Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

11. Iconography of Injury: Encountering the Wounded Soldier’s Body in American Poster Art and Photography of World War I

JOHN M. KINDER Iconography of Injury: Encountering the Wounded Soldier’s Body in American Poster Art and Photography of World War I m orld War I produced injury on a previously unimaginable scale. Along the Western Front—the vast network of entrenchments and redoubts that snaked its way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Swiss border—the sight, smell, feel, and taste of opened bodies was ubiquitous. The dead hung on nets of barbed wire, rotted half-buried in shell craters. Some soldiers were obliterated entirely, atomized in the creeping artillery barrages that preceded infantry assaults. Others were violently dismembered, their limbs, skulls, fingers , even teeth transformed into deadly projectiles. The widespread introduction of new, increasingly efficient killing and maiming technologies resulted in the devastation of an entire generation of European youth. In fifty-two months of bloody fighting, the war would claim the lives of more than 9.5 million men. Twenty million more were severely wounded, while 8 million veterans returned to their homes permanently disabled because of injury and disease.1 Although American casualties paled in comparison to those of other nations, they were by no means insignificant. Over the course of U.S. involvement in World War I (April 6, 1917– November 11, 1918), more than fifty thousand “doughboys” died from combat-related injuries (a figure even more horrific ICONOGRAPHY OF INJURY 341 if we recall that U.S. forces only spent about two hundred days in the field). Tuberculosis, influenza, and other infectious diseases killed sixty thousand more, many of whom perished in training camps or on transport ships long before reaching European shores.2 For the survivors the physiological and psychological effects of the Great War would linger well beyond its end. Over 224,000 Americans were wounded in battle, the vast majority by shrapnel from German artillery.3 Moreover, nearly all of the 1.3 million Americans who saw action suffered some kind of injury, from routine maladies such as “trench foot” and muscle fatigue to more serious ailments resulting from gas attacks and relentless bombardment. By the end of 1919, 179,578 army servicemen had been officially discharged because of disease and nonbattle injuries, and over 930,000 servicemen applied for disability benefits within the first five years of the war’s end.4 Despite rapid advances in military medicine and transportation, more than two hundred thousand American veterans remained permanently disabled as of 1920.5 Countless others would suffer from undiagnosed psychological ailments for decades after returning home. An ocean away from the fighting, few American civilians encountered (were able to touch, smell, hear, see) their nation ’s war-wounded bodies in the flesh. Throughout World War I, many in the United States remained sheltered from the realities of wartime injury to an extent that would have been difficult, if not impossible, in the urban centers of Europe. Unlike their European counterparts, the bulk of America’s injured soldiers were not shipped home until after the Armistice was signed. Even then, many of America’s most severely wounded—despite spending months, sometimes years, in rehabilitation centers—were never fully reintegrated into civil society. Thousands were permanently cloistered in military 342 JOHN M. KINDER hospitals and government-run soldiers’ homes, hidden away from public eyes. As a result, both during World War I and afterward, Americans ’ encounters with wounded and disabled soldiers were largely mediated through cultural productions, especially poster art, magazine illustration, and photography. While the Committee on Public Information, the U.S. government’s propaganda arm during World War I, rigorously censored photos of America’s dead and dying throughout much of the conflict, there was no shortage of injury-themed visual culture.6 Indeed, in the absence of the soldiers themselves, images of woundedness disproportionately shaped Americans’ understanding of the social and political meanings of war-produced impairment. Besides recovering the contexts, contents, and conventions of the Great War’s iconography of injury, this essay examines how the wounded soldier’s body was constantly reimagined in American visual culture. As we shall see, propagandists, charity organizations , rehabilitation advocates, and antiwar activists all employed images of woundedness, although to very different ends. Collectively, they offered a diversity of interpretations of wartime injury and America’s obligations to its disabled veterans . With notable exceptions, however, they also managed to decontextualize soldiers’ injuries—to detach them from both the life struggles of...