Chapter 3 examines the Permanent Inter-Allied Committee for the War Disabled (PIC), which, from 1917 to 1922, hosted annual conferences, created an institute on the Rue du Bac in Paris for the study and cataloguing of pertinent information, and published the Inter-Allied Review to circulate the results of their efforts. PIC members and affiliates – many of whom were prolific contributors to the Allied culture of rehabilitation – shared a common vocabulary for, and framing of, the work of rehabilitation. They also, by and large, shared an understanding of their role within it, in terms that preserved the social hierarchy through preservation of their masculinity vis-à-vis the working-class soldier. The cooperative space created by the PIC, where government and military officials, social reformers, and medical practitioners came together, encouraged the reimagination of belonging, but whether the soldier and his sacrifice belonged to the nation, the Allies, or to humanity – and therefore whether nations ought to maintain exclusive responsibility for the disabled soldier – was never fully resolved.

Chapter 5 highlights the role of disabled veterans in establishing rehabilitation rights at both the national and international levels. It examines, particularly, the involvement of ex-servicemen in the work of the Disablement Branch of the International Labour Organization. Moreover, it answers the question posed by government, military and medical authorities, reformers, and the public-at-large about what was to become of the rehabilitation programmes and technological advances that the war had wrought. The Allied culture of rehabilitation provided the framework for disabled civilian workers and their advocates to lobby for an extension of rehabilitation rights to the industrially disabled, yet, in the end, the expansion of soldiers’ rehabilitation programmes to the civilian body remained largely elusive until the Second World War. Attempts to capitalise on the popular zeal for rehabilitation collapsed as gendered comparisons between soldiers and labourers fell short of their aims, patriotism and wartime collectivist sentiment lost their coercive force, and the political climate turned, bringing the reform era that had launched rehabilitation to a close.