Examination showed perceptive power and knowledge to be good. He played the violin, but always the same tunes. He said that he had not worked in Berlin during the winter of 1914. He spoke as if he had been in another sanitarium, where he did nothing but dream by himself, taking no interest in things, and lying indifferently, with a blanket over him.
He said that when he received the uniform he had a longing for clean underclothes. Requested to explain the meaning of the uniform, he remarked: “Why, many have these things on.”
_Re_ dementia praecox, Lépine states that in the French army instances of dementia praecox have been numerous in the interior, both at the time of mobilization and at the time of calling out sundry new classes. He notes that the courtmartial and invaliding experts have neither the leisure nor the experience necessary to keep these men from going into the army. The somewhat frequent remissions in dementia praecox make the task all the more difficult. To be sure, the stuporous and catatonic cases are not very much in evidence in the army; when such cases do occur, it is easy enough to evacuate the patients to a hospital for observation. Far more troublesome are cases of a less advanced or milder nature. Here are cases in which judgment is deficient, and in which quite unsystematic, incoherent, and transient delusional ideas occur. The patient looks quite normal to the non-psychiatric expert. Something odd happens which quite suddenly reveals the delusional ideas. For example, there is a fugue, or else the soldier goes to his superior and aggressively chides him for having troubled him the night before. These particular psychopaths are among the most dangerous to be found in the army.
A gunner, aged 23, enlisted on the expiration of his regular period of service and was a good soldier, in excellent health, up to June, 1915. He then began to have a few vague ideas of persecution. In a short time these became more definite and he caused talk by requesting to go into another corps because his comrades did not like him. He told his brigadier that the soldiers were frightening him by magnetism. He had hallucinations of hearing people say, “He will get it.” He kept by himself, would not eat and stood motionless for long periods of time before his mess-tin. He was often found in a dreamy state of apathy. One day he left the cantonment without leave, wandered through fields, had coffee in a village and then started off in no special direction. The police took him without resistance the next day. He said, “My comrades are in politics; they are going to cheat me.” He was brought to Fismes and the ambulance surgeon said that he found he did not know what he was about. He was amnestic for the fugue, explaining that he went because he was frightened. It was hard to get him to eat.