Nelson Ferguson was a musician, stretcher-bearer and artist who was rendered almost blind by a gas attack in World War I. Despite this, he was able to rebuild his life back in Australia.
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His story will be celebrated in The Glass Soldier, one of the concerts in the Canberra International Music Festival, which this year commemorates the centenary of the start of the First World War.
The festival's director, Christopher Latham, said Ferguson epitomised the entire idea behind this year's festival, bringing together music, art and war in a way that promoted peace and healing.
"The vast majority of musicians were stretcher-bearers on the front line and they had a very high casualty rate - 80 per cent - compared to the infantry generally which was 30 per cent."
Ferguson was struck by mustard gas at Villers-Bretonneux in 1918 at the age of 25 and lost most of his sight. Nevertheless, on returning to Australia he taught art at RMIT in Melbourne, married and raised a family.
He left RMIT in 1950 and began a stained glass factory at his home with his family.
"He could see the ironwork that held the glass in place and his son did the colours," Mr Latham said.
When he was 76 he underwent a corneal transplant.
"Suddenly he could see again - he could see all the work he had made."
The centrepiece of the concert will be The Glass Soldier suite, arranged by Nigel Westlake from music he wrote for a play by Hannie Rayson about Ferguson.
Westlake and Ferguson's grandson Donald Farrands will read excerpts from Ferguson's diaries and the concert will also feature The Minstrel Boy - "Nelson Ferguson's favourite piece, played on solo trumpet" - the hymn Amazing Grace (with its apt words "was blind, but now I see") and the Australian premiere of Bredon Hill from English Pastoral Impressions Op.26 by British composer Ernest Farrar, who was killed on the Western Front in 1918.
In preparatation for the concert, 156 windows in the Fitters' Hall have been coloured with lighting gels by a team including University of Canberra art lecturers Ann Cleary and Jessica de Rome.
The resulting work, The Cathedral Window, is appropriate on a number of levels, Mr Latham said - and not just because it represented Ferguson's work in stained glass.
"Art has a ritualistic aspect generally and although there was plenty of argy-bargy about the Fitters' Workshop it's looking towards the future."
He said that artists and musicians - some of whom had argued over the the Fitters' Hall - should both be able to use it for many purposes.
