Sculptors and artists designed lifelike masks for gravely wounded soldiers.
(Anna Coleman Ladd papers, Archives of American Art, S.I.)
Life in the trenches, wrote the British poet Siegfried Sassoon, "is audacious
and invincible—until it is whirled away in enigmatic helplessness and ruin."
Enemies popped up from the earth to shoot at each other, producing a bumper crop
of head wounds.
Sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd (above right) perfected mask-making in her Paris
studio. "We give the soldiers a warm welcome," Ladd wrote.
With an unidentified assistant, Ladd fits a French soldier with a paper-thin
metal mask, secured by ear-pieces from spectacles and plated from a plaster mold
of the man's face. Ladd made a point of befriending "those brave faceless ones."
(Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs)
Sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd adapted Francis Derwent Wood's methods at her Studio
for Portrait Masks in Paris.
Portraits in Ladd's Paris workrooms documented the progress of patients who were
the beneficiaries of new noses, jaws and eyes.
Masks were painted on their wearers to precisely match skin color.
Some masks bristled with lifelike mustaches.
Soldiers gained confidence to reenter society. "Thanks to you," one wrote to
Ladd, "I will have a home....The woman I love...will be my wife."
Some soldiers came to a 1918 Christmas party in Ladd's Paris studio swaddled in
bandages while others wore new faces. Festooned with flags, trophies and
flowers, the place was designed to be cheerful. Mirrors were banned from some
treatment centers to save patients from seeing their mangled faces. By the end
of 1919, some 185 men would be wearing new Ladd Studio faces.
Amid the horrors of World War I, a corps of artists brought hope to soldiers disfigured in the trenches
By Caroline Alexander, Smithsonian Magazine, February 2007
Wounded
tommies facetiously called it "The Tin Noses Shop." Located within the 3rd
London General Hospital, its proper name was the "Masks for Facial Disfigurement
Department"; either way, it represented one of the many acts of desperate
improvisation borne of the Great War, which had overwhelmed all conventional
strategies for dealing with trauma to body, mind and soul. On every
front—political, economic, technological, social, spiritual—World War I was
changing Europe forever, while claiming the lives of 8 million of her fighting
men and wounding 21 million more.
The large-caliber guns of artillery
warfare with their power to atomize bodies into unrecoverable fragments and the
mangling, deadly fallout of shrapnel had made clear, at the war's outset, that
mankind's military technology wildly outpaced its medical: "Every fracture in
this war is a huge open wound," one American doctor reported, "with a not merely
broken but shattered bone at the bottom of it." The very nature of trench
warfare, moreover, proved diabolically conducive to facial injuries:
"[T]he...soldiers failed to understand the menace of the machine gun," recalled
Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France. "They seemed to think
they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the
hail of bullets."
Writing in the 1950s, Sir Harold Gillies, a pioneer in
the art of facial reconstruction and modern plastic surgery, recalled his war
service: "Unlike the student of today, who is weaned on small scar excisions and
graduates to harelips, we were suddenly asked to produce half a face." A New
Zealander by birth, Gillies was 32 and working as a surgeon in London when the
war began, but he left shortly afterward to serve in field ambulances in Belgium
and France. In Paris, the opportunity to observe a celebrated facial surgeon at
work, together with the field experience that had revealed the shocking physical
toll of this new war, led to his determination to specialize in facial
reconstruction. Plastic surgery, which aims to restore both function and form to
deformities, was, at the war's outset, crudely practiced, with little real
attention given to aesthetics. Gillies, working with artists who created
likenesses and sculptures of what the men had looked like before their injuries,
strove to restore, as much as possible, a mutilated man's original face.
Kathleen Scott, a noted sculptress and the widow of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott of
Antarctica fame, volunteered to help Gillies, declaring with characteristic
aplomb that the "men without noses are very beautiful, like antique marbles."
While pioneering work in skin grafting had been done in Germany and the
Soviet Union, it was Gillies who refined and then mass-produced critical
techniques, many of which are still important to modern plastic surgery: on a
single day in early July 1916, following the first engagement of the Battle of
the Somme—a day for which the London Times casualty list covered not columns,
but pages—Gillies and his colleagues were sent some 2,000 patients. The
clinically honest before-and-after photographs published by Gillies shortly
after the war in his landmark Plastic Surgery of the Face reveal how
remarkably—at times almost unimaginably—successful he and his team could be; but
the gallery of seamed and shattered faces, with their brave patchwork of missing
parts, also demonstrates the surgeons' limitations. It was for those
soldiers—too disfigured to qualify for before-and-after documentation—that the
Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department had been established.
"My work
begins where the work of the surgeon is completed," said Francis Derwent Wood,
the program's founder. Born in England's Lake District in 1871, of an American
father and British mother, Wood had been educated in Switzerland and Germany, as
well as England. Following his family's return to England, he trained at various
art institutes, cultivating a talent for sculpture he had exhibited as a youth.
