Total War: A War of Machines

1. Total War: A War of Machines The world has stood aghast at the . . . unexpected and well-nigh incredible increase in the size, range, and number of heavy guns, the undreamed-of expenditure of ammunition, and they way in which the war has become one of heavy artillery. . . you can form some faint picture of the nerve-racking bellow and thunder and roar of shell-burst in which the modern soldier has to live and fight. . . . The trench seems to have put its stamp on the whole of this war. Even the wounds inflicted in it are almost trench-like in their depth, their complexity, with traverses, saps, and branches reaching in every direction. . . Luckily humans are not like Humpty Dumpty— they can be “put together again,” without even calling in “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.” And the wonderful way in which the disabled and the crippled can be put together again, and made, not, of course, as good as new, but skilled, efficient, self-supporting workers, is one of the medical triumphs of the war. . . . Dr. Woods Hutchinson, The Doctor in War(1918)

3. New Weapons  Mechanized Warfare Machine Guns Artillery Naval Aviation Poison gas Barbed wire Tanks Trenches

4. New weapons have caused a new type of wounds . . . Artillery has leaped into new and dominating importance. These shells, all surgeons agree, produce terrible and wide-spread mutilations . . . Dr. William Keen, The Treatment of War Wounds (1918) Before After

5. A high explosive shell would dive into the mud and throw the mud with such tremendous velocity that it would actually cause the penetration of the skin; and through that hole a vast amount of mud would be forced, producing a very bad type of wound, and in some instances death. . . . Journal of American Medical Association(Nov. 1917)

6. Men without half their faces; men burned and maimed to the condition of animals. Day after day, the tragic, grotesque procession disembarked from the hospital ships and made its way towards us. Harold Gillies, ear, nose and throat surgeon, Red Cross

7. To talk to a lad who, six months ago, was probably a wholesome and pleasing specimen of English youth, and is now a gargoyle, and a broken gargoyle at that. . . is something of an ordeal. You know very well that he has examined himself in a mirror. That one eye of his has contemplated the mangled mess which is his face. . . . He has seen himself without a nose. Skilled skin-grafting has reconstructed a something which owns two small orifices that are his nostrils; but the something is emphatically not a nose. . . . Ward Muir, The Happy Hospital (1918)

8. My broken and septic teeth were extracted and my wound cleaned. The problem then was how to reunite the broken fragments of my lower jaw bone, which were still hanging loosely in my mouth. The solution adopted was to set the broken bones of the lower jaw and then cement it to the upper jaw, which thereby acted as a splint. . . As most of my lower jaw had gone, I was shown an album of photographs of handsome young men and asked to choose the chin I would like to have! John Glubb, Into Battle: A Soldier’s Diary of the Great War

9. Mirrors were prohibited in that ward, but to my dismay I found the corporal in possession of one the evening that his bandages were taken off. I pretended not to see it when he called me over and asked me to put the screens around his bed. The next morning he asked for pen and paper and wrote a letter to Molly. ‘You’re well enough to see her now,’ I said. ‘Why not let her come down?’ ‘She will never come now,’ he said quietly, and there was the finality of despair in his voice. . . Nurse Catherine Black