|
Yes, but I don't think we're talking about exactly the same thing. Michael unquestionably suffered from what today we call PTSD- but that is, as it says, post-trauma. What Tolkien briefly described in the Siege of Gondor was something else, the paralysis of will that is the trauma, as it were, where naked fear overcomes all discipline, training or courage, the point where a man is said to "break." It happens and has happened on all battlefields in all ages, but under the shellstorms of the Western Front probably more than most.
__________________
The entire plot of The Lord of the Rings could be said to turn on what Sauron didn’t know, and when he didn’t know it.
|