Tens of thousands of badly wounded Australian veterans stoically participated in the earliest Anzac Day parades after the end of the first world war.

Look at the old photographs and you’ll see many of the 155,000 service men who were wounded on the various fronts, being pushed in wheelchairs by fellow veterans, or hobbling along with the aid of prosthetic limbs, crutches and walking sticks. There are the many blind men too, tap-tap-tapping their way along the main streets of the towns and cities with their white canes, clinging to the elbows of comrades.

Study those sepia images carefully today and you might see them off to the side – ghostly figures with faces shadowed under broad-rimmed hats or even more self-consciously concealed with scarfs. They were the old soldiers who were so horribly facially disfigured that even they referred to themselves as the “broken gargoyles”.

English army medical officer making a mould for a soldier's facial injury. Photograph: Public Domain/Australian War Memorial Photograph: Public Domain/Australian War Memorial

Many of the limbless ex-servicemen could disguise their disabilities. For the facially disfigured, however, the return to civilian life could be far more conspicuous and unforgiving.

The amputees, the blind, and even those with “shell shock”, formed the public, stoic face of Australia’s Great War “sacrifice”.

But despite numbering as many as 37,000, so confronting – even frightening – were the facially disfigured, that many became socially marginalised on repatriation. While a few wore special custom-made masks to conceal their missing noses, ears, mouths and jaws, others simply withdrew from normal civilian life by abandoning parents, wives and children – upon whom they were often dependant for tube or spoon feeding – for the bush, where they were less conspicuous.



Many others killed themselves or died in suspicious accidents.

William Kearsley: In October 1917, shrapnel struck Kearsey in the face, severely gashing his face. Photograph: Public Domain/Australian War Memorial Photograph: Public Domain/Australian War Memorial

A century after the war began a young Australian academic has been moved to tell the stories of these shunned servicemen from Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Kerry Neale, an archivist at the Australian War Memorial and a PhD candidate at the University of NSW, has spent six years tracing the plight of thousands of soldiers – with particular emphasis on the Australians – who received revolutionary facial reconstruction treatment at what was then known as the Queen’s hospital in Sidcup, Kent, England.

Using repatriation files and Australian and English medical records, so intimate has she become with her research subjects that she now refers to them with the deepest affection as “my boys”.

“Although they are strapping men, some of whom went on to live fantastic lives, when I consider their stories and look at their photographs, they become my boys,” she says.

Their stories are invariably deeply moving, often tragic. The photographs of the men – with lower jaws, noses, mouths and eyes missing – are very confronting and disturbing. You look and immediately wonder: how did they manage to live?

Queen’s Hospital football team for wounded soldiers. Photograph: Public Domain/Australian War Memorial Photograph: Public Domain/Australian War Memorial

Neale points out that while the weapons of modern warfare – cannon and mortar shells, and the machine gun – increased the prevalence of such terrible wounds, rapid advances in battlefield medicine and facial reconstruction surgery meant that men with such terrible injuries to the face and neck were often saved.

“Obviously, I had that initial gut reaction to the photographs – that physical response that a lot of people do when they see the photos – and I thought the only way that I’d be able to overcome that is through understanding. Understanding the medical technique, the innovation that was going on at the time, and then what their lives were like afterwards,” says Neale, who is speaking about her research in Canberra on Monday night.

“That was the only way I was going to be able to come to terms with what I hadn’t even realised was such a high proportion of facial wounds among the casualties that were coming back. I’d never even thought of it. It was the amputee, the shell-shock victim – that is the first world war wounded.”

About 12% of Australian casualties were men wounded in the head or neck. They are men like William Kearsey, a 25-year-old infantryman from Inverell, New South Wales, who wanted to serve so badly that he had corrective surgery on his eyes before the enlistment officer would accept him into the 33rd Battalion.

In October 1917, shrapnel struck Kearsey in the face while he was serving on the European western front, severely gashing his face from the forehead, across the bridge of his nose and through his cheek.

Saved at a battlefront clearing station, he was then evacuated to the Queen’s hospital where he – along with 5,000 other soldiers of the empire – underwent revolutionary facial reconstruction surgery under the expert guidance of the highly skilled New Zealand surgeon Harold Gillies. And then he was shipped home to Inverell.

