The Roosting Box

The nurses at the hospital, many of them war veterans, gave much of themselves in their efforts to ease pain and to transition the injured out of the wards. Treatments often involved the use of X-ray machines, skin grafts, and facial reconstruction. Occupational therapists assisted those with dire wounds, although little could be done for soldiers suffering from the phantom pain they experienced from lost limbs.

Lorne Mulloy, a famed South African War veteran who was blinded in that conflict, lectured the wounded veterans about this even more terrible war and urged self-reliance: “Happiness is obtainable only through work — is possible only for a man who successfully finds his way back to productive activity.” The message of overcoming injuries echoed forth across society, and den Hartog might have made more of a poster she describes — its caption reads: “Once a soldier, always a man” — and what it reveals about fears of diminished masculinity for the physically disabled.

While the wounds and their treatments make for illuminating reading, The Roosting Box is strongest when drawing out the stories of the many individual veterans as they struggled to embrace their new lives. Hugh Russell was nineteen when he enlisted in London, Ontario. He had a love of horses and agonized over seeing so many of them killed during the conflict, writing that the screaming animals were “worse than seeing men cut up. The men have an idea what it is all about but the horses have to take it as it comes and say nothing.”

Russell was later buried by an exploding shell and suffered shell shock. His recovery was slow, and, like many of the soldiers with mental wounds, he could never leave behind the horror of the Western Front. Russell was treated at the Christie Street Hospital, where he and other patients screamed at night and twitched during the day.

Service records note that some veterans suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder trembled with a “hysterical gait,” while others heard imaginary noises and ducked for cover. The soldiers’ enduring mental trauma is a metaphor for the darkness cast across Canada by the Great War, including long after the guns fell silent.