In the weeks leading up to the first peaceful Christmas for four years, advertisements began to appear suggesting presents that would not have found a place in leisure magazines before the war. In many houses that Christmas, furniture was moved out of the way to make room for spanking new cane wheelchairs. The Illustrated London News recommended an ingenious gadget for individuals who had lost their arms. By the manipulation of a flat lever with two stockinged feet, a plate balanced on top of the lever could be made to rise towards the armless diner’s mouth. Forks and spoons could be made to levitate towards the mouth in a similar way. On 13 December the same magazine was promoting an intriguing choice of gift in the Ellieson Carrier Electric Invalid’s Carriage, a contraption that ‘heralds a new era’. The Ellieson, capable of speeds of up to five miles per hour, afforded the disabled person the freedom from nurse, attendant or bath-chair man as well as an opportunity to breathe in fresh air. These self-propelling invalid chairs were in plentiful supply from Garrould’s, the medical supplies store, and a photograph in the Daily Sketch on 17 December showed a charming model well wrapped up, but smiling broadly as she demonstrated the benefits of the machine.
But the soldier’s disability pension was not enough to keep a family in rent, food and clothing, let alone allowing anything over for Christmas presents. For the one and a half million men who emerged from the war with severe physical injury, there was a clear financial demarcation in the rate of official compensation offered by the Government. Since the beginning of the war over 41,000 men had lost at least one limb. The severest bodily war wounds, the loss of a full right arm from the shoulder downwards, was worth sixteen shillings a week. Fourteen shillings were awarded if the arm was missing from below the shoulder but above the elbow, and then the rate dropped to eleven shillings and sixpence for limbs missing from below the elbow. The left arm however merited a shilling less with each specific affected joint. Allowances stopped at anything above the neckline.
Priority was given to the wounded men for whom surgical help could be provided. The Princess Louise Scottish Hospital for Homeless Soldiers and Sailors at Erskine in Renfrewshire treated one in five of the disabled veterans. The demand was so high that workers from the Clyde-side shipyards with their knowledge of steel and joints were recruited to make false arms and legs. Civilians had to wait their turn. Emily Brooker, mother of ten children, and stretched beyond both her means and energy, developed a terrible cyst in her eye, which caused so much pain that her entire eye had to be removed. The black patch that she wore over the Samson-like hole in her face was itself unsightly but the waiting list for artificial eyes was confined to wounded soldiers. As a temporary measure Emily was advised to place a white shell in the socket that drew more gasps than the black patch. When the hospital finally loaned her a replacement eye for the sum of £3, it did not fit properly. On the bus journey back home to Brighton, with the sightless bauble in position, Emily suddenly sneezed and out popped the new eye to the consternation of the conductor. Within a day Emily had dropped and smashed the precious but useless egg-shaped pebble. She did not have a further £3 to spare. The black patch was returned to its former position concealing the unsightliness beneath.
A poster produced by the Young Men’s Christian Association showed a collection of fearful, damaged men, one holding his crutches, another with empty suit sleeve pinned up to his lapel, armless and shrinking back from the viewer. ‘Don’t Pity a Disabled Man,’ the message pleaded. ‘Find him a job.’ But the eight million disabled veterans had arrived home anxious to find work only to discover that many were unable or forbidden to return to pre-war jobs in offices and factories because of their physical disabilities. Instead they took up positions on street corners, smartly dressed in suit and bowler hat, clinging to their pride, their trays held out in front of them tied on with a ribbon laced around their neck, and packed with newspapers, bootlaces and matchboxes. Some of those with missing limbs would turn their disability to advantage, appearing on stage in variety revues, demonstrating how to type or to play a piano with some skill by means of their toes.
Casualties of the war were everywhere. And drunkenness was often a means of release from the humiliation of poverty. Small children placed under the care of a disabled father while the mother went to work would be perched on windowsills outside pubs while the parent sat inside sluicing away his distress. Outside Hoxton’s pubs in London’s East End rows of neatly parked prams were a familiar sight, the abandoned occupants bellowing their heads off. Drinking went with manhood, it was said, and pride in their manhood was one of the things the wounded missed most.