Although Kearsey’s reconstructive surgery was a comparative success, he initially withdrew when he returned home. He broke up with the woman to whom he had been engaged before the war, and worked as a farm labourer.

“Of course we don’t know for certain what happened. But it is fair to assume – maybe she was worried that he would never be able to find work and wouldn’t be able to provide. Obviously that’s a real concern going into a marriage,” Neale says of Kearsey’s broken relationship.

“Your personality, your identity all shines through your face. And for these men, they had to learn how to talk again, how to breathe again, how to engage with their loved ones – you know, you can’t just smile at someone and have them understand, now that you no longer have a mouth to smile with.

“You read stories of alcoholism, of becoming estranged from families and of them abandoning wives and of being unemployed, just an ongoing trial and error with trying to find work … I mean these men would refer to themselves as broken gargoyles. They knew that they no longer looked like the men who had gone off to war. They were different. And they would be constantly reminded, while they were at the Sidcup hospital, of how people, once they returned home, would react. You had nurses who were worried about taking off bandages because they knew there was going to be no face under there. So they knew how people responded to the types of disfigurement that they were carrying. Obviously, on the flip side, you have wives who were not able to adjust to the changed appearance.”

Gillies referred to his patients at Sidcup as “my boys’ and “my brave lot”. The patients supported one another as a strong community grew around the institution and its legion of disfigured men.

The men wrote musical scores about their plight. They also staged dramatic performances that hinged on questions of the existential, of identity, and often included elaborate costumes and masks. The hospital also raised its own football team to compete against non-hospital teams.

“They had a football team. And they used to say that they were always guaranteed of a win because whichever team came up against them they’d take one look at the patients and run in the opposite direction,” Neale said.

After everything was done for an injured veteran surgically, the more badly disfigured would be offered prosthetic facial features and masks, which were custom-made at the so-called “Tin noses shop” at the Third London general hospital in Wandsworth.

Unlike the limbless veterans, who were assisted by special support groups on repatriation, the facially disfigured were largely left to find their own way. Their plight was rarely mentioned in the newspapers or specifically taken up by the Returned and Services League.

But somehow some men like William Kearsey endured and even flourished.

“The men who did best realised that this injury would affect the rest of their lives. But it didn’t have to define it,” Neale says.

William Kearsey became a professional wool-classer and, after a period of isolation, became heavily involved in his local community and the affairs of the RSL. He chose to live on, where others in his situation permanently retreated from the world.

Like the disfigured veteran from Caulfield in Melbourne, who returned to his wife’s boarding house where he drank heavily while, in his own words, “suffering from nerves”. With his terrible appearance and drinking, he frightened the boarders and his wife expressed fears for her own life to the authorities. Eventually, and inevitably perhaps, he suicided with poison. Afterwards, in order to attain a pension, his widow struggled to convince the authorities that her husband’s suicide was war-related.

Another facially disfigured veteran from nearby Richmond went to his local bowling club on Anzac Day, 1954. That day he drank – as he often did, according to his wife – “because his face used to get him down”. He drowned in the nearby river. His wife explained that he would have “drown [sic] easily because he hardly had any swallow poor fellow” (his mouth having been so distorted and reduced in size).

Kerry Neale understands why some people might be “turned off” by looking at the photos of these men.

“But that is the whole point of my research. These men weren’t looked at, they were ignored, 100 years ago. Isn’t it time that we afforded them the respect they are due by just looking at them?”

Some of the photographs are, however, easier to contemplate. Like William Kearsey’s wedding picture from 1951 when, at 59, he married Verdun Frances Mary, a young woman born in 1917 – the year he was so badly injured on the western front. Later, the Kearseys adopted a son and William lived contentedly well into his seventies.

“I’ve had a few photos sent through from family members of the men once they got into their old age,” says Neale. “And all of a sudden their disfigurement changes. They just become old. The lines and everything soften and you just get these men whose faces are worn – just well worn rather than disfigured. It’s really a very beautiful thing.”