At first, these World War I era photos look unextraordinary.
Medals.
Jackets with large buttons.
Some bandages.
But look at the glasses.
None of them are for vision.
They were for support.
Through this passageway and inside a studio, sculptors created the best possible way to
conceal some of the war’s most significant facial injuries.
World War I is known for machine guns, tanks, and lethal gas attacks, but artillery
dominated attacks on trenches.
When you think of artillery, imagine cannons - guns that fired large destructive shells.
This chart shows estimates of artillery rounds in battles from the American Civil War to
World War I.
At Gettysburg, 32,000 rounds were fired.
At Somme, in 1916: 4,000,000.
A staggering volume of shells dropped, creating deadly flying debris.
That barrage resulted in an estimated 20,000 facial injuries, a statistic that medicine
had to confront.
This book about plastic surgery was published after the war, but it shows groundbreaking
techniques for suturing and transplanting skin.
Techniques like cartilage insertion in the nose or grafts to the ear were pioneering
at the time.
But some cases went beyond the abilities of these plastic surgeons.
That’s where the sculptors came in.
Before she was in this American Red Cross studio in Paris, Anna Coleman Ladd was a sculptor
and writer in America.
Having heard of the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood’s pioneering work in London, in 1917
she took his techniques to the Red Cross in France, starting her own studio there.
They made casts of the injured faces, then sculpted attachments that restored the face.
These were then used to make a paper thin copper-plated attachment, which Ladd and others
then painted.
Eyebrows and mustaches were made from real hair or tiny pieces of tinfoil, with astonishing
results.
They were supported by tiny ties around the ears or, more often, glasses.
They made more than 150 of these masks.
After the war, Anna Coleman Ladd returned to America.
She sculpted many pieces similar to her pre-war work.
Perfect figures, oblivious to charts about artillery.
Figures who didn’t need glasses.
In 1923, she created a controversial World War I memorial for the American legion in
Manchester, Massachusetts.
It showed a skeleton trapped in barbed wire.
She once wrote about memorials, “when the masters of yesterday have passed, the masters
of tomorrow will express this new sense of the futility of war and the greater power
of the spirit.”
Her Memorial in Manchester actually had two images.
The skeleton was called night.
On the other side, she put dawn.