Too old for active duty when war broke out, he had enlisted, at age 44, as a
private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Upon being assigned as an orderly to
the 3rd London General Hospital, he at first performed the usual
"errand-boy-housewife" chores. Eventually, however, he took upon himself the
task of devising sophisticated splints for patients, and the realization that
his abilities as an artist could be medically useful inspired him to construct
masks for the irreparably facially disfigured. His new metallic masks,
lightweight and more permanent than the rubber prosthetics previously issued,
were custom designed to bear the prewar portrait of each wearer. Within the
surgical and convalescent wards, it was grimly accepted that facial
disfigurement was the most traumatic of the multitude of horrific damages the
war inflicted. "Always look a man straight in the face," one resolute nun told
her nurses. "Remember he's watching your face to see how you're going to
react."
Wood established his mask-making unit in March 1916, and by June
1917, his work had warranted an article in The Lancet, the British medical
journal. "I endeavour by means of the skill I happen to possess as a sculptor to
make a man's face as near as possible to what it looked like before he was
wounded," Wood wrote. "My cases are generally extreme cases that plastic surgery
has, perforce, had to abandon; but, as in plastic surgery, the psychological
effect is the same. The patient acquires his old self-respect, self assurance,
self-reliance,...takes once more to a pride in his personal appearance. His
presence is no longer a source of melancholy to himself nor of sadness to his
relatives and friends."
Toward the end of 1917, Wood's work was brought
to the attention of a Boston-based American sculptor, inevitably described in
articles about her as a "socialite." Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Anna
Coleman Watts had been educated in Paris and Rome, where she began her
sculptural studies. In 1905, at the age of 26, she had married Maynard Ladd, a
physician in Boston, and it was here that she continued her work. Her sculptural
subjects were mostly decorative fountains—nymphs abounding, sprites dancing—as
well as portrait busts that, by today's tastes, appear characterless and bland:
vaguely generic portraits of vaguely generic faces. The possibility of
furthering the work by making masks for wounded soldiers in France might not
have been broached to Ladd but for the fact that her husband had been appointed
to direct the Children's Bureau of the American Red Cross in Toul and serve as
its medical adviser in the dangerous French advance zones.
In late 1917,
after consultation with Wood, now promoted to captain, Ladd opened the Studio
for Portrait Masks in Paris, administered by the American Red Cross. "Mrs. Ladd
is a little hard to handle as is so often the case with people of great talent,"
one colleague tactfully cautioned, but she seems to have run the studio with
efficiency and verve. Situated in the city's Latin Quarter, it was described by
an American visitor as "a large bright studio" on upper floors, reached by way
of an "attractive courtyard overgrown with ivy and peopled with statues." Ladd
and her four assistants had made a determined effort to create a cheery,
welcoming space for her patients; the rooms were filled with flowers, the walls
hung with "posters, French and American flags" and rows of plaster casts of
masks in progress.
The journey that led a soldier from the field or
trench to Wood's department, or Ladd's studio, was lengthy, disjointed and full
of dread. For some, it began with a crash: "It sounded to me like some one had
dropped a glass bottle into a porcelain bathtub," an American soldier recalled
of the day in June 1918 on which a German bullet smashed into his skull in the
Bois de Belleau. "A barrel of whitewash tipped over and it seemed that
everything in the world turned white."
Stage by stage, from the mud of
the trenches or field to first-aid station; to overstrained field hospital; to
evacuation, whether to Paris, or, by way of a lurching passage across the
Channel, to England, the wounded men were carried, jolted, shuffled and left
unattended in long drafty corridors before coming to rest under the care of
surgeons. Multiple operations inevitably followed. "He lay with his profile to
me," wrote Enid Bagnold, a volunteer nurse (and later the author of National
Velvet), of a badly wounded patient. "Only he has no profile, as we know a
man's. Like an ape, he has only his bumpy forehead and his protruding lips—the
nose, the left eye, gone."
Those patients who could be successfully
treated were, after lengthy convalescence, sent on their way; the less fortunate
remained in hospitals and convalescent units nursing the broken faces with which
they were unprepared to confront the world—or with which the world was
unprepared to confront them. In Sidcup, England, the town that was home to
Gillies' special facial hospital, some park benches were painted blue; a code
that warned townspeople that any man sitting on one would be distressful to
view. A more upsetting encounter, however, was often between the disfigured man
and his own image. Mirrors were banned in most wards, and men who somehow
managed an illicit peek had been known to collapse in shock. "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," wrote Dr. Albee. "...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."
The pains
taken by both Wood and Ladd to produce masks that bore the closest possible
resemblance to the prewar soldier's uninjured face were enormous. In Ladd's
studio, which was credited with better artistic results, a single mask required
a month of close attention. Once the patient was wholly healed from both the
original injury and the restorative operations, plaster casts were taken of his
face, in itself a suffocating ordeal, from which clay or plasticine squeezes
were made. "The squeeze, as it stands, is a literal portrait of the patient,
with his eyeless socket, his cheek partly gone, the bridge of the nose missing,
and also with his good eye and a portion of his good cheek," wrote Ward Muir, a
British journalist who had worked as an orderly with Wood. "The shut eye must be
opened, so that the other eye, the eye-to-be, can be matched to it. With
dexterous strokes the sculptor opens the eye. The squeeze, hitherto representing
a face asleep, seems to awaken. The eye looks forth at the world with
intelligence."
