I mean war always has been a part of our life since the first civilizations was established. I’m sure “shellshock” wasn’t only caused by artilery shots.
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PTSD is largely caused by people feeling helpless to avoid death for an extended period of time. While there were some limited cases of PTSD pre-WWI, WWI represented a rather dramatic change in the day to day experience for a soldier at war.
Pre-WWI it was rare for soldiers to be in combat for an extended period of time. Armies were relatively small and an entire army would march as a distinct group of men. You can look at civil war campaign maps to get an idea for how Napoleonic era wars were fought, but it wasn’t like a modern war where there was a front line or even a border.
There were just big blobs of troops marching around and occasionally they would meet up at a strategic chokepoint, like a mountain pass, crossroad, or railhead. When the army blobs did come into contact, it was rare for combat to be the result. The limited range of the weapons at the time meant that the two sides just kind of stared each other down before the weaker side withdrew. If combat did occur, the battle was over within a few days, at which point things returned to how they were.
The end result of this was that most soldiers either never saw combat or only saw very brief combat where they, personally, were only in danger for a brief period of time. The soldiers also didn’t develop a sense of helplessness because the enemy was in sight and the soldier could shoot back. Those conditions just aren’t extreme enough to give rise to PTSD.
WWI represented a big change to that because front lines developed in which there were static defensive systems hundreds of miles long. Soldiers just sat in those defensive lines, enduring occasional shelling and gunfire for months on end. On top of that, much of the incoming fire came from artillery that was miles away – far beyond what people could see or respond to.
In effect, WWI soldiers spent months living in a situation where they could die at any time from a shell they never saw coming, which was fired from a gun they couldn’t shoot back at. Those are the conditions that result in PTSD and WWI was the first time in human history that those conditions were present.
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