Key words: Agostino Gemelli, shell shock, military psychiatry, courage
In 1917 Agostino Gemelli, chaplain for the staff officiers, published a study titled “Our Soldier. Essays on military psychology”. This book is the result of a concrete experience of a medical lieutenant, even thouth the author had a european background in the field of experimental psychology. Actually, the text goes beyond the moral categories of courage and fear as well as the determinism of Cesare Lombroso’s heritage. Gemelli’s investigations of the military milieu in the trench reveal the “gradual fading” of the man’s awareness induced by the monotony of life in the trenches, that leads to a genuine “shrinking of the field of his consciousness”. His observations retain their relevance one hundred years thereafter, particularly when matched with the words of the many writers that experienced the first line of the Great War.