found in the loft of a barn at Warloy-Baill and cast out as rubbish

[rm]

via coyotegoth

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/exclusive-the-unseen-photographs-that-throw-new-light-on-the-first-world-war-1688443.html

The place, according to a jokingly chalked board, is "somewhere in France". The time is the winter of 1915 and the spring and summer of 1916. Hundreds of thousands of British and Empire soldiers, are preparing for The Big Push, the biggest British offensive of the 1914-18 war to date.

A local French photographer, almost certainly an amateur, possibly a farmer, has offered to take pictures for a few francs. Soldiers have queued to have a photograph taken to send back to their anxious but proud families in Britain or Australia or New Zealand.

Sometimes, the Tommies are snapped individually in front of the same battered door or in a pear and apple orchard. Sometimes they are photographed on horseback or in groups of comrades. A pretty six-year-old girl – the photographer's daughter? – occasionally stands with the soldiers or sits on their knees: a reminder of their families, of human tenderness and of a time when there was no war.

Many of the British soldiers are wearing rough sheepskins over their battle-dress: a tell-tale sign of the great overcoat shortage of the winter of 1915. The sheepskin-clad "Tommies" look, bizarrely, like ancient warriors or Greek or Yugoslav partisans.

Within a few months – or days, most probably – many of the soldiers were dead. The "somewhere in France" where these pictures were taken was a village called Warloy-Baillon in the département of the Somme. Ten miles to the east was the front line from which the British Army launched the most murderous battle of that, or any, war, which lasted from 1 July to late November 1916 and killed an estimated 1,000,000 British empire, French and German soldiers.

More than 90 years later, at least 400 glass photographic plates preserving the images were found in the loft of a barn at Warloy-Baillon and cast out as rubbish. In recent months, the plates, some in perfect condition, some badly damaged, have been lovingly assembled and their images printed, scanned and digitally restored by two Frenchmen.

I'm going through the photos now and finding them nearly impossible to look at, they're so wrenching. What's really interesting about them is that, as informal photos, it allows their subjects to look remarkably modern. I think it's generally very hard to look at photos from this era and earlier and realize these people were just like us. Not so with these. There are also many, many faces here that I'm not even convinced were so much as sixteen.

Comments

[lovefromgirl.livejournal.com]

If anything, I tend to identify more with pictures from that era and before, as my looks never quite settled into this century. One of the women sent a shiver down my spine.

Thank you for this link. I have passed it on to the Darling Man, whose forefathers may well have fought in WWI. (The D.M. is English, hence why these are relevant.) I doff my hat and keep my poppies pinned to my purse...