166 chapter 5
The most notable activity Brock prescribed for Owen was the editorship of
The Hydra. Most hospitals that treated shell shock had small papers or gazettes
that published hospital activities, though none were quite as literary as The
Hydra.^44 Not only did The Hydra provide the kind of comradeship between
officers that Brock recommended, it specifically demonstrated the indelible
forms of education that each officer carried. Through its frequent allusion to
literature, classics, and the arts, the magazine allowed the officers to associate
with both their social class and with past communities of school and home.
The journal was entirely patient-run—evidence of Brock’s influence. Already
relying on the forms of classical knowledge shared by most officers, the first
editorial states: “The name of the journal will indicate what we wish its char-
acter to be: many headed—many sided” (April 28, 1917). The name Hydra
was not only a reference to Hercules’s labors, but also referred to the fact that
the hospital was a former hydropathic sanitorium, dubbed “the hydro” by its
wards. Through the articles published in The Hydra (especially during the four
months when Owen was editor), we come to understand how writing at
Craiglockhart was a part of the therapeutic process of organizing neurasthenic
time.
For instance, the September 15, 1917 issue, under Owen’s editorship, in-
cludes an eerie cartoon of Captain Rivers, drawn by “one who has not seen
him.” Rivers is dressed as an Oxford tutor and stands on a pedestal of books
while four officers sit in the background passively waiting for the wand-
bearing wizard to cure them. (From the Casualty Clearing Station, Owen
wrote to his sister Mary on May 8, 1917: “The Nerve Specialist is a kind of
wizard, who mesmerizes when he likes: a famous man.”^45 The soldiers in the
drawing show no sign of functioning or taking control of their own activities;
they sit slumped in chairs as if in a trance. A scroll in Latin swirls above Rivers’s
head: “Styx Acheron Phlegethon Lethe Cytis Avernus,” but upon closer exam-
ination we see that the doctor is reciting, the scroll leading ominously back to
his mouth. The pun on “rivers” is clear in the translation from the Latin; these
are the names of “rivers” Virgil and Dante encounter in The Inferno. Rivers
stands on the stage of literature with a book ignited in flame in his left hand,
asking his charges to confront their own personal hell of traumatic memories,
as if to show how despite all the discipline and authority in their education
and military training, there will always be a chaos threatening to ignite at any
moment. There is, in the postures of the slumped men, the sense of complete
passivity; despite the mesmerism of the “wizard” doctor, there seems a distinct
possibility that these men are broken beyond repair. In this way, the cartoon
offers another subtle questioning of the military and therapeutic orders the
men are expected to follow in the hospital. The cartoon, then, shows how edu-
cation and psychotherapy are perhaps inadequate forms of discipline and self-
preservation in the face of neurasthenic “hell.” This scene replicates and mocks
the forms of classical education to which the officers were privileged, while at