Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War

Author Michele Barrett discusses her new book about the First World War

To mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice which falls on 11 November this year, Michèle Barrett discusses her new book, Casualty Figures (Verso, 2008), a unique investigation into the impact of the First World War on those who survived it.

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. Barrett will discuss 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 acknowledged and profoundly controversial through the term ‘shell shock’.

“[A] fascinating and moving book” - BBC History Magazine

Michèle Barrett is Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author, among other works, of Women’s Oppression Today, The Anti-Social Family, and Politics of Diversity (co-authored with Roberta Hamilton).

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