The Great War: Trench wounds
Among the many new horrors of trench warfare, head and face injuries were some of the most dreadful.
On July 17, 1918, on the Western Front, a shell exploded close enough to Herbert Foxton to send ragged pieces of metal tearing through his face. The 25th Battalion’s 27-year-old captain, a watchmaker before the war, was blinded and left unable to speak, with just a gaping hole where part of his face had been.
Among the many new horrors of trench warfare, head and face injuries were some of the most dreadful. While deep trenches protected bodies, the temptation, or need, to peer over the parapet resulted in a disproportionate number of wounds to the head.
Another surprise, and every bit as horrific, was the discovery that some of the most grotesque facial injuries could be survived. Men like Foxton, who was initially expected to die, lived on with noses, jaws, eyes, ears and sometimes their whole faces removed by machine-gun fire, shrapnel and shell fragments.
Plastic surgery was in its infancy, but like so many young men, it grew up quickly in the war years. Facio-maxillary reconstruction surgery was in the hands of gifted surgeons such as New Zealander Harold Gillies, who persuaded the British army to found a hospital for facially mutilated survivors. It received 2000 patients in the days following the start of the Battle of the Somme.
In a time before antibiotics, the surgery itself was dangerous, but victims were prepared to endure multiple procedures to reclaim something of their previous identity. Over three years, Foxton underwent 25 operations on his disfigured face, which was gradually returned to something approaching human form.
He was returned to Australia in 1925, and that same year married his pre-war sweetheart, Ruth Love. They went on to raise a large family; here they are with their 12 grandchildren at Christmas in 1964.
Foxton was one of the lucky ones, then, although that does, perhaps, stretch the definition of luck.
His watchmaking career was, of course, over; indeed there were few opportunities of any kind for a middle-aged blind veteran. Apart from his brief employment in an engineering factory during WWII, Foxton never found work again before his death, aged 94, in 1984.