Away from the city, the wounded were often less obvious, absorbed into kinder communities and able to escape to the open places of the countryside. Three-year-old Mary Beale lived at Bettenham in the Weald of Kent near the village of Biddenden where her father Os kept the farm. Up the lane lived Tom Noakes who owned two of the fields. Mary begged her mother Dorothy never to take her near Tom Noakes’s fields for fear of bumping into the owner. The section of his arm from elbow to hand was entirely missing, shot off in the war. In its place was an enormous hook with which Tom pushed back trailing shoots that got in his way as he surveyed his small estate. Chop chop, he would go with his full right arm, and then hoik, hoik with his left hook to clear the branches of trees. Mary was terrified that one day Tom would hoik her.
Pam Parish, aged three, knew she should be sad for all the soldiers who had not returned to her village of Sidcup but she could not help dreading the visits of one of the neighbours. Stuart Lloyd had lived most of his life in Pam’s village except for the four years when he had been away serving as a Captain while ‘protecting the country’, as Pam’s mother told her. Nowadays he was always popping in for a chat with her mother, his brilliantly polished medals, including the cross and bar for distinguished service, pinned on to his tweed coat, shiny and clattery against one another as he moved. Stuart Lloyd was enough of a local hero to be regarded with awe in the town of Sidcup but the Parish sisters did not look forward to his visits.
‘Now whenever poor Mr Lloyd comes to see us I want you to give him a nice hallo kiss,’ Ethel Parish would urge Pam and her elder sister Stella.
‘But he looks all upside down and strange,’ they objected.
Their mother was adamant. ‘Now, now, I will hear no such nonsense. I know you find it difficult but just think of poor Mr Lloyd.’
And when Mr Lloyd came through the door the pyjama-wearing sisters tried to unscrew their expressions of revulsion and force themselves to kiss his cheek as far away as possible from his mouth before running upstairs and making audible sick noises as soon as they reached their bedroom door. Before going to bed, the children were asked to include Mr Lloyd in their prayers. ‘Please God make Mr Lloyd quite quite well,’ they would dutifully ask, running the sentence on without a break as they asked God for forgiveness ‘for anything I have done wrong today’. But there was little hope of God intervening. When Mr Lloyd stayed for supper the children would turn their faces away, dreading the reappearance of his food through his nose. Half of Stuart Lloyd’s face was gone, his palate missing, blown off at the Somme.
According to Siegfried Sassoon, the noise of a shell passing overhead was like the sound of ‘water trickling into a can’. The impact of bullet on skull was described by one American soldier, himself with a missing face, ‘like someone had dropped a glass bottle into a porcelain bathtub’. Perhaps that was the sound Stuart Lloyd had heard a few years earlier. Or maybe the noise of whistling that preceded the appearance of the shell was all that remained in his memory of that day.
Many of the most extreme of war wounded cases had not come back to their own homes at all. They were hidden away in institutions, allowed out occasionally to take the air, objects of fascination and pity, to be stared at and then hastily ignored by the able-minded going about their business. ‘Don’t look,’ John Leigh Pemberton’s mother would caution her young son as they walked along the front at Westg
ate-on-Sea, passing the gas-blinded soldiers. But John was captivated by the old soldiers as they walked in an orderly line from the nearby Home for the Blind, their hands on the shoulder of the man in front for guidance. Safely seated in deck chairs they took pleasure from feeling the warmth of the sun on their faces. ‘They are the Debris of War,’ his mother told him.
