unimaginable and highly personal.”
Michèle’s Guardian article on Shell Shock from 2003.
Click to read or download the full article
WW1 marches and songs.
Printing, Writing and a Family Archive: Recording the First World War
by Michèle Barrett and Peter Stallybrass
History Workshop Journal 75: 1-32
An examination of the Layton family archive containing war documents, wills, letters, Field Service Postcards, photos and other documents based on one family’s experience of the First World War.
Read the full Article online at History Workshop Journal
Eric William Layton, died 1915
See additional photos from the archive
Faculti Media film company made a short films of Michèle discussing the History Workshop Journal article “Printing, Writing and a Family Archive”
Talk on the Imperial War Graves Commission (Archive recording)
Michèle gave this talk on the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House in February 2009. The session was chaired by Rehana Ahmed, and there was a discussion after the talk; the audio below is in two segments.
Inaugural Lecture Queen Mary 2001
Read the text of Michele’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory:
INAUGURAL Image and Affect