A sick soldier in a military hospital kept complaining of being waked up too early, and of poor food. His reactions looked like the irritable weakness of a psychopath. One day he went into a room where a woman was being examined, without knocking. When ordered out, he boxed the Sister’s ear.
He said himself, on transfer to the psychiatric clinic, that he had always been quarrelsome as a child with his brothers and sisters, subject to fainting spells, and poor and stubborn in military service,--all of which seemed to clinch the diagnosis of psychopathic constitution.
But he seemed to show a decided lack of autocritique. About boxing the Sister’s ear on her saying “Please go out,”--his idea was that he could not let a thing like that happen to him,--a German soldier and a patient! Moreover, “It should not be thought that perhaps I had a love affair with her! There was a cynicism about her.” The Sister had a strong sex impulse, he could see that by her nose: she was, so to speak, “hypochondriacal.” Both in speech and writing he used stilted phrases. The ego at last swelled to the point of his saying that he was an inhabitant of the World and hated Prussia and Prussian _Junkertum_.
Then came unmotivated states of excitement, with pressure of speech and motion, and eventually negativism. Accordingly, the diagnosis hebephrenia finally replaced that of psychopathic constitution.
A German private, called to the colors, was supposed to take his civilian clothes to the post office along with his comrades on March 21, 1915. He did not get his package ready in time and was ordered to go with another troop. At an opportune moment, he left the barracks with the package of clothing. When later arrested, he said that he had gone by railroad to Dirschau; then he had visited Berlin. After this, he had walked to Bromberg, Schneidemühl, and Landsberg.
At last he had ridden back to Küstrin. At Küstrin some children told a railway official that the man was making drawings. There was a petroleum tank near by. Accordingly, he was arrested as a possible spy. He claimed that he was not a soldier.
In the clinic, he looked dull and smiled a good deal. It seems that, before being called to the colors, he had been very angry with his wife and had even threatened her. He now explained this anger as his wife’s fault. She had attacked him, he said. He said that he sometimes had attacks of weakness, which used to last two days at a time, but they had recently lasted for a shorter time. He said that his thoughts always wanted to be somewhere else. In fact, he had not performed military duty. His uniform had been gotten for him, but he had had no further orders. Sometimes in a fever or dream his head seemed to be as big as a room, as if there were no space for it. There was an itching in his legs, he said, which often fell asleep so he could not stand on them. He had had syphilis seven years before, after which he had been hoarse, forgetful, and anxious.