ABSTRACT
Historians tend to play down the significance of the First World War as a chronological boundary. Those who lived through it saw it differently: ‘that happened before the war, during the war or after the war’, they said. No wonder. This was, after all, the ‘War of a Million [Imperial] Dead’. Tens of thousands had lost limbs. Casualty lists displayed in schools gave boys the impression that England was steadily ‘bleeding to death’. The sculptor Francis Derwent set up the Tin Noses Shop at Roehampton Hospital for servicemen with ruined faces. He modelled masks using the photographs taken for mothers, wives and sweethearts as his patterns. The ‘Hysterical Diseases of War’, as they were called, left men blind, deaf, mute, immobile. Restored to his happy childhood home in Cookham in December 1918, with his ‘dear little mummy’ and his music-teacher ‘Par’ playing Mozart on the piano, Stanley Spencer (born 1891) began to think that he had been killed and sent to heaven.
