The Worst Loss of All
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Wounded British soldiers at Mametz, July 1916 (IWM Q815)
Of all the injuries servicemen could have inflicted on them in the First World War, wounds to the face were considered to be the worst by far.
In 1916, the British Journal of Nursing described the loss of a limb as a ‘minor evil compared with the difficulties of feeding and speech, and the miseries of gross disfigurement’.
In fact, so devastating, face wounds were seen as a fate worse than death. Despite working in traumatic hospitals close to the frontline, nurse Catherine Black found her time on the Cambridge Military Hospital facial ward the most challenging of her career.
"In all my nursing experiences those months at Aldershot in the ward for facial wounds were, I think, the saddest. Sadder even than the casualty clearing stations which I went to afterwards, for there death was swifter and more merciful, and it is not so hard to see a man die as to break the news to him that he will be blind and dumb for the rest of his life."
Catherine Black, King's Nurse, Beggar's Nurse, 1939
Indeed, these injuries were considered to have such a significant impact on a man that it was even recognised in government policy. Injuries to the face were one of the few categories of war wounds which the British War Office saw as severe enough to warrant a full pension.
"[Facial injury] unequivocally lowers the sufferer’s economic value in the labour market. A blemish which cannot be hidden entitles the man to an evaluation more liberal than is called for in the case of scars on parts of the body which are usually clothed."​​
W.M. Beaumont,
‘Pensions in relation to the eye’, 1919
Very severe facial disfigurement
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Lunacy
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Total loss of speech
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Amputation of leg above knee
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Total deafness
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Amputation of leg below knee
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Loss of two fingers of either hand
100%
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100%
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80%
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70%
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70%
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50%
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20%
Injuries and proportions of pension, Ministry of Pensions leaflet, c.1920
The visibility of face wounds played a large part in the reaction they elicited. Historian Suzannah Biernoff has found that pensions for wounded servicemen in Britain were calculated less by how much an injury prevented the man from being able to work, and more by the extent to which it impacted his 'masculinity': wounds were allocated different values depending on their impact on his ability to 'be a man' (Biernoff, p.671.).
Facial injuries were unique in that they affected a highly visible signifier of identity and individuality. A face indicates a person's age, gender, ethnicity, emotion, and enables people to recognise and interact with each other. Unlike other wounds which affected just the body, a serviceman who had lost his face was perceived to have lost himself and what made him human. ​
While leg and arm wounds, therefore, could reduce a serviceman's capacity to act like a man by leaving him unable to play the traditionally masculine role of breadwinner, far more devastatingly, the facially-wounded had irreconcilably lost the ability to be a man.
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“So intimate and sacred, somehow, and so precious a man’s face to his being that the loss of a limb – grave as it is – seems to many a trifle to it."​
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'Worst Loss of All: Public Deeply Moved by War-Time Revelation', Manchester Evening Chronicle, May 1918​
Wounded Canadian soldiers return to Britain, 1918 (Shawshots/Alamy)
Indeed, servicemen who had sustained injuries to the face were considered removed from ordinary human existence. They were written about in dehumanising and objectifying ways, with a sense of horror and disgust.
“There are eyes – eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of faces – the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men […] Once they were real, splendid, ordinary, normal men. Now they mew like kittens. Once they were fathers and husbands and sons and the lovers of women. Now they scarcely remember … I am a ghost woman leaning over a thing that is mewing.”
Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone, 1929
"I can see the patient is a man, and I can see that once upon a time this man had a face: but I am thinking not of … the damnable wickedness of war; only of how long I shall be able to stand looking at this dreadful creature who is still a man."
'Patient's New Face Taken from His Chest', Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 Dec 1917​​
"To talk to a lad who, six months ago, was probably a wholesome and pleasing specimen of English youth, and is now a gargoyle, and a broken gargoyle at that - the only decent features remaining being perhaps one eye, one ear, and a shock of boyish hair - is something of an ordeal."
Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital, 1918
Servicemen with facial injuries were treated as something less than human because of their changed appearances (IWM)
Nicknamed ‘The Loneliest of Tommies’, they were largely assumed to have a desolate and hopeless life ahead of them. Isolation and rejection from wives and children became common themes in narratives about these men.
"Suppose he is married, or engaged to be married. Could any woman come near that gargoyle without repugnance? His children… Why, a child would run screaming from such a sight. To be fled from by children! That must be a heavy cross for some souls to bear."
Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital, 1918
They were expected to have to - and want to - hide away for the rest of their lives. Minister of Pensions George Barnes used this reasoning to defend the full pension awarded to facially-injured servicemen:
"[The facially-injured man must] remain in the house and cannot go out into the daylight. He is deprived not only from earning his living but of all the ordinary amenities of life."
​Minister of Pensions George Barnes, House of Commons debate, 19 March 1917
Certainly, it was assumed that men with facial injuries were universally depressed and ashamed of their appearance.
"To the victims of such grievous injury, the mental suffering is acute. They suffer frequently from terrible depression, hiding themselves in corners of hospital wards, refusing to return to home or friends in dread of the pity, or even worse, the repulsion, that they know their awful disfigurement would evoke."
​‘New Features For Old: Wonders of Plastic Surgery’, Morning Advertiser, 27 July 1917
"Nothing was more painful than the sense of loneliness of those mutilated, since these deformities repelled even their wives and children. I understand that many, faced with the horror of the situation, committed suicide."​
Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, quoted in Reginald Pound, Gillies: Surgeon Extraordinary: A Biography (London: Michael Joseph, 1964).
While those who had sustained wounds to limbs and other parts of the body were considered heroes, men with facial injuries were objects to be pitied.
Explore Further​
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Level 3: Suzannah Biernoff, 'The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain', Social History of Medicine, 24:3 (2011), 666-685.
'The Crutch We Want' poster to raise money for walking aids for servicemen with leg injuries
(IWM PST10829)