The Great Silence (9 page)

Violet did not object when John, a reticent and complicated man, asked his wife to pack away all Charlie’s photographs and possessions. A short while after the wedding John Jacob returned to the war and had his right leg blown off. Back home again, John suffered a continuous and dreadful pain in the remaining part of the limb, and retreated to his rooms, occupying himself with his passion for painting. One day his new wife walked into her husband’s studio to find him at an easel painting a nude model.

Moving to open the window, Violet remarked, ‘Yes, darling, I do agree, it
is
hot in here’, and left the room, making no further comment. A woman of impressive resilience, Violet considered silence to be the most prudent response. But deep within the silent recesses of her private sitting room at Hever Castle in Kent was a secret. Here in the place where Anne Boleyn had loved and lost Henry VIII, the lovely and romantic place that her new husband had inherited on his father’s death, Violet had prised open a brick or two and within the cavity behind had placed her favourite photographs, a lock of hair, the cufflinks and the medals that had belonged to the man she would always love best. After the war was over, being with their two children and holding these precious things lessened the loneliness that still gripped her.

In the weeks leading up to the first peaceful Christmas for four years, advertisements began to appear suggesting presents that would not have found a place in leisure magazines before the war. In many houses that Christmas, furniture was moved out of the way to make room for spanking new cane wheelchairs. The
Illustrated London News
recommended an ingenious gadget for individuals who had lost their arms. By the manipulation of a flat lever with two stockinged feet, a plate balanced on top of the lever could be made to rise towards the armless diner’s mouth. Forks and spoons could be made to levitate towards the mouth in a similar way. On 13 December the same magazine was promoting an intriguing choice of gift in the Ellieson Carrier Electric Invalid’s Carriage, a contraption that ‘heralds a new era’. The Ellieson, capable of speeds of up to five miles per hour, afforded the disabled person the freedom from nurse, attendant or bath-chair man as well as an opportunity to breathe in fresh air. These self-propelling invalid chairs were in plentiful supply from Garrould’s, the medical supplies store, and a photograph in the
Daily Sketch
on 17 December showed a charming model well wrapped up, but smiling broadly as she demonstrated the benefits of the machine.

But the soldier’s disability pension was not enough to keep a family in rent, food and clothing, let alone allowing anything over for Christmas presents. For the one and a half million men who emerged from the war with severe physical injury, there was a clear financial
demarcation in the rate of official compensation offered by the Government. Since the beginning of the war over 41,000 men had lost at least one limb. The severest bodily war wounds, the loss of a full right arm from the shoulder downwards, was worth sixteen shillings a week. Fourteen shillings were awarded if the arm was missing from below the shoulder but above the elbow, and then the rate dropped to eleven shillings and sixpence for limbs missing from below the elbow. The left arm however merited a shilling less with each specific affected joint. Allowances stopped at anything above the neckline.

Priority was given to the wounded men for whom surgical help could be provided. The Princess Louise Scottish Hospital for Homeless Soldiers and Sailors at Erskine in Renfrewshire treated one in five of the disabled veterans. The demand was so high that workers from the Clyde-side shipyards with their knowledge of steel and joints were recruited to make false arms and legs. Civilians had to wait their turn. Emily Brooker, mother of ten children, and stretched beyond both her means and energy, developed a terrible cyst in her eye, which caused so much pain that her entire eye had to be removed. The black patch that she wore over the Samson-like hole in her face was itself unsightly but the waiting list for artificial eyes was confined to wounded soldiers. As a temporary measure Emily was advised to place a white shell in the socket that drew more gasps than the black patch. When the hospital finally loaned her a replacement eye for the sum of £3, it did not fit properly. On the bus journey back home to Brighton, with the sightless bauble in position, Emily suddenly sneezed and out popped the new eye to the consternation of the conductor. Within a day Emily had dropped and smashed the precious but useless egg-shaped pebble. She did not have a further £3 to spare. The black patch was returned to its former position concealing the unsightliness beneath.

