Read The Great Silence Online

Authors: Juliet Nicolson

The Great Silence (51 page)

 

Plaster casts at the Paris studio of sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd were taken from injured faces. The ‘restored’ face masks were painted to match skin tone to give a convincing reality to the mask. Most recipients were eventually buried in the masks, wary of revealing their injuries to the world, even in death

 

 

Above left:
Chinese workers were brought in to clear up the devastated battlefields of France in preparation for visits from those anxious to see where their loved ones had fallen

 

 

Above right:
Full or partial prosthetics made of galvanised tin were used to cover up some of the more horrific facial scarring of trench warfare

 

 

Left:
Harold Gillies, leading plastic surgeon at the Queen’s Hospital at Sidcup, Kent, made detailed drawings of facially damaged men before operating on their injuries

 

 

Soldiers at Roehampton Hospital in London, centre for prosthetic limbs. Over 41,000 men lost at least one limb during the war. Government compensation for loss of a full limb was worth sixteen shillings a week. Allowances stopped at anything above the neckline

 

Disabled and unemployed veterans selling bootlaces and matches were a common sight in city streets after the First World War

 

 

 

The ‘thousand-yard stare’ into vacancy was a familiar sight in victims of shell shock

 

London buses were sprayed against infection during the great flu epidemic of 1918–19, which turned its victims’ skin the colour of polished amethyst. Fifty million people worldwide are estimated to have died of the virus, three times as many as were killed in the First World War

 

 

 

Junior diplomat Harold Nicolson (second left, front), in one of the sessions at the Paris Peace Conference in the summer of 1919, which he described in every detail to Marcel Proust, being careful not to forget the macaroons

 

Queen Mary, Queen Alexandra and King George V walking across the Buckingham Palace courtyard on 19 July 1919. They were on the way to watch the London Peace Parade that celebrated the signing of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the Great War

 

 

 

Left:
In 1919 a cunningly concealed bath chair and a hovering helper allowed the newly wed Lady Diana Cooper to attend the grandest winter balls despite a badly broken leg

 

Below left:
Picasso and his wife Olga spent the summer of 1919 in London where he was painting the vast backdrops for Serge Diaghilev’s production of the new ballet
The Three-Cornered Hat

 

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