On the day after Christmas in 1920, a French mailman and veteran of World War I wrote an American woman named Anna Coleman Ladd to thank her for what she had done for him during the war, reports The Washington Post.
Ladd knew the veteran, Charles Victor, who had been wounded in the face by a hand grenade in 1915. She had two photos of him.
In one, he is sitting in a chair, wearing his uniform and military medals. He has large ears and a shock of dark hair, parted on the side. But the lower half of his face is mutilated. Most of his nose and lips are gone, and his mouth looks crooked and rearranged.
In the second photo, he is sitting in the same chair. But now he is wearing glasses and a jaunty mustache, and there is no sign of injury.
What Ladd had done for Victor was not plastic surgery.
She was a sculptor. And he was one of the scores of disfigured French and American soldiers for whom she had made exquisite metal masks to conceal their war injuries.
With the start this summer of the centennial of World War I (1914-18) and increased interest from researchers, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art has posted a cache of Ladd’s papers online.
The collection includes letters, scrapbooks, photos and notebooks from Ladd’s long career as a sculptor. And it includes files and photos from her short but fascinating work as director of the Red Cross mask-making studio in Paris.
“She was a neoclassical sculptor,” said David Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber professor of art at Wake Forest University.
“She was very interested in principles of ancient art, the sort of beautiful serene face,” he said. “And she gives these men . . . this almost unreal serenity.”
Millions of soldiers were wounded or killed in the Great War, and it created an especially grim subset of casualties.
These were the “mutilés de la face,” men who had suffered terrible facial injuries wrought by shrapnel, bullets and flamethrowers.
“World War I was the first war in which a man could get half his face blown off and survive,” Lubin said earlier this month. Doctors would say, “ ‘Okay, now we saved this guy’s life. But he looks like a monster. What are we going to do with him?’ ’’
British author Ward Muir, who worked as a wartime hospital orderly, wrote in 1918: “Hideous is the only word for these smashed faces.”
Plastic surgery could repair only some of the damage, and many men were permanently disfigured. Jaws destroyed, foreheads gone, noses, mouths and eyes missing.
“One man who came to us had been wounded 21 / 2 years before and had never been home,” according to a 1919 report from Ladd’s studio. “He did not want his mother to see how badly he looked.”
“Of all his face there was only one eye left, and after 50 operations . . . he came to us,” the report said. “People get used to seeing men with arms and legs missing, but they never get used to an abnormal face.”
An estimated 60,500 British soldiers had head or eye injuries, according to a 2011 article in the British journal Social History of Medicine. There were no doubt similar numbers of such French and German casualties from the war.
Such injuries often were linked to trench warfare, where the face could be the most exposed part of body.
Men “seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of machine gun bullets” the American orthopedic surgeon Frederick H. Albee wrote, according to the journal article by Suzannah Biernoff, a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.
Helmets provided some head cover, but nothing protected the face from flying chunks of exploding artillery shells.
Ambulance driver Evadne Price described one of the wounded as having a “wagging lump of raw flesh on a neck that was a face a short time ago,” according to an article Lubin wrote in the Archives of American Art Journal.
Wars still inflict such injuries. The face remains vulnerable, said Navy Capt. Gerald T. Grant, an expert at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
And facial prostheses, as they are now known, are still crafted for disfigured soldiers.
Today they are made of silicone and acrylic. They often are designed on a computer and in 3-D. And they are held in place with implants and magnets. “We’ve come quite a bit further,” Grant said.
Anna Coleman Ladd, the well-to-do daughter of Philadelphia socialites, had been educated in Europe and was a successful sculptor in Boston by the time the war began.
Her husband, a pediatrician, was already overseas in 1917 when she heard about the work of the British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood.
He had started making masks for disfigured British soldiers in a facility the soldiers called the “Tin Noses Shop.”
“My work begins where the work of the surgeon is completed,” Wood wrote in 1917 in the Lancet 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,” he wrote. “ The patient acquires his old self-respect . . . [and] his presence is no longer a source of melancholy.”
Ladd, 39, who had lived in France, wondered whether she might do the same for French soldiers.
Read more of this report from The Washington Post.