A poster produced by the Young Men’s Christian Association showed a collection of fearful, damaged men, one holding his crutches, another with empty suit sleeve pinned up to his lapel, armless and shrinking back from the viewer. ‘Don’t Pity a Disabled Man,’ the message pleaded. ‘Find him a job.’ But the eight million disabled veterans had arrived home anxious to find work only to discover that many were unable or forbidden to return to pre-war
jobs in offices and factories because of their physical disabilities. Instead they took up positions on street corners, smartly dressed in suit and bowler hat, clinging to their pride, their trays held out in front of them tied on with a ribbon laced around their neck, and packed with newspapers, bootlaces and matchboxes. Some of those with missing limbs would turn their disability to advantage, appearing on stage in variety revues, demonstrating how to type or to play a piano with some skill by means of their toes.

Casualties of the war were everywhere. And drunkenness was often a means of release from the humiliation of poverty. Small children placed under the care of a disabled father while the mother went to work would be perched on windowsills outside pubs while the parent sat inside sluicing away his distress. Outside Hoxton’s pubs in London’s East End rows of neatly parked prams were a familiar sight, the abandoned occupants bellowing their heads off. Drinking went with manhood, it was said, and pride in their manhood was one of the things the wounded missed most.

Away from the city, the wounded were often less obvious, absorbed into kinder communities and able to escape to the open places of the countryside. Three-year-old Mary Beale lived at Bettenham in the Weald of Kent near the village of Biddenden where her father Os kept the farm. Up the lane lived Tom Noakes who owned two of the fields. Mary begged her mother Dorothy never to take her near Tom Noakes’s fields for fear of bumping into the owner. The section of his arm from elbow to hand was entirely missing, shot off in the war. In its place was an enormous hook with which Tom pushed back trailing shoots that got in his way as he surveyed his small estate.
Chop chop
, he would go with his full right arm, and then
hoik, hoik
with his left hook to clear the branches of trees. Mary was terrified that one day Tom would hoik her.

Pam Parish, aged three, knew she should be sad for all the soldiers who had not returned to her village of Sidcup but she could not help dreading the visits of one of the neighbours. Stuart Lloyd had lived most of his life in Pam’s village except for the four years when he had been away serving as a Captain while ‘protecting the country’, as Pam’s mother told her. Nowadays he was always popping in for a chat with her mother, his brilliantly polished medals,
including the cross and bar for distinguished service, pinned on to his tweed coat, shiny and clattery against one another as he moved. Stuart Lloyd was enough of a local hero to be regarded with awe in the town of Sidcup but the Parish sisters did not look forward to his visits.

‘Now whenever poor Mr Lloyd comes to see us I want you to give him a nice hallo kiss,’ Ethel Parish would urge Pam and her elder sister Stella.

‘But he looks all upside down and strange,’ they objected.

Their mother was adamant. ‘Now, now, I will hear no such nonsense. I know you find it difficult but just think of poor Mr Lloyd.’

And when Mr Lloyd came through the door the pyjama-wearing sisters tried to unscrew their expressions of revulsion and force themselves to kiss his cheek as far away as possible from his mouth before running upstairs and making audible sick noises as soon as they reached their bedroom door. Before going to bed, the children were asked to include Mr Lloyd in their prayers. ‘Please God make Mr Lloyd quite quite well,’ they would dutifully ask, running the sentence on without a break as they asked God for forgiveness ‘for anything I have done wrong today’. But there was little hope of God intervening. When Mr Lloyd stayed for supper the children would turn their faces away, dreading the reappearance of his food through his nose. Half of Stuart Lloyd’s face was gone, his palate missing, blown off at the Somme.

According to Siegfried Sassoon, the noise of a shell passing overhead was like the sound of ‘water trickling into a can’. The impact of bullet on skull was described by one American soldier, himself with a missing face, ‘like someone had dropped a glass bottle into a porcelain bathtub’. Perhaps that was the sound Stuart Lloyd had heard a few years earlier. Or maybe the noise of whistling that preceded the appearance of the shell was all that remained in his memory of that day.

