The Faces of War | The Men with Broken Faces

TO: The TLS
FROM: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities (RALPH)
RE: Facial Trauma
Your excellent review of The Men with Broken Faces (Cultural Studies, July 22) did miss an earlier study of WWI facial trauma, one that appeared in 2009 from Auckland University Press. It was called The Face of War and came with some powerful black-and-white photographs. We here at RALPH reviewed it earlier that year.
The author, Sandy Callister, noted that these pictures of mutilated faces had a secret military use, "confined to institutional files ... outside the collective memory."
They were "hidden in a medical archive of WWI records at Queen Mary's Hospital in New Zealand." Callister suggests that these photographs had "more power because of their unfamiliarity; they do not easily slot into any of the existing mental pictures we have of the Great War."
Our review of this title can be found at