In his pioneering work ‘A history of disability’ (1982) Henri-Jacques Stiker has pointed out the general impact of the Great War on the Western intercourse with persons with disabilities. To the general image sketched out by Stiker several disability scholars during the last two decades have added more sophisticated and detailed descriptions of these maimed soldiers’ vicissitudes. If the use of prosthesis, the role of the state, the formation of organizations and the particular place attributed to the re-education of these disabled soldiers already to a large extent has been been examined for the United States of America, France, Germany, Great-Britain, Canada and Australia, up till this time there have been no studies which focus on the history of Belgian ‘invalid soldiers’. This is a rather strange finding for in some publications of the Red Cross the Belgian government has been described as a pioneer in the rehabilitation of disabled soldiers and from the very start of the First World War their existed in the North of France – where the Belgian government had settled down during the German occupation – two Belgian re-education centers: Institut Militaire des Invalides de la Guerre (Port-Villez) and Dépôt des Invalides (Saint-Adresse). In this lecture we on the one hand would like to focus on the educational rehabilitation of the Belgian soldiers provided in these institutes and contextualize these efforts by referring to the highly politicized and international discourse with regard to these brave men who sacrificed their vision, face or limbs for the freedom of their country. For this part of the lecture we will make use of the archival records found in the Moscow archives of the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History in Brussels. After having outlined the aims and preeminent means of the rehabilitation of these Belgian soldiers we, on the other hand, would like to present what happened with these soldiers after the Armistice and thus would like to examine whether the promises made towards these disabled comrades by the general population as well as the politicians were met during the Interwar period. Here we will make use of the bimonthly journal published by the national institute for disabled soldiers (I.N.I.G) ‘l’Invalide Belge’ which was published from 1917 onwards. Both the presentation of this particular kind of popular re-education and the life-circumstances encountered by the Belgian disabled soldiers during the Interwar period will enable us to make a substantial contribution to the existing corpus of disabled veterans history.

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