Here Ya Go II
March 23rd, 2005 - 9:43 pm
One mo’ time, we’re going to try to link to working versions of those color WWI battlefield photos. David of Poiema Design was smart enough to save all the pictures on his own hard drive, and public-spirited enough to post them on his own website.
Here they are. Enjoy.
And thanks, David.
UPDATE: Calvin von Weissenfluh, a reader here and one of my favorite email correspondents, also saved the images. He’s sending them to me in a Zip file. So if David ever gets tired of playing host, I’ll gladly take up the slack.
These look to be pictures of French troops, taken during the summer (non-rainy season), probably not too late in the war based on the appearance of the weapons and uniforms. The ‘staff car’ is really a transport truck used to move supplies. The ‘command post’ appears to be some sort of entertainment (a command post would be much bigger), or perhaps a small commissary or chaplain’s tent.
The freight car had the crap shot out of it… especially when you remember that the individual soldier was using a bolt-action rifle. Probably someone inside was shooting at the attackers, who then turned the car into a collander.
If the colors are indeed accurate (versus someone colorizing black and white photos), the French uniforms would have stood out pretty well against the background as target indicators. The Senegalese(?) troops (black troops) had much better uniforms camo-wise.
WWI was a miserable war for the soldier. You had the advent of modern battlefield weapons — effective artillery and small arms, especially the machine gun — but the generals were still thinking in terms of the Napoleanic Wars. You had atrocious wounds, but dismal medical care. Gangrene was a big killer of the wounded… if you made it to and through the field hospital. And the generals kept thinking that if they only bombarded a little more, only sent a few thousand more troops in the first wave, they’d break through. That’s why the British lost more men in the first hours of the Somme than we lost in Korea.
The tremendous battle casualties among the British, French, and Germans, and the abhorrence of those casualties by their families, changed European culture forever. The French Army mutinied late in the war after suffering millions of deaths in pointless and stupid attacks. The British troops melted away. The German Army shot their bolt in the big Spring 1918 offensive, and the individual soldier gave up. The Americans were the breath of fresh air that blew through the beaten-but-not-defeated Germans, and caused the collapse of the Western Front.
It’s interesting today on how we fixate on losing 1,500 Americans (STILL too many) in Iraq, yet we lost over 100,000 Americans in 18 months in WWI. But some things don’t change, like the cry of the simple-minded to GET OUT! (and thus leave the spark that starts the next war).
>> yet we lost over 100,000 Americans in
>> 18 months in WWI.
Many of those losses were to disease.
Some researchers have suggested
that as many US soldiers, sailors,
and Marines died from the Influenza
Pandemic, as from enemy action.
More information and references to
photos are available from the WWI-L
discussion email group (yes, I know, email, how quaint!).
http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/wwi-l.html