WARTIME TRAUMA is often cast as an unavoidable but deeply regrettable outcome of conflict that permanently scars the human psyche. For at least one fourteenth-century French writer, however, subjecting his reader to the physical and mental anguish of combat held the promise of achieving peace and thus of healing the wounds of war. Rather than protect his privileged reader and sovereign, Charles V of France (r. 1364–80), from the ravages of war, Henri de Ferrières attaches to his ninety-six-chapter, predominantly prose political dream narrative, the Songe de pestilence, a final guided meditation in prose of twenty-one chapters, in which the king experiences war as violence inflicted on his own body, followed by two verse prayers on peace. This already unconventional meditation, in which the king is called on to experience an ongoing war as physical agony, is further destabilised by its initial staging as a prophecy delivered by an unidentified learned friend of the dreamer. The friend's prognostications recast decades of war already endured by the French kingdom as physical wounds to be suffered by the reigning king. That is, past battles that were first explained in the dream as a divine curse on the French kingdom that would cause it to be ‘plus tourmenté que nul autre royalme’ (more tormented than any other kingdom, ch. 240, lines 61–2) are recast as future trauma to be suffered by the king, who will be ‘en grant aventure de mort’ (at great risk of death, ch. 246, lines 15–16). This gripping reimagining of past battles as personal wounding gives way to the first of the two closing verse prayers, in which the author beseeches God to ‘gar[der] de mal et de tourment, / De mechief et de villennie, / Nostre roi (protect from evil and torment, from harm and villainy, our king, ch. 257, lines 2–4). The French king is counselled to recognise the ‘maleficence’ (malfeasance) already done to his kingdom: