The First planet War formally ended on November 11, 1918. But not for millions of soldiers who returned from the front physically and mentally mutilated. Their suffering has become a turning point in reasoning about veterans and about what obligations the state has towards them. How was the modern approach to war heroes born?
British soldiers on the front, 1917, photograph by IWM
When, at dawn on 11 November 1918, Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on behalf of the entent and president of the German delegation Matthias Erzberger, signed under the truce agreement, they were unaware that this day would be considered to be symbolic end of the 19th century. 1 of the top challenges of the era, which was just beginning, were millions of wounded, permanently mutilated and traumatized soldiers – people for whom leaving the trenches did not always mean returning home in glory. A modern approach to war veterans as heroes who deserve recognition, but besides concrete support, was born – virtually and figuratively – in pains, at the same time as a fresh planet order was established.
Care for Veterans
In 1919, Poland adopted a permanent wage bill for veterans of uprisings from years 1831 and 1863, thus she was among the pioneers of a modern approach to soldiers fighting in armed conflicts. Thus, they were entitled to a permanent salary, and six months later all surviving participants of national events were promoted to the first officer's degree. Though the number of soldiers who suffered as a consequence World War, and the scale of their mutilations were incomparable to the losses suffered by the insurgents, younger veterans had to wait longer for interest from the state. It was not until March 18, 1921 that the Sejm passed a bill on the supply of wartime invalids and their families. It included not only soldiers of the Polish Army, but besides those who served in the possessive armies – subject to Polish citizenship.
The regulations guaranteed veterans pensions, allowances, treatment and supply of orthopaedic apparatus. aid besides included children and widows of fallen soldiers. Veterans with disabilities could number on support in uncovering a occupation – for example, wheelchairs were created while serving as stalls, cooperatives employing disabilities were created. However, this does not mean that the life of veterans in the II Republic was easy. Many faced poorness and even homelessness. Severe mutilations and deformations made it hard for them to function in society. Nevertheless, Poland managed to avoid the situation in Germany, where a immense number of straumatized soldiers became the base for the emerging Nazi ideology.
While Poland began with concern for veterans of the 19th-century rallies, another European countries focused on developing solutions for soldiers of the large war, as was then the First planet War. The United Kingdom inactive set up the Ministry of Pensions in the course of its armed action, which took over tasks previously dispersed between the Ministry of War, the infirmary in Chelsea and the Central Office for Military Pensions. The fresh institution dealt with the payment of war pensions to naval and land troops and the provision of medical care to disabled people.
Rehabilitation of German War Disableds. A man with an amputated leg performs a advanced jump, photograph Ullstein Bild
In 1916, France established the National Office for Invalids and Fired from the Army of War Veterans, and 2 years later introduced an extended strategy of disability, widows and orphans pensions. Mutilated soldiers were given free medical care and provided with the essential equipment – carts, prostheses, orthopaedic apparatus. However, the French were not limited to material aid. They put large emphasis on highlighting the heroism of veterans and their peculiar place in society. They even introduced the position of a "fear nation" – children whose parents died or were injured in the war. The state guaranteed them education, care and a sense that the sacrifice of their loved ones was not for nothing.
A fresh face for a soldier
World War I brought unprecedented acceleration of the arms industry. Combat aircraft, modern artillery, first tanks, combat gases, device guns, fire-throwers – the fight on its fronts was no longer like the fight soldiers faced in erstwhile centuries. However, the improvement of technology has led to an expanding number of victims. It is estimated that 8.4 to 11.8 million soldiers died or died as a consequence of the wounds. Of the 20 million wounded, many would give anything to trade with the fallen. He was given the title of heroes, alive – mutilated, with heavy deformed faces and bodies covered with burn scars – they had to face social aversion.
People were accustomed to seeing disabled people with amputated limbs, but not those whose faces no longer resembled humans. Isolated, frequently abandoned by loved ones, they were depressed. Many of them chose suicide. Although medicine had made large advancement during the years of the war, it inactive focused on saving lives, not on aesthetics. 1 of the first to decide to change that was surgeon Harold Gillies, serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was fascinated by the possibilities of reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and learned methods of jaw reconstruction.
In 1916, the Queen Mary infirmary opened in Sidcup, UK, 1 of the world's first facilities specialising in facial reconstruction. Although innovative methods did not warrant success, desperate soldiers were willing to take risks. Already in the first days of the clinic's operation, over 2,000 veterans of the conflict of Somma reported. Gillies and his colleagues conducted over 11,000 reconstruction operations. Although the effects from today's position seem modest – the faces of patients inactive bore many scars – for soldiers it was a chance for a fresh life.
Hidden behind the mask
However, the advanced cost of treatments and insufficient number of surgeons specialising in specified operations made facial reconstruction beyond the scope of most veterans. With them in mind, Anna Coleman Ladd, an acclaimed artist and sculptor, opened her studio in Paris. The artist decided to make masks – facial prostheses. She made them from copper sheet, silver plated and then hand-painted, based on a previously made plaster cast. She supplemented them with natural eyebrows and hair. She made certain that soldiers could not only hide their deformed face but besides regain their dignity. The masks were frequently enriched with fashionable mustaches or glasses, giving them an individual character. In her projects, Ladd utilized photographs of her clients reporting to her, trying to recreate their features as accurately as possible before the war. In total, she made masks for 185 veterans of the large war. Although this number may seem small, to the artist any soldier who thanks to her work could return to society was a individual victory.
Although Ladd's works are best known today, she was not a pioneer in the creation of alleged prosthetic masks. She first came into contact with them, learning the work of Francis Derwent Wood – British, who had run a studio in London since 1915 known as a tin nose shop. He was the 1 who convinced Ladd that artists could have their part in restoring veterans' lost face. And dignity.
Trauma, not cowardice
The conflict of Verdun, which lasted nearly a year of the German and French Army clash in 1916, was not only 1 of the bloodiest, whose number of casualties inactive failed to be established. Historians estimation that each side may have lost over 300,000 soldiers and the another so many were injured or severely mutilated. The brutality of the fight, which utilized the conflict gases and flamethrowers, the bang of artillery, had yet another effect. “I came there with 175 people,” wrote the Frenchman whose unit was the victim of a German artillery attack at Verdun. "I left 34, any of which were half insane... and they did not answer even erstwhile I spoke to them." This phenomenon was not only for the French.
Medicalians on all fronts began to announcement a increasing number of soldiers with speech paralysis, strong confusion, failure of logical reasoning ability, or insomnia. Even those soldiers who did not have physical wounds reported specified symptoms. They have sometimes panicked and acted irrationally, frequently compromising their lives and their colleagues. The case was so serious that the British Army appointed Charles S. Myers, a doctor and psychologist, to be a scientist of the British Expeditionary Forces. During the war, he worked in a French hospital, where he encountered cases of "shell shock", as he described him. Myers put the hypothesis that the origin was suppressed by trauma, and pressed the War Ministry to push troops affected by this condition distant from fighting and creating conditions for treatment – but as close as possible to the front, so that they could rapidly return to service.
American soldiers – recovery while visiting the captured German submarine. London around 1919, photograph by Library of Congress
In Poland, although it should be said in Galicia, work with patients suffering from “war nerve” began in 1914 at the Jagiellonian University Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic. Its initiator was Prof. Jan Piltz, who gave the lecture "Standing and intellectual disorders perceived during the mobilisation and during the war". The scale of the problem was huge, and all week respective dozen, and sometimes even more than a hundred, went to the clinic. As Piltz himself estimated, throughout the war he treated "11,000 military nervously and mentally ill, in this 3,000 cases of illness following a tense shock caused by the threat of warstorm".
Piltz put large emphasis on the fact that there were virtually no examples of simulation among patients to avoid returning to the front. While in Germany there was inactive a "therapy" of starving patients and electroshocks, and in the UK there were cases of shooting patients for cowardice and attempted desertion, the empathic and attentive approach of Polish doctors was exceptional.
The end of the war did not mean the end of the problem – traumatized veterans had large difficulties returning to civilian life, uncovering themselves in the labour marketplace and in household life. This problem afraid all countries that participated in the large war. The United Kingdom was the first country to consider "artillery shock" as a consequence of as severe as physical injuries and to qualify veterans suffering from it for the pension and benefit system. The islands besides formed the first charity to focus on the support of veterans in their recovery to intellectual wellness – Combat Stress – founded in 1919. 1 of her first actions was to open recovery homes that offered therapy.
At a time erstwhile psychiatry was based on drastic methods specified as electroshocks, Combat Stress utilized occupational therapy and worked with psychologists. After more than 100 years of operation, the organization continues to aid veterans, emphasizing that although armed conflicts, intellectual traumas and injuries they face are inactive the same.
World War I changed not only the map of Europe, but besides the view of those who survived it. The scale of warfare was almost unimaginable erstwhile compared to erstwhile armed conflicts. 70 million soldiers fought, of which 10 million died and 20 million wounded. How many returned from the straumatized front and with symptoms of intellectual disorders? No 1 estimated that. Europe faced a challenge – what to do with a multitude of men, any of whom barely knew adult life outside the trench. Monuments and medals were no longer enough. Insistently and without fault, support systems were created: medical, financial and psychological, knowing that for soldiers the war does not end on the day of the peace treaty.
