Broken gargoyles: the disfigured soldiers of the first world war

Broken gargoyles: the disfigured soldiers of the first world war

This is the face of man after taking artilley shrapnel to his head. It all grew back but he is forever marked from that war long ago. The world will move on and it always will, but some are so unfortunate to be living reminders. ⠀

Tens of thousands of badly wounded Australian veterans stoically participated in the earliest Anzac Day parades after the end of the first world war.

Look at the old photographs and you’ll see many of the 155,000 service men who were wounded on the various fronts, being pushed in wheelchairs by fellow veterans, or hobbling along with the aid of prosthetic limbs, crutches and walking sticks. There are the many blind men too, tap-tap-tapping their way along the main streets of the towns and cities with their white canes, clinging to the elbows of comrades.

Study those sepia images carefully today and you might see them off to the side – ghostly figures with faces shadowed under broad-rimmed hats or even more self-consciously concealed with scarfs. They were the old soldiers who were so horribly facially disfigured that even they referred to themselves as the “broken gargoyles”.

Many of the limbless ex-servicemen could disguise their disabilities. For the facially disfigured, however, the return to civilian life could be far more conspicuous and unforgiving.

The amputees, the blind, and even those with “shell shock”, formed the public, stoic face of Australia’s Great War “sacrifice”.

But despite numbering as many as 37,000, so confronting – even frightening – were the facially disfigured, that many became socially marginalised on repatriation. While a few wore special custom-made masks to conceal their missing noses, ears, mouths and jaws, others simply withdrew from normal civilian life by abandoning parents, wives and children – upon whom they were often dependant for tube or spoon feeding – for the bush, where they were less conspicuous.

Many others killed themselves or died in suspicious accidents.

A century after the war began a young Australian academic has been moved to tell the stories of these shunned servicemen from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Kerry Neale, an archivist at the Australian War Memorial and a PhD candidate at the University of NSW, has spent six years tracing the plight of thousands of soldiers – with particular emphasis on the Australians – who received revolutionary facial reconstruction treatment at what was then known as the Queen’s hospital in Sidcup, Kent, England.

Using repatriation files and Australian and English medical records, so intimate has she become with her research subjects that she now refers to them with the deepest affection as “my boys”.

“Although they are strapping men, some of whom went on to live fantastic lives, when I consider their stories and look at their photographs, they become my boys,” she says.

Their stories are invariably deeply moving, often tragic. The photographs of the men – with lower jaws, noses, mouths and eyes missing – are very confronting and disturbing. You look and immediately wonder: how did they manage to live?

Neale points out that while the weapons of modern warfare – cannon and mortar shells, and the machine gun – increased the prevalence of such terrible wounds, rapid advances in battlefield medicine and facial reconstruction surgery meant that men with such terrible injuries to the face and neck were often saved.

In October 1917, shrapnel struck Kearsey in the face while he was serving on the European western front, severely gashing his face from the forehead, across the bridge of his nose and through his cheek.

Saved at a battlefront clearing station, he was then evacuated to the Queen’s hospital where he – along with 5,000 other soldiers of the empire – underwent revolutionary facial reconstruction surgery under the expert guidance of the highly skilled New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies. And then he was shipped home to Inverell.

Although Kearsey’s reconstructive surgery was a comparative success, he initially withdrew when he returned home. He broke up with the woman to whom he had been engaged before the war, and worked as a farm labourer.

“Of course we don’t know for certain what happened. But it is fair to assume – maybe she was worried that he would never be able to find work and wouldn’t be able to provide. Obviously that’s a real concern going into a marriage,” Neale says of Kearsey’s broken relationship.

“Your personality, your identity all shines through your face. And for these men, they had to learn how to talk again, how to breathe again, how to engage with their loved ones – you know, you can’t just smile at someone and have them understand, now that you no longer have a mouth to smile with.

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