Vanity of War

     Outside of the descriptions of glory and gold obtained by victorious kings in battles against the enemy, war is only ever described as the worst imaginable descriptors. Rough, dirty, raw, terrifying, and horrendous, war has never been for the weak stomach or the soft of heart.
     As the weapons of modern war developed alongside improved medical techniques, the devastatingly wounded soldiers of World War I trenches found themselves in an odd spot of history. They were injured in record numbers, but they did not die. Shrapnel from large and small artillery shells ripped uneven gashes into the bodies and faces of trench-bound soldiers. The trenches themselves, leaving the head most prone to injury in the line of fire from enemy marksmen, were effectively suited to harm the minds and faces of men.

     Because of the high survival rate and the horror that facial disfigurement created, the British and French governments set up departments to handle reconstruction of veteran faces. In its infancy, plastic surgeons developed skin and bone grafts to regrow faces, notably Harold Gillies; while the most serious facial injuries required masks, often made of thin sheets of copper, to hide the disfigurements. After the first day of the battle of Somme, a flood of two thousand facially injured soldiers appeared at the hospital for Harold Gillies. Because multiple, gradual surgeries were required for most patients, of the 5,000 men cared for in the years of the hospital's operation, over 100,000 surgeries were performed, some 11,000 by Dr. Gillies himself.
     While World War I saw the terrible capabilities of man's ability to war, the pressures of the war saw innovation in many other areas. Communication, travel, flight, and medicine all benefited from the focused efforts made during the war. Despite the ingenious attempts of aiding, caring for, and recovering the personality of the wounded, plastic surgery could only do so much. Not even half of facial injuries in Britain were ever addressed, only the most grievous cases. Of an estimated 20,000, the success of those 5,000 seems a much smaller number. Given the knowledge, skill, and successes of the time, remarkable achievement were accomplished by the surgeons, nurses, and patients that worked long years after the war to finish their work.
     Unfortunately, even regrowing faces only covers the wounds. Psychological effects continued for a lifetime for the soldiers and their families. One of the overseeing doctors observed, "The psychological effect on a man who must go through life, an object of horror to himself as well as to others, is beyond description. It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted person to feel like a stranger to his world. It must be unmitigated hell to feel like a stranger to yourself."
     Much like the actual battlefields of the Great War, these small victories of one man seem inconsequential given that a thousand men could fall for no ground, yet it is the efforts of the soldiers that stayed brave through their treatment and the doctors who served to find methods that paved hope for the future's peace. A peace, that while short lived, learned some of the lessons of this earlier punishment of the thirst for glory and the vanity of war.

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Agatha Tyche