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It’s a level playing field at Headley Court, the rehabilitation unit for injured servicemen in Epsom, Surrey. At least that’s the aim. So when a group of soldiers play volleyball, they do it shuffling on their bottoms. “It makes things more equal for everyone,” says Major David Hepburn, Headley’s chief physiotherapist. “That way someone with a lower limb amputation can play against someone who has two good legs.” Competition, and a little colour-ful language, is always in the air.

At any one time there are up to 50 patients with severe injuries, known as complex trauma, being treated at Headley. Some have been wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan, others will have been injured during training.

Lance-Corporal Jonathan Le Galloudec, 27, ambushed on patrol in Basra, was shot in the back by a sniper last June. “I knew the injury was serious because I couldn’t feel anything in my spine,” he says. Flown first to Birmingham’s Selly Oak hospital, he was transferred to Stoke Mandeville, the specialist hospital for spinal injuries, where he stayed for nearly three months.

“I remember the doctors telling me that I would always be in a wheel-chair,” he says. “It was a great feeling being able to walk out of there and prove them wrong.”

Today, six months after the shooting, he is walking around Headley Court with the aid of a stick and confounding all medical expectation. “When I came here, I thought my case was severe,” he says. “Then I saw all the head injuries and I thought I’m just a tiny little person compared with them. You will see someone who has no legs or whose hands are badly burnt and you realise we are all struggling. And if you are having a bad day and wanting to crawl into a corner, someone here will notice. We all bounce off each other and we all give each other hope.”

Help for Heroes, a charity set up in September to support wounded soldiers, aims to raise £5m to build a swimming pool and new gym at Headley Court. Sunday Times readers have already been enormously generous, giving more than £200,000 of the £1.3m already raised. We hope you will continue to support the charity, which numbers among its patrons Jeremy and Francie Clarkson and the singer James Blunt, as part of our Christmas appeal.

As Hepburn points out, there are already a hydrotherapy pool and gyms at Headley Court. But fill the pool with six soldiers, and there is no room to spare. “We would like a pool in which people could do lengths and build up distances as a cardiovascular exercise,” he adds. “Swimming is a very important part of rehabilitation for all injuries because it promotes strength, muscle tone and mobility.”

Bryn Parry, who served for 10 years with the Royal Green Jackets and who founded the charity, believes Headley Court’s soldiers deserve better: “The Ministry of Defence talks about ‘making do’. I want to see us doing more for the servicemen. We can’t prevent them getting hurt but we can demonstrate our appreciation. Surely we can do more for survivors of bombs, ambushes and mines?”

Money is also sought to build a new gym. One of the old gyms is merely a temporary canvas structure. “It’s boiling in summer and freezing in winter,” Parry says. “Again, we can do better for everyone than this.”

Le Galloudec is in the middle of a three-week stint at Headley Court and expects to return several times over the next few months before his battalion finds him a desk job. It’s a tough regime, which starts with parade at 8.30am sharp, followed by up to six hours of intensive remedial therapy that aims to achieve the best possible outcome for each patient. Nobody has time to loll around in a dressing gown; no wonder everyone is dressed in gym kit.

Another patient learning to cope with his injuries is 26-year-old Corporal Tony Burbidge, who served alongside Le Galloudec in Iraq. As a section commander he was carrying out a routine search in Basra last June when he was shot in the arm. He didn’t realise that he had been hit until he tried to lift his rifle. “At first I thought I had lost my whole left arm,” he says. A main artery and median nerves had been damaged. He was sent to Selly Oak where surgeons managed to take a vein out of his leg to implant in his arm. Since then he has been treated at Headley Court three times. “I couldn’t use a knife and fork and I was struggling to feed myself. But after five days of intensive physiotherapy I began to use my hand again. My wife was amazed at the change in less than a week.”

The medical staff at Headley, which includes eight consultants, 45 nurses, 20 physiotherapists and 20 remedial or training instructors, emphasise the importance of early rehabilitation. “The window of opportunity for treatment is the first few weeks after they have been stabilised,” says Hepburn. “And getting in early gives them a massive psychological boost.”

The scale and nature of the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan compared with that of the Balkans during the 1990s mean that many more servicemen are being referred to Headley Court than expected. Advances in treating men on the battlefield means more soldiers are surviving wounds that once would have killed them. In the second world war, for example, for every two men wounded, one died; now the figure is one dead for every seven wounded.

The consequence is more complex trauma, more missing limbs. The amputee service provided by the prosthetics department was launched in June last year. It was envisaged that it would deal with between 10 and 15 patients a year. Yet in the past 18 months alone it has seen 55 patients, most of them victims of the current conflicts. Its specialists, who fit sports limbs, sprinting legs and electronic prosthetics, can supply a soldier with an artificial limb within five days, a speed of service that would be envied by the NHS.

As Headley’s patients point out, there is nothing miraculous about the place. Extraordinary things happen because of patience, persistence and a determination by the wounded to get back their old lives. Burbidge feels so confident that he has signed up for a 300-mile bike ride next May in aid of Help for Heroes. Five staff and five patients will be among 300 people taking part in the Big Battlefield Bike Ride. Setting off from Portsmouth, their six-day itinerary will take in the beaches of Normandy, before the Somme and Calais. The team needs to raise £23,000 to cover its expenses and your donations would help to buy two tandems to allow its disabled servicemen to compete.

With Burbidge will be 22-year-old Craig Dryden, an able seaman at HMS Collingwood. His leg was amputated below the knee after an exercise in Gibraltar when he was bitten by a spider. The wound ulcerated, he developed septicaemia and his immune system failed. He is here to get used to his artificial leg and build muscle. “I hope to do everything that I always did and I aim to be the first amputee PT instructor,” he says.

Help for Heroes has set itself a target of £5m. One of the physiotherapists at Headley Court, who works with the patients for up to six hours a day, described it as a “privilege” to help the servicemen return to their old lives. Parry agrees. “It’s an inspiring, positive place and it’s the beginning of hope for so many,” he says.