The diagnosis of pathological intoxication was made, and the soldier was thereby cleared of his dangerous situation; a criminal prosecution was not instituted. He thereafter behaved with entire sobriety and modesty, and he achieved his corporalcy and later became file leader.
Desertion in alcoholism may deserve the term “pathological.” Case of fugue.
A “deserter” said: “I went because I drank a glass. I just went, _comme ça_, without any motive.” He was somewhat feebleminded and, in explaining the impulsivity of his act, he added: “I went like a broken-down beast. I walked straight ahead, without knowing where I was going and if I had been going to be killed, it would have been all the same to me.” He could not that afternoon remember very well; but next morning, after having slept, he regained full consciousness. He said that he then found himself in a field near a cemetery. He had carried his gun and equipment with him, but had lost them somewhere, and from a military point of view, his desertion was complicated by loss of effects. On coming to, he said to himself, “Where am I? How foolish after fifteen months in the line! Probably I have deserted again.” In fact, he had a month before left his post under exactly the same conditions in the midst of a period of alcoholic excitement.
This alcoholic fugue is typical: drunkenness, impulsive and subconscious ambulatory automatism, with partial amnesia, disorientation, with mislaying of objects, followed by sleep and immediate return to normality.
_Re_ fugue, see discussion under Cases 58 and 59. The French military code cannot excuse victims of fugue even though executed in a quite unconscious state, if the fugue is due to alcohol. There was a certain procursive suggestion in the fugue of Case 88, who went “like a broken-down beast,” straight ahead, without knowing where he was going.
Alcoholism: Amnesia experimentally reproduced.
February 15, 1915, a German soldier drank beer in the canteen and at roll-call appeared tipsy. He then went to bed, but rose an hour later to go to town. A quarter of an hour later, he went to a clerk’s house and asked for paper, on the ground that the next day he was going to march to Warsaw. The clerk gave him no paper, which he then tried to get by force. A policeman arrested him and he said, “You just wait, lame dog!” Upon examination he denied that he had ever been guilty of any crime but had been in institutions on account of delirium. In point of fact, this man had grown up in very bad surroundings, amongst quarrels and disputes of his parents, who kept a disorderly house. At 19 he had been convicted of incest. He finally admitted having been convicted for rape. It was found that he had once run out into the front trenches; had been removed by an advance guard to a stable, and then wondered why he was not in school. He described a number of attacks of delirium although he had not drunk more than moderately.