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 23 A wartime photograph of the front of the Thuillier home at the time when many of the photographs were taken. (From the Thuillier collection)
PLATE 24 Exterior of the Thuillier farmhouse, Vignacourt, February 2011. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)
At the old kitchen table in the run-down farmhouse, Madame Bacquet told a sad story from the Great War. Her mother, the daughter-in-law of Louis and Antoinette, had described how as a young woman during the war she had heard the screams of young wounded men passing through the village in horse-drawn ambulances. ‘They were calling for their mothers,’ she said. ‘It was very sad.’
PLATE 25 Soldiers of the Army Services Corps pose with their Dennis troop-carrier truck in the main street of Vignacourt during the war. The buildings behind them still stand today.
Madame Bacquet would have made a good probing military interrogator in another life, questioning us for several hours about our motives. As it became clear to her that our quest was an honourable one and that the proud memory of her ancestors would be fulsomely acknowledged, she brought out a collection of Thuillier family photographs. For the first time we laid eyes on Louis and Antoinette.
PLATE 26 Louis Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)
PLATE 27 Antoinette Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)
Christian Thuillier, Louis and Antoinette’s grandson, is a Normandy businessman.
He had been nominated by the family to show us around the farmhouse, and it was Christian who, with a wry smile, conceded that the answer to our quest for the photographs might lie in the attic above the building. We stepped out of the kitchen anteroom into a huge outside courtyard, our hearts missing a beat or two as he led us up several flights of stairs to the attic where the Thuillier photographic plates had been stored for nearly a century. It was as if Louis and Antoinette had just walked away from their massive project and dumped everything upstairs. In the gloom we could discern boxes of unused glass plates and empty bottles that had once no doubt contained the chemicals used to develop the prints. No sign of the original camera. But there, under the light of an attic window … three chests. As soon as we opened the first of them we knew our search was over.
PLATE 28 Antoinette Thuillier poses with her son in the same position where she and her husband photographed thousands of Allied soldiers during the First World War.
PLATE 29 The man in the bottom of this single four-exposure slide is a young Louis Thuillier, almost certainly taken by his wife, Antoinette – perhaps while she was learning to use the cameras?
PLATE 30 Ross Coulthart looks at the Thuillier plates with, from left, Laurent Mirouze, Christian Thuillier and Peter Burness. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)
PLATE 31 An original Takiris silver bromide photographic paper box found in the attic. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)
Laurent recognized some boxes immediately. He had helped Robert Crognier sort through them nearly a quarter of a century earlier, but he had never learned of their hiding place. After Robert’s death, the plates had clearly been dumped and forgotten here in the attic. As we excitedly searched through box after box, we could hardly believe what we were seeing. The battered boxes were filled with thousands of glass negative photographic plates, and for hours we held them up to the attic window light, revealing often perfectly preserved ghostly negative images of thousands of British Tommies, Welshmen, Irishmen, Scots, Australian ‘diggers’, turbaned Sikhs, and French, Canadian and American soldiers. There were gasps of awe and excitement from all of us, especially Peter Burness, as he pulled out plate after plate. It seemed scarcely possible that this dusty attic, freezing in winter and no doubt stifling in the French summer, could have preserved the photographs so well. On this especially chilly winter’s day, it was sobering for all of us to think what it must have been like for the young soldiers in a French winter, nearly a hundred years earlier, as they endured the appalling conditions in the open trenches just twenty to thirty kilometres to the north-east.
Our quest for the elusive Thuillier collection was over, but our investigations into the stories behind the thousands of plates had only just begun.
PLATE 32 Labour Corps.
PLATE 33 Royal Army Medical Corps.
PLATE 34 Royal Engineers.
PLATE 35 Dorsetshire Regiment.
PLATE 36 A sad soldier of the Royal Fusiliers – a close-up from the high-resolution scan of his fatigued face shows him lost in thought. This same soldier also appears in Plate 216.
In February 2011, the Australian Channel Seven TV Network aired a documentary about the discovery of the Thuillier glass plates. Shortly after that ‘Lost Diggers’ story was broadcast, we posted thousands of the Thuillier collection photographs of the Allied soldiers on the programme’s website and also on a specially created Facebook page, which still exists today. It became an unprecedented social media phenomenon for a history archive, with millions viewing the pictures online from all over the world. Within days, the volume of emails, excited phone calls, letters and Facebook messages we were receiving showed just how much the images had touched so many. Hundreds of thousands of viewers wrote us emotional and passionate accounts of their response to the faces of the Australian diggers and British Tommies in particular:
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