Stereo card view of wounded Belgian soldiers in an Antwerp hospital attended by a Red Cross nurse. The nurse attends to a severely wounded soldier whose head, face, and hands are swathed in bandages.
V18817—The Horror of War: Ghastly Glimpse of Belgian Wounded, Antwerp Hospital.
"This afternoon the Grand Duchess Marie opened an exhibition at the corner of the Champ-d-Mars and the Moika, of prothetic appliances for facial injuries. She asked me to meet her there.. . . The wan light which came through the windows made this melancholy exhibition seem still more depressing. In every showcase photographs, plaster masks and wax figures alternated with appliances for demonstrating their working and uses. All these torn and battered faces, with bones fractured or missing and in some cases deprived of all resemblance to the human countenance, made a loathsome picture for which no word can be found in any tongue."
Excerpts from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Friday, October 27, 1916. The Grand Duchess later pulls the Ambassador aside to discuss her concerns for the war, her country, and its weak-willed ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, whom she sees as no match for his wife, Empress Alexandra.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, pp. 71–72, publisher: George H. Doran Company
1916-10-27, 1916, October, prosthetics, wound, wounds, wounded soldier
