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 92 This private with his clean uniform and freshly combed hair probably wanted a photograph to remind him of this French family who perhaps boarded him as a billet while he was behind the lines. Most of these French villagers never saw their British soldier friends again.
PLATE 93 A sergeant from the Durham Light Infantry with a French family and a family member or friend from the French navy. Perhaps the sergeant was billeted with them in Vignacourt.
Vignacourt soon became a veritable United Nations of nationalities from across the British and French colonial empires. As well as soldiers from the French and British armies, including English, Scots, Welsh and Irishmen, there were Australians, Canadians, Moroccans and Nepalese soldiers all passing through, often sharing a glass of wine or two in the local bars.
The Chinese men in the Thuillier images were all non-combatants; while China joined the Allied nations in declaring war on Germany on 14 August 1917, the French government had earlier contracted their Chinese counterparts in May 1916 to supply 50,000 labourers – sadly, known by a racial slur as ‘coolies’. The British followed suit to form the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) and the men from that corps are probably the Chinese nationals featured in these images since Vignacourt was a British base. They were prodigiously hard workers, labouring long hours every day digging trenches, transporting supplies and building and repairing roads and railways. They came mainly from Shandong Province but also from Liaoning, Jilin, Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui and Gansu. About 140,000 Chinese labourers served on the Western Front, several winning awards for bravery, and at least 2,000 (and probably many more) died during the conflict, mostly from the Spanish influenza epidemic at the end of the war. All were classified as war casualties and are buried in graveyards on the Somme battlefields.
PLATE 94 Chinese labourers in a relaxed pose with a local child.
PLATES 95 – 96 A Chinese Labour Corps soldier with CLC insignia over his breast pocket and (right) the same soldier dressed in civilian clothes.
PLATES 97 – 98 Chinese labourers in Vignacourt.
PLATE 99 A Chinese labourer with local children.
PLATE 100 The Chinese labour camp at Vignacourt.
PLATE 101 A delightful picture of a child, probably Robert Thuillier, the photographers’ son, with Indian Rajput Cipaye cavalrymen.
PLATE 102 Gurkhas from Nepal.
PLATE 103 An Indian cavalryman towers over a local lady.
PLATE 104 Nepalese Gurkhas fix the camera with their trademark gaze.
The first Australians moved into the Somme valley in July 1916, and Vignacourt was soon full of the Australian diggers as well as British Tommies. Within weeks, the Australian and British soldiers from here would experience a baptism of blood just to the north of the river Somme at a town called Pozières. There were also large Australian camps very close by, at Pernois and Flesselles, and many of the diggers who appear in the photographs are likely to have walked several kilometres into Vignacourt from those camps to have their picture taken by the Thuilliers. One of the best descriptions of these rest towns appears in the book The Gallant Company: An Australian Soldier’s Story of 1915–18, by Harold R. Williams, in which he describes going to a rest camp at the town of Buire:
Its one main street was churned into mud with the ceaseless stream of transports and marching infantry passing to and from the line. Its inhabitants consisted of aged men, frightened looking children and women with care-lined faces … Every second house was an estaminet which dispensed vin blanc and vin rouge of dubious vintage. These places were open for troops only during certain hours … its immediate merit was that the Army here provided steaming hot baths … no words can describe the desire for it of men whose bodies and clothes were overrun with vermin and foul with trench mud … Dried, we went to the store and were issued with garments in lieu of those we had handed in. Sometimes this underclothing was new, but mostly it was the laundered and disinfected wear of others who had been through the baths. Invariably these contained the eggs of lice which survived treatment and eventually hatched out …2
So while it was a supply and support hub for the war effort, Vignacourt became a place primarily for rest and recreation – a sanctuary from the horrors of the war just twenty to thirty kilometres to the north-east.
PLATE 105 Soldiers of the Australian 5th Battalion pose with Robert Thuillier.
PLATE 106 A smiling Australian corporal in the Signals Corps sits a young local girl on his lap.
Unlike so many of the soldiers they photographed, Louis and his wife survived the war. Perhaps because he had been exposed to so many motorcycles during the conflict – there are many in his photographs – Louis indulged a passion post-war for motorbike racing and, ever one with an eye for an opportunity, in 1920 he became a dealer in army surplus. Judging from his attic, and the mountains of early motorcycle-racing magazines strewn around his photographic gear, it seems the Thuillier photographic plates were left exactly as they were immediately the war ended, forgotten until Robert Crognier first tried and then Laurent Mirouze succeeded in bringing them to the world’s attention decades later. There are no plates in the Thuillier collection beyond about 1919 or 1920, so it seems likely Louis and Antoinette wanted a break from photography after the war years.
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