The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart
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Название: The Lost Tommies
Автор: Ross Coulthart
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008110390
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PLATE 77 A rushed wedding before the new husband heads off to defend his homeland? A French soldier with his bride.
PLATE 78 ‘Honour to 9 May’: almost certainly a reference by these French soldiers to the disastrous Second Battle of Artois a year earlier (9 May–18 June 1915), which resulted in 102,500 French and 27,809 British casualties but failed to break through the German lines. The shadow of another negative – featuring a ghostly image of a soldier on horseback – has adhered to this plate from when they were stacked in the Thuillier attic.
PLATE 79 Proud French colonial troops, cavalrymen of the 8th Regiment of Hussars, strike a pose – summer 1915.
PLATE 80 The French soon abandoned such nineteenth-century uniforms because their bright colours made them easy targets for German gunners.
PLATE 81 French soldiers pose with a dedication to the mitrailleurs – the machine-gunners – probably honouring their comrades who fell in the battles of 1915.
PLATE 82 Moroccan tirailleurs. The soldier on the right sports the typical Berber haircut of the day.
PLATE 83 Moroccan light infantrymen – or tirailleurs – in Vignacourt. North African tirailleurs served with distinction on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. They were assigned their own regiment in 1914 and suffered heavy losses.
In late 1915 Vignacourt came under the military control of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), and the Thuillier images reflect that change, thousands of the plates showing British Tommies and kilt-wearing Scots.
PLATE 84 A Thuillier image of some hard-looking Scots soldiers in kilts, most probably Gordon Highlanders.
Louis Thuillier also roamed the streets and the nearby army camps in search of subjects to photograph.
PLATE 85 A dapper lieutenant colonel with the South Staffordshire Regiment in front of the stairs that today still lead up to the Thuillier attic where the photographic plates were discovered. He is a decorated officer who has been twice wounded, as indicated by the two wound stripes on his left sleeve. The three small chevrons on his right sleeve show he is in his third year of overseas service. These chevrons were introduced in January 1918, which places this image in the final year of the war.
PLATE 86 Royal Engineers dispatch riders in Vignacourt – a typically humorous and informal Thuillier picture.
PLATE 87 A sergeant and a private soldier in front of their tent, probably at one of the many military camps.
PLATE 88 These men have adopted a local dog.
PLATE 89 Two British lads or the Royal Field Artillery – friends or perhaps brothers? – send a message home during the colder months on the Western Front – possibly leading into the winter of 1916–17. For reasons of security ‘Somewhere in France’ was all they were allowed to say about their location. They are wearing variations of the animal-skin vests the soldiers used to keep warm.
PLATE 90 A Royal Engineers private, ‘somewhere in France’.
In 1798, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a poem called ‘We Are Seven’, asking:
A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in its every limb,
What should it know of death? …
In the poem, the questioner meets a little girl who initially seems to know very little about death because she appears to be in denial about the death of her siblings and she still sings and talks to them. It ends, though, with the notion that maybe the little girl knows more about death than the adult to whom she is speaking. The little girl refuses to be wretched about death or to forget about the dead, and she gets on with her life as happily as she can:
How many are you, then, said I,
If they two are in heaven?
Quick was the little maid’s reply,
O Master! We are seven.
But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!
Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will
And said, Nay, we are seven!
Perhaps these seven young British soldiers posing in front of this sign simply did not realize the significance of their words in terms of Wordsworth’s poem, but is it possible they were sending a gentle message to their loved ones back home? That whatever happened to them in the war, they preferred their families not to become incapacitated by grief – or ever to forget them, just like the little girl.
PLATE 91 ‘We Are Seven’ might be a reference by these soldiers of the Machine Gun Corps to a William Wordsworth poem of the same name.
Early in the war Vignacourt was designated as one of the main rest areas for Allied soldiers. An easy day’s march from the Somme front lines, it offered exhausted troops the opportunity to rest and revive themselves in the local bars, called estaminets, but it was close enough to allow an easy deployment back into the fighting. The town also had a large hospital СКАЧАТЬ