There were people in Pam Parish’s village of Sidcup who seemed to the children to have something wrong with themselves, something not easily identifiable, just people who kept to themselves, who wished to be left alone. The children never approached them, nor spoke to those whom the family referred to as ‘Les Invalides’. In Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex where a big convalescent home housed hundreds of men with smashed up faces, the locals wrote to the matron asking her to keep the inmates inside, as it gave them ‘the shivers’ to see these horrifying casualties of war walking about, open to the public gaze.
Better protection for the head had replaced the cloth and leather caps that soldiers had worn at the outbreak of war but they provided no covering for the face. Emergence from a trench into the enemy line began with one quick glance. The unprotected face appeared first, in preparation for the scramble over the top. Dr Frederick Albee, a surgeon working on the front line, was amazed that soldiers failed to understand ‘the menace of the machine gun’; he was incredulous that ‘they seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets’.
At least 60,000 men were estimated to have been shot directly in the head or eye, vulnerable not only to a direct hit but also to the lacerating wounds caused by flying fragments of shell. Lookout sentries were advised to stand with their head and shoulders fully above the parapet for the chance of a statistically less damaging hit to the body. If a bullet itself did not make a direct hit, catastrophic burns from explosives could all but obliterate a man’s face. Burns were likewise the chief hazard for airmen, due to the exposed petrol tank sited directly behind the flimsy wicker flying seat which could explode at any moment. Gun-turret fires on board ship were hard to extinguish too, and faces rarely escaped the flames. With unvaryingly poor nutrition, the weakened men offered little resistance to the infection that festered in the wounds.
Before the war Anna Coleman Ladd, an American sculptor working in Paris, had concentrated on decorative fountains featuring nymphs and sprites. But during the war, after a stint at the American Red Cross office in Paris, she became determined to use her creative gift to help servicemen who had been badly damaged in action. Patients would walk through the statue-populated courtyard and climb the stairs to consult Mrs Ladd in her flower-filled studio above. She listened carefully to men often with barely recognisable features, who explained to her that they wanted her to make them look exactly the same as they had before the shell had hit. If there was a way to pretend that the wounding had never happened, they could perhaps get on with their lives.
In England Francis Derwent Wood, a professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art, had worked for the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens but was too old to enlist at the outbreak of war. He had begun voluntary work in London’s hospitals and in 1917 found himself profoundly affected by the extent of the physical damage confronting him. Wood was further disturbed by the frightening suicide rate among returning soldiers and by the distress of families unable to come to terms with the shell-shattered appearances of their menfolk. Mirrors were forbidden in the wards but occasionally a visitor smuggled one in, anxious to please a relation consumed with curiosity about his own appearance. Stories went around that people had fainted with shock at the face in the mirror that looked back at them. Wood set up a department in the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth devoted to covering up facial disfigurement. Patients and their families called the department the Tin Noses Shop.
With the combined help of pre-injury photographs and artistic guesswork, Coleman Ladd in Paris and Derwent Wood in London spent hours in discreet workshops putting together complete facial masks made of galvanised copper which would hide the effects of damage. Concealment, it seemed, rather than repair was the only option for those who no longer had noses, eyes, jawbones, cheekbones, chins, ears or much of a face at all.
Requirements varied. Some simply needed a screen for a missing eye; others wanted something that gave greater covering, extending from the chin upwards across the entire face. Sometimes a patient would produce a photograph that he hoped might be an improvement on his pre-war appearance. Rupert Brooke’s image was sometimes chosen as an alternative. At Rugby, the public school attended by Brooke, there were plans to commission a portrait of their most famous old boy based on an already famous photograph by Sherrill Schell, taken in 1913. The unblemished face bore no resemblance to the broken men who had come back alive from the front but it represented something to aspire to.
Derwent Wood promoted his work to the sceptical by explaining that ‘the patient acquires his old self-respect, self-assurance, self-reliance, takes once more a pride in his personal appearance. His presence is no longer a source of melancholy to himself nor of sadness to his relatives and friends.’ Usually all the patient wanted was to become a face indistinguishable in the crowd.
