Faces of Battle: Unseen photography and footage of Britain’s faceless war wounded is displayed alongside contemporary uniform sculptures tracing their surgery, rehabilitation and recovery, at a groundbreaking new exhibition at the National Army Museum.

Faces of Battle charts the stories of the men whose faces were blown away in battle in the First World War, and the pioneering medics who fought to enable them to face life again. The conflict saw injuries inflicted on a scale and intensity unseen before. Trenches dug to protect the bodies of soldiers from powerful new weapons could not protect their heads – exposed to sniper fire over the parapets, or to the shrapnel and artillery hailing down on them from across No Mans Land.

Surgeon Harold Gillies, posted to France in 1915, quickly realised that the number and severity of facial casualties would be vast, and successfully argued for the establishment of a special ward - ultimately, a specialist hospital - for the treatment of the facially wounded. At the start of the Battle of the Somme, he prepared his team for 200 casualties. Two thousand arrived.

Gillies’ work was revolutionary, and yet is little remembered. Most field surgeons, faced with blasted faces, simply stitched together the edges of wounds to stop infection. As wounds healed and scar tissue contracted, the skin of men’s faces would become twisted and not only disfiguring, but disabling.

Men returned from the horrors of the front terrified to face their loved ones. Gillies’ technique used bones and cartilage to reconstruct faces, and pioneered the extraordinary ‘tubed pedical’ method of skin grafting, in the days before skin grafts were possible. Multiple surgeries were required and the patients were kept in hospital for years at a time.

Co-curator Samantha Doty said “The impact of Gillies’ work cannot be underestimated. Contemporary society glorified its war dead but recoiled from its war wounded. Yet for seven years after the Armistice was signed, Gillies rebuilt not only faces, but self-esteem damaged by the war. The trauma suffered by his patients was matched only by the courage they showed. But this exhibition is about remembering, not Remembrance. Some died. But most lived.”

The exhibition represents the combined activity of a diverse working partnership. Artist and co-curator Paddy Hartley first came into contact with Dr Bamji and the Gillies Archive four years ago through his research into the origins of facial reconstruction. Moved to bring the stories of Gillies’ patients to a wider public, with the aid of a major Wellcome Trust grant Hartley formed ‘Project Façade’ and began to work in response to the patient records at the archive. By tracing and collaborating with the families of Gillies’ patients, Hartley has created a series of uniform sculptures that convey personal histories interpreting the extraordinary surgery the patients endured. Samantha Doty, Head of Education at the National Army Museum, has worked with Hartley’s Project Façade team to present his sculpture alongside original Gillies Archive documents, for the first time, in the exhibition Faces of Battle.

www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/faces