The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

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      PLATE 113 Two seated sergeants (the one on the left has a Military Medal ribbon on his left breast). A corporal stands on the left and a private on the right, regiment unknown.

      There is a tragic twist to the story of Louis Thuillier, related by his nephew Robert Crognier, in a letter he wrote to Laurent Mirouze shortly after they met, in 1989. For years after the war, Louis struggled with depression and, despite the concern and care of his family, he withdrew from them and sank into a deep despair. One early morning in January 1931, a furious knocking on the door of their house woke Robert’s parents. It was the husband of Louis’s sister, Louisa, who lived nearby. They were told ‘Louis Peugeot’ had committed suicide at the age of forty-four. He had shot himself in the head.

      There is no one from the family who knows for sure what drove Louis to end his life. But it is entirely plausible that he was traumatized and pushed into depression by his own wartime experiences; tormented by the memory of the thousands of young men who went on to their deaths after sitting or standing before his camera in his Vignacourt courtyard. There was not the understanding back then that there is today of the effects of battlefield trauma on a human soul.

      Louis’s suicide perhaps explains why the extraordinary photographic collection was placed in the family attic after his death and forgotten. For Antoinette, who lived until the 1970s, it may well have been too painful for her to recall this enormously creative period during the First World War when she and her husband lived such a vital and social life, welcoming soldiers from all over the world into their home, Louis often working well into the night to print the latest photographs.

      The couple had two children, both boys, Robert and Roger. Robert was born in 1912 and features in many of the ‘Lost Diggers’ wartime pictures. Roger was born after the war, in 1920.

      PLATE 114 A Thuillier family photograph – Robert and Roger Thuillier, after the war. (Courtesy Bacquet family)

      For the many Allied soldiers, a child’s innocent face was doubtless a blessed relief after everything they had experienced in the trenches. The delightful, happy images of the town’s children sitting with soldiers suggests they clearly enjoyed playing with the troops, many of whom were fathers themselves.

      PLATE 115 Soldiers, possibly of the Army Services Corps, with Roger Thuillier, on the right, and another little friend.

      PLATE 116 A slightly damaged plate of Royal Engineers soldiers posing with a Thuillier child and another local.

      PLATE 117 Two Army Cyclist Corps privates with a young French girl.

      PLATE 118 An Army Services Corps lance corporal with bandolier and spurs, posing in front of a bus.

      PLATE 119 A Royal Artillery Regiment soldier (left) with two Army Services Corps men, clearly in the winter.

      PLATE 120 A classic informal Thuillier image of three Royal Artillery soldiers with three Australian diggers and a young Thuillier relative.

      Robert Thuillier never married and had no children. Roger’s children are Madame Eliane Bacquet, born in 1945, and Christian Thuillier, born in 1947, both of whom we have already met. It is with their kind cooperation that the entire Thuillier collection was carefully removed from the family farmhouse attic, cleaned, packed and then brought to Australia for preservation.

The War

      On 28 June 1914, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, unleashed the apocalypse we now know as the First World War. Militaristic Prussians had long wanted to expand Germany’s empire; the German Kaiser Wilhelm II had launched an arms race with Britain, and scrambled to snap up colonies and global resources. After years of simmering tensions, the shooting of the Archduke in the Balkans was the spark that ignited the war. One by one the great powers of Europe plunged into the abyss as treaty obligations pushed nations on to either side of the conflict. France, bound by treaty to Russia, found itself at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Within weeks, Germany had invaded Belgium, aiming for Paris. By 4 August 1914, Britain and soon after, its empire, had also entered the war. By late September 1914, the Allied armies and their German adversaries were locked in a trench-warfare stalemate – each side dug in to a roughly matched pair of trench lines running often just metres apart, over a distance of 700 kilometres from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast of Belgium.

      PLATE 121 French soldiers head north-west along the Rue de Daours in Vignacourt towards the front line. Because the men are no longer wearing the red trousers originally issued to soldiers, this is likely to be during 1915. As the war went on, the French changed their uniform to the bluey-grey tunic worn by soldiers in this picture instead of the earlier colourful uniform which was an impractical relic of the Franco-Prussian War.

      Attempts by each side to outflank the other had failed and the only solution was ‘digging in’ to trenches. The stalemate was created by modern artillery and the new machine СКАЧАТЬ