Also, surviving a battle injury was far less common before the discovery of antibiotics and the germ theory of disease. Infection from relatively minor wounds caused a much higher death rate. So the surviving soldiers were less likely to have experienced physical trauma and lived long enough to make it into accounts of their behavior afterwards.
[1] https://blastinjuryresearch.amedd.army.mil/assets/docs/newsH...
But the survivors might well have trauma from their actions not their injuries. Hacking another human to death is traumatic for normal people. The survivors would also have survivor guilt.
I wonder how much video games have do to with this perception? In a video game, you have a Kill-Death ratio, not a Kill-Death-Prisoner-Flee-Serious Injury-Light Injury ratio (I know some games have a more sophisticated model, but still).
I suspect that some of the harmful behaviors (we associate with PTSD) weren't socially abhorrent, in past eras.
eg: Societies generally condone some amount of mistreating other people. That particular outlet could have been fully acceptable, when done to marginal and lesser classes.
I suppose there could also be a sense in which, depending on the culture, a death in hand to hand combat might be viewed as glorious in a way that getting shot by a sniper or blown up by artillery wouldn't be.
WWI had the technology to be profoundly violent. Ok, there were cannons in ships and in the Civil War for example, but I suspect that WWI (and later wars) had a bigger technological dependency.
Technologies that are loud, flashy and destructive: tanks, bombs, machine guns, grenades, etc.
>I think you're right - everyone would be traumatised by modern standards.
But if everybody is traumatized then nobody is, it's the local normal. Sure we can say they were "wrong" but that's just a reflection of our current cultural norms. What is right and wrong or traumatic or not is a matter of cultural norms and social consensus. The reason we give a crap over whether or not people are traumatized is because it makes them "messed up" and affects their ability to function normally in society. If people are able to function normally in society, are not "messed up" according to the people around them and don't consider themselves traumatized are they really traumatized?
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office and say the past was horrible but it's only horrible because we have a different frame of reference. For the people who lived it it was just how things are. I think it's kind of paternalistic to say the people of the past were all/mostly traumatized because it's not like they had any other options, the things they had to experience were unavoidable facts of life.
There was a whole discussion here a few months back about how the WW1 battlefield (blasted trees, churned mud, etc) has shaped our expectations of what battlefields should look like. Before that, the battlefield itself was mostly untouched. Shell shock was a new phenomenon for soldiers from WW1 because it was a new experience for soldiers - artillery barrages just hadn't been that intense before.
Ancient hand-to-hand combat would have been horrific. Never mind trying to survive, just actively trying to hack someone else's body up with a sharp tool, when they're right there, would mess you up pretty bad. If, as TFA says, every able-bodied man in your entire society has experienced this, then every able-bodied man is going to be messed up.
But then, if every woman has gone through multiple stillbirths, child deaths, and so on, then everyone is going to be messed up. What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma".
I think you're right - everyone would be traumatised by modern standards.