Anglo-Australian and fiercely patriotic but too old to fight (he turned 59 in March 1915) Roberts, in London, seems to have leapt at a sudden opportunity in 1915 to enlist with several other Australian artists as a hospital orderly.

"Roberts was treated like any other soldier," Roberts' biographer Humphrey McQueen illuminates. "Off went the beard [forbidden by the army] although he kept the moustache."

Roberts selflessly threw himself into his work, working extraordinary days and hours (living at the hospital he spent just one night at home in every fortnight) doing menial things for and among the sometimes shockingly war-mutilated at the 3rd London General Hospital, Wandsworth. Five hundred of the hospital's beds were for wounded Australians.

In time he became a sergeant in charge of the hospital's dental department and McQueen reflects that "For Roberts, who had made his career painting the portraits of handsome women, pretty children and distinguished men, the sight of 100 smashed faces was more than usually poignant."

in a letter Roberts described one of the Dental Room's smashed faces in exquisite detail.

"The whole upper jaw and left eye carried away, leaving only one thing human-looking, on a strange front to a man's head, an eye – an eye that through the pain, the operations, stayed bright."