After the mutilated face had been surgically patched up and given time to heal, Derwent Wood’s work began. Once ‘the surgeon has done all he can to heal wounds, to support fleshy tissue by bone grafting’, he explained, he would try and restore the missing parts with his sculpting skills. The face would be smothered in wet clay. After a ghastly claustrophobic interlude, the cast would be dried and removed before a working model was produced from plasticine. From this model the basic copper mask would be made and the prosthetic pieces such as nose or chin would then be grafted on to fit. Eyebrows and eyelashes, glass eyes that had an impressively lifelike glint, hair made from copper wire and moustaches were all then added and glasses were usually used to hold the mask in place. When an eye socket was missing and there was no place into which a glass eye might be slipped, the paintbrush worked its magic, waking up the mask to the illusion of sightfulness.
The copper absorbed the painted facial characteristics with ease and these were added in enamel while the mask was in place in order to match the skin tone of the wearer more accurately. Sometimes a tell-tale sign of chipped paint or rust became visible to the observer and a touch-up visit to the artist was arranged. Enormous trouble was taken to find the right colour of paint that would look natural when exposed to bright sunshine, dull weather, or to electric light. A balance was sought between a newly shaved shine with a trace of blue-tone and the faint stubble of later in the day. Sometimes electric light would catch the glint of the paint, the unnatural gleam on the face giving away the artificiality of the skin.
The mask weighed between four and nine ounces, the equivalent of anything from a half to a full cup of butter, and measured one thirty-second of an inch thick, or in the estimation of one society lady, the width of a visiting card. For most of the wearers the masks were horribly uncomfortable as the tin rubbed against the ravaged face beneath producing a nearly intolerable sensation. Anything that touched the acutely sensitive and delicate new skin was an irritant. However one grateful patient told Mrs Ladd in her Paris workshop that his emotional life had been totally restored. ‘The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive,’ he wrote, admitting, ‘as she had a right to do’.
In her French studio Anna Coleman Ladd was delighted that this newfound confidence encouraged her patients to ‘twirl their artificial mustachios with all the verve and aplomb so characteristic of your true Gaul’. Some men were so delighted with the chance to live a near normal life that they allowed the fitting to be filmed. The process demanded the frequent removal of the mask while the smallest adjustments were made and the camera closed in on the contrasting faces, the one destroyed, the other resurrected.
The mask was incapable of ageing, a gift not bestowed on other parts of the body, leading in later years to an incongruous mismatch. And a
ll the ingenuity of the artist was defeated by the challenge of making the mask smile, laugh, frown, look surprised or even happy. The face was completely and eerily immobile. Unlike a living face, with its infinite variety of response, the tin mask remained capable only of the one expression imposed by the artist. The masks were as alive as the effigies on tombs in churches up and down the country, the effigies of the dead. And unresponsiveness, fragility and strange physical sensations were not the only drawbacks. The device for concealing a face, initially convincingly real but on closer examination absolutely unreal, forced the imagination to concentrate on the truth of the dreadful Stygian picture beneath the mask.
Ladd and Wood expected their masks to have a lifespan of just a few years before wear and tear would cause them to rust and crumble. Some masks remained unworn in their boxes. The young plastic surgeon, Harold Gillies, was not surprised. At his own plastic surgery hospital in Sidcup, one of Gillies’s convalescent patients was halfway through a sequence of operations, recovering from one as the healing process took place before his damaged skin was well enough for the next session under Gillies’s restorative hand. This particular patient had been given a temporary leather mask to wear on a day’s visit to London. The patient would leave the reception desk with a jaunty wave, and make for the railway station. At the end of the day the front door would swing open to reveal a fearful sight. The man had long grown tired of being stared at in the railway carriage and it had become his habit and little private game with himself to whip the mask off when the maximum number of pale-faced ladies had gathered in his carriage. Returning to the hospital he would hold up the appropriate amount of fingers to indicate the number of victims he had succeeded in terrorising.
The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age Page 7