This plasticine likeness was the basis of all subsequent
portraits. The mask itself would be fashioned of galvanized copper one
thirty-second of an inch thick—or as a lady visitor to Ladd's studio remarked,
"the thinness of a visiting card." Depending upon whether it covered the entire
face, or as was often the case, only the upper or lower half, the mask weighed
between four and nine ounces and was generally held on by spectacles. The
greatest artistic challenge lay in painting the metallic surface the color of
skin. After experiments with oil paint, which chipped, Ladd began using a hard
enamel that was washable and had a dull, flesh-like finish. She painted the mask
while the man himself was wearing it, so as to match as closely as possible his
own coloring. "Skin hues, which look bright on a dull day, show pallid and gray
in bright sunshine, and somehow an average has to be struck," wrote Grace
Harper, the Chief of the Bureau for the Reeducation of Mutilés, as the
disfigured French soldiers were called. The artist has to pitch her tone for
both bright and cloudy weather, and has to imitate the bluish tinge of shaven
cheeks." Details such as eyebrows, eyelashes and mustaches were made from real
hair, or, in Wood's studio, from slivered tinfoil, in the manner of ancient
Greek statues.
Today, the only images of these men in their masks come
from black-and-white photographs which, with their forgiving lack of color and
movement, make it impossible to judge the masks's true effect. Static, set for
all time in a single expression modeled on what was often a single prewar
photograph, the masks were at once lifelike and lifeless: Gillies reports how
the children of one mask-wearing veteran fled in terror at the sight of their
father's expressionless face. Nor were the masks able to restore lost functions
of the face, such as the ability to chew or swallow. The voices of the
disfigured men who wore the masks are for the most part known only from meager
correspondence with Ladd, but as she herself recorded, "The letters of gratitude
from the soldiers and their families hurt, they are so grateful." "Thanks to
you, I will have a home," one soldier had written her. "...The woman I love no
longer finds me repulsive, as she had a right to do."
By the end of 1919,
Ladd's studio had produced 185 masks; the number produced by Wood is not known,
but was presumably greater, given that his department was open longer and his
masks were produced more quickly. These admirable figures pale only when held
against the war's estimated 20,000 facial casualties.
By 1920, the Paris
studio had begun to falter; Wood's department had been disbanded in 1919. Almost
no record of the men who wore the masks survives, but even within Ladd's
one-year tenure it was clear that a mask had a life of only a few years. "He had
worn his mask constantly and was still wearing it in spite of the fact that it
was very battered and looked awful," Ladd had written of one of her studio's
early patients.
In France, the Union des Blessés de la Face (the Union of
the Facially Wounded) acquired residences to accommodate disfigured men and
their families, and in later years absorbed the casualties of subsequent wars.
The fate of similarly wounded Russians and Germans is more obscure, although in
postwar Germany, artists used paintings and photographs of the facially
mutilated with devastating effect in antiwar statements. America saw
dramatically fewer casualties: Ladd reckoned that there were "between two and
three hundred men in the American army who require masks"—a tenth the number
required in France. In England, sentimental schemes were discussed for the
appropriation of picturesque villages, where "maimed and shattered" officers, if
not enlisted men, could live in rose-covered cottages, amid orchards and fields,
earning their living selling fruit and weaving textiles by way of
rehabilitation; but even these inadequate plans came to naught, and the men
simply trickled away, out of sight. Few, if any, masks survive. "Surely they
were buried with their owners," suggested Wood's biographer, Sarah
Crellin.
The treatment of catastrophic casualties during World War I led
to enormous advances in most branches of medicine—advances that would be used to
advantage, mere decades later, treating the catastrophic casualties of World War
II. Today, despite the steady and spectacular advance of medical techniques,
even sophisticated modern reconstructive surgery can still not adequately treat
the kinds of injuries that condemned men of the Great War to live behind their
masks
Anna Coleman Ladd left Paris after the armistice, in early 1919,
and was evidently sorely missed: "Your great work for the French mutilés is in
the hands of a little person who has the soul of a flea," a colleague wrote to
her from Paris. Back in America, Ladd was extensively interviewed about her war
work, and in 1932, she was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. She
continued to sculpt, producing bronzes that differed remarkably little in style
from her prewar pieces; her war memorials inevitably depict granite-jawed
warriors with perfect—one is tempted to say mask-like—features. She died at age
60 in Santa Barbara in 1939.
Francis Derwent Wood died in London in 1926
at age 55. His postwar work included a number of public monuments, including war
memorials, the most poignant of which, perhaps, is one dedicated to the Machine
Gun Corps in Hyde Park Corner, London. On a raised plinth, it depicts the young
David, naked, vulnerable, but victorious, who signifies that indispensable
figure of the war to end all wars—the machine-gunner. The monument's inscription
is double-edged, alluding to both the heroism of the individual gunner and the
preternatural capability of his weapon: "Saul hath slain his thousands, but
David his tens of thousands."
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