Many of the most extreme of war wounded cases had not come back to their own homes at all. They were hidden away in institutions, allowed out occasionally to take the air, objects of fascination and pity, to be stared at and then hastily ignored by the able-minded
going about their business. ‘Don’t look,’ John Leigh Pemberton’s mother would caution her young son as they walked along the front at Westgate-on-Sea, passing the gas-blinded soldiers. But John was captivated by the old soldiers as they walked in an orderly line from the nearby Home for the Blind, their hands on the shoulder of the man in front for guidance. Safely seated in deck chairs they took pleasure from feeling the warmth of the sun on their faces. ‘They are the Debris of War,’ his mother told him.

There were people in Pam Parish’s village of Sidcup who seemed to the children to have something wrong with themselves, something not easily identifiable, just people who kept to themselves, who wished to be left alone. The children never approached them, nor spoke to those whom the family referred to as ‘Les Invalides’. In Burnham-on-Crouch in Essex where a big convalescent home housed hundreds of men with smashed up faces, the locals wrote to the matron asking her to keep the inmates inside, as it gave them ‘the shivers’ to see these horrifying casualties of war walking about, open to the public gaze.

Better protection for the head had replaced the cloth and leather caps that soldiers had worn at the outbreak of war but they provided no covering for the face. Emergence from a trench into the enemy line began with one quick glance. The unprotected face appeared first, in preparation for the scramble over the top. Dr Frederick Albee, a surgeon working on the front line, was amazed that soldiers failed to understand ‘the menace of the machine gun’; he was incredulous that ‘they seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets’.

At least 60,000 men were estimated to have been shot directly in the head or eye, vulnerable not only to a direct hit but also to the lacerating wounds caused by flying fragments of shell. Lookout sentries were advised to stand with their head and shoulders fully above the parapet for the chance of a statistically less damaging hit to the body. If a bullet itself did not make a direct hit, catastrophic burns from explosives could all but obliterate a man’s face. Burns were likewise the chief hazard for airmen, due to the exposed petrol tank sited directly behind the flimsy wicker flying seat which could explode at any moment. Gun-turret fires on board ship were hard
to extinguish too, and faces rarely escaped the flames. With unvaryingly poor nutrition, the weakened men offered little resistance to the infection that festered in the wounds.

Before the war Anna Coleman Ladd, an American sculptor working in Paris, had concentrated on decorative fountains featuring nymphs and sprites. But during the war, after a stint at the American Red Cross office in Paris, she became determined to use her creative gift to help servicemen who had been badly damaged in action. Patients would walk through the statue-populated courtyard and climb the stairs to consult Mrs Ladd in her flower-filled studio above. She listened carefully to men often with barely recognisable features, who explained to her that they wanted her to make them look exactly the same as they had before the shell had hit. If there was a way to pretend that the wounding had never happened, they could perhaps get on with their lives.

In England Francis Derwent Wood, a professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art, had worked for the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens but was too old to enlist at the outbreak of war. He had begun voluntary work in London’s hospitals and in 1917 found himself profoundly affected by the extent of the physical damage confronting him. Wood was further disturbed by the frightening suicide rate among returning soldiers and by the distress of families unable to come to terms with the shell-shattered appearances of their menfolk. Mirrors were forbidden in the wards but occasionally a visitor smuggled one in, anxious to please a relation consumed with curiosity about his own appearance. Stories went around that people had fainted with shock at the face in the mirror that looked back at them. Wood set up a department in the Third London General Hospital in Wandsworth devoted to covering up facial disfigurement. Patients and their families called the department the Tin Noses Shop.

With the combined help of pre-injury photographs and artistic guesswork, Coleman Ladd in Paris and Derwent Wood in London spent hours in discreet workshops putting together complete facial masks made of galvanised copper which would hide the effects of damage. Concealment, it seemed, rather than repair was the only option for those who no longer had noses, eyes, jawbones, cheekbones, chins, ears or much of a face at all.

Requirements varied. Some simply needed a screen for a missing eye; others wanted something that gave greater covering, extending from the chin upwards across the entire face. Sometimes a patient would produce a photograph that he hoped might be an improvement on his pre-war appearance. Rupert Brooke’s image was sometimes chosen as an alternative. At Rugby, the public school attended by Brooke, there were plans to commission a portrait of their most famous old boy based on an already famous photograph by Sherrill Schell, taken in 1913. The unblemished face bore no resemblance to the broken men who had come back alive from the front but it represented something to aspire to.