Soldiers in the 1831-32 Acre siege showed WWI-style shell shock symptoms

Evidence

On the face of it the Syrian campaign of 1831–40 and the First World War of 1914–18 are so different in nature and distant in time that the comparison between them becomes nearly untenable. … Be that as it may, as far as both wars were experienced by the soldiers who did the fighting and not by the commanders who drove them to their deaths there are significant similarities between them that make comparison worthwhile. In both wars there was an underlying current of discontent with the war, of “pacifism,” to use a modern term, a feeling that the war was futile, purposeless and unnecessary. … W. H. R. Rivers, the noted anthropologist and clinical psychologist who treated numerous cases of “shell shock” during the war, concluded that the “quantity of neurotic symptoms correlated not with the intensity of battle, the length of an individual’s service, or his emotional disposition, but with the degree of his immobility.” In the Syrian war it was during the prolonged siege of Acre (early December 1831 to late May of the following year) that thousands of Egyptian troops were feeling vulnerable, sitting immobile as they did in the sappers’ trenches that they were digging to approach the walls of the fortress and falling prey to the shells that were being fired from the defiant city. It was then that the men started showing signs that could only be read as “shell shock” and resembled the experiences of the British soldiers eighty years later. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1096

Categorization

• XREF: Shockingly, the same immobility-under-fire mechanism from this book’s own deep-listening and soundscape reading appears here; also connects to modern writing on combat PTSD and neuroscience of freeze responses. — connects to: British leaders at WWI’s end rejected any return to prewar conditions. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 194