6 - The War’s Returns: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939

Summary

The debate over whether World War I should be termed “total” is, in its essence, a scholarly dispute. It hinges on distinctions that only those at a safe remove from the terrible violence of the first half of the twentieth century can draw. For the Great War's victims, the question was not comparative. More than nine and a half million soldiers died during World War I; on average, the war claimed the lives of 5,600 men every day that it continued. Twenty million men were severely wounded; eight million veterans returned home permanently disabled. Casualties of Europe's bloodiest war, disabled soldiers had suffered the worst injuries ever seen. Shrapnel from exploding shells tore a ragged path through flesh and bone, leaving wounds, one British surgeon acknowledged, “from which the most hardened might well turn away in horror.” Under the threat of constant shell fire and ubiquitous death, some men lost their minds. Others contracted debilitating illnesses that shortened their lives. Years after their demobilization, disabled veterans still bore the sufferings war inflicted. Like bank clerk Erich Reese, they lived with injuries that robbed independence. Both hands amputated, blind in one eye, Reese found himself unable even to hold an umbrella.