Rescue
A badly wounded Scottish sergeant receives medical assistance during the Battle of Polygon Wood, 26 Sep 1917 (IWM Q6003)
Injuries to the face and head were widely assumed to mean certain death for servicemen.
The unprecedented level of destruction caused by new weapons meant many had never seen face injuries as severe before, and the tremendous amount of blood produced by face wounds caused panic.
“I was rendered speachless [sic] … My friends looked at me in horror and did not expect me to live many moments … [They] were unable to stop the flow of blood in my mouth which was nearly choking me.”
Private Harold Cullimore, shot in the chin.
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“A stream of blood spouted like a fountain from my mouth and gushed from my nostrils. A passing soldier tried to use his field dressing kit, but his panic not being able to discover the nature of the wound, only a fountain of blood spouting from my mouth he stuffed the whole packet in just as it was between my teeth – like a biscuit given to a dog!”
Private Percy Clare, shot through the jaw.
Indeed, British servicemen were ill-prepared to deal with face wounds. The personal first aid kits given to them were often inadequate to treat the kinds of wounds they were sustaining.
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Listen to Private Joseph Pickard describe what he found in his field dressing kit to attend to the loss of his nose and other serious wounds.
First Field Dressing kit c.1914 (© Science Museum)
Oral history interview with Joseph Pickard, conducted by Peter Hart, 1986. (IWM 8946)
"All that was in there was a lot of gauze, a little tube of [antiseptic] and a big safety pin – that was your first aid! … [A piece of shrapnel had] cut the sciatic nerve, chipped both hip joints, smashed the left side of the pelvis, there was three holes in the bladder, I lost my nose! A bloody mess! Oh dear!"
American infantry soldier receives first-aid from a comrade in Varennes-en-Argonne, France, 26 Sep 1918 (US National Archives).
Servicemen had more hope if they were picked up by a medical party, but for the facially-wounded this was not always easy.
Rescuing the wounded could be a dangerous and arduous mission. Entering the battlefield unarmed but under fire, stretcher bearers risked being injured themselves and the task to move a soldier back to safety could take hours, by which time it could be too late.
During the Battle of Loos in 1915, three men were killed and four injured trying to save a company commander injured just 20 yards from the trench. When medical help finally reached him, he was no longer worth saving. He was later found dead with his fist stuffed into his mouth so that his cries would not provoke anyone else to risk their life to save him.
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Stretcher bearers carry a wounded soldier over the top of a trench in Thiepval, c.1916 (IWM Q1332).
Assuming their efforts were better-placed elsewhere, medical parties were often reluctant to pick up facial wound cases.
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After the passing soldier failed to adequately help Percy Clare, he had to try three times before a rescue party agreed to assist him.
Clare had lost so much blood that the first party which came upon him initially assumed he’d been wounded in the stomach. He recalled the corporal in charge shake his head and tell his men that it wouldn’t be worth taking him to a casualty clearing station, as "that sort always dies soon."
“A second party also refused me. I was so soaked with blood and looked so sorry a case … they probably were justified that their long tramp with so unpromising a burden would be futile.”
Private Percy Clare
Fortunately for Clare, a friend who’d come across him found a third party willing to take him.
“My persevering friend brought up yet a third party and this time when I roused I found them lifting me on to their stretcher.”
Private Percy Clare
Clare was lucky. For others, alone and unable to speak, such perseverance must have been an impossible task. Private Walter Ashworth was injured on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and lay on the battlefield for three days, without a jaw, unable to call for help. Ashworth was eventually found. Many others were not so fortunate.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
Close up of 'Stretcher bearers of the Royal Army Medical Corps lifting a wounded man out of a trench', Gilbert Rogers, 1919 (© Wellcome Collection, 16182i).
And yet even getting picked up by a rescue party did not necessarily ensure survival.
The limited understanding of face wounds meant that, particularly during the early stages of the conflict, many died on their way to medical aid, drowning in their own blood or choking on their tongues.
British dental surgeon William Kelsey Fry discovered this firsthand after leading a soldier who’d been hit in the jaw through the trenches to medical assistance. Barely as he had left the man, he was told he had asphyxiated after being laid on his back on a stretcher.
Fry later issued an official recommendation that all servicemen with facial injuries be carried facedown with their heads hanging over the end of stretchers to prevent suffocation.
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Stretcher bearers carry a facially-wounded soldier on his back, 1916 (IWM Q101064).
Plagued by a range of obstacles, just getting off the battlefield was a challenge for the facially-injured.​​​