During the Great War, surgeon Harold Gillies helped thousands of men to literally face the world again.

During the Great War, surgeon Harold Gillies helped thousands of men to literally face the world again.

During the Great War, surgeon Harold Gillies helped thousands of men to literally face the world again. 

A procession of men arrived at his London Queens Hospital with jaws, noses and cheeks destroyed, tongues torn out and eyeballs dislodged. 

With no textbooks to follow, Gillies had to invent his own solutions. ‘He would set to work on some man who had had half his face literally blown to pieces with the skin that was left hanging in shreds,’ remembered a nurse. 

While men who lost a limb were treated as heroes, those suffering facial injuries were often shunned. Mothers hurried their children indoors to avoid seeing them, while women broke off engagements to their disfigured fiancés. 

Unsurprisingly, disfigured men suffered bouts of despondency and melancholia, which sometimes lead to suicide. 

Gillies’ wife, Kathleen, frequently visited the wards, where she tried to ‘revive hope in despairing hearts.’ 

Another nurse remembered that the hardest thing to do was ‘rekindle the desire to live’ in these men. 

Nurses had to learn not to react to the distressing sights to which they were exposed. 

Mirrors were banned from the wards, although one nurse recalled a soldier coming into possession of shaving-glass. ‘I pretended not to see it when he called me over and asked me to put screens around his bed. Every nurse learns that there are moments when it is better to leave a patient alone because sympathy would only make things worse.’

Patients were encouraged to walk the local streets where some benches were painted blue so that passersby would be warned in advance that a disfigured man might be sitting there.

Moved by these stories, I featured Wilfred Rhodes in ‘Night in Passchendaele’, who himself, has a disfiguring scar running across his cheek which leaves his face misshapen. Rather than return to Australia, he seeks refuge in the French countryside with similarly wounded men. 

While walking with Wally, who is similarly injured, Rhodes volunteers:

‘It’s the staring I hate.’

‘And the look of horror on kids’ faces,’ agrees Wally. 

‘I bloody despise it.’

Their simple exchange sums up the psychological trauma suffered by thousands of men who were disfigured in the Great War. 

Scott’s novel ‘Night in Passchendaele’ Out Now: