JF Ptak Science Books – A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

World War I Photographs–German Prisoners, the Somme, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1322

This news service photograph (a Canadian Official Photograph from the Western Newspaper Union) shows a line of German prisoners of war in the Canadian lines at the battle of Courcelette, France. [The original is available at our blog bookstore.]

It was a battle that took place within a battle, in the last third of the enormous 18-week series of battles and actions known as the Somme Offensive. The photograph was made between early September and mid-November 1918, which is when the Canadians joined the British offensive.

The landscape is bleak, the soldiers worn. I rarely see expressions of pain in this series of 1500 photographs from a collection of war images that I purchased. This is one of a very slim minority.

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Photography — World War I
World War I Photography–Heavy and Stuck

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What is this man smiling about?

He’s satisfied with his place there in the tractor, rather than his soldier brothers whop were trying (impossibly) to leverage the beast out of a shell-made muck hole. At least the guys on foot had a comic sense of what their task was supposed to be. [This original photograph is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.]

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Photography — World War I
Blank & Empty Things Series: The Militant Christian Patriots, Hitler and Saving Britain from Itself, 1938

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1323

[Part of our series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things]

The flag of the group Militant Christian Patriots may tell you something about them faster than even their name: it was a large bright red field, with a white circle in the center, in the center of which was a simple black cross. Drop the horizontal bar to the middle, elongate it, shrink the vertical just a tad, and turn the ends of each bar 90-degrees at 75% of their length, et voila, you have the Nazi flag.

This unsigned circular blasts the “appeasers” from inside the government of the valiant Mr. Chamberlain, who is supported by the Militant Christian Patriots in his stance to keep Britain out of the developing (and developed) trouble brewing between the Nazis and the Czechs. The piece of paper that Chamberlain held aloft at the airport, claiming victory with his appeasement of the Nazis and happy with the firm trust in Hitler’s signature, was a good document to start with for this extremist group. Next, they would have Mr. Anthony Eden (who wound up resigning his position until recalled by Churchill when he finally and thankfully took over the office of PM from Chamberlain in May 1940) removed, what with his alliances to Fabian-Zionists and all. The other ministers targeted by the Militant Christian Patriots were among those others who supported Eden and worked against Chamberlain–undesirables, “pacifists, Socialists, Communists and Zionists”. The other branch of their unholy alliance were “the disgruntled refugees and their powerful friends in Britain, who aim at bringing Germany to her knees”, because, somehow, members of Parliament were somehow responsive to disgruntled refugees.

[The original document is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

This is a photo of Chamberlain at the airport with Hitler’s signature, telling the world, basically, that “it was up to the Czechs, now”, somewhat confident in the fatal Munich Agreement, trusting Hitler to end his European territorialism . The occupation of Czechoslovakia came just months after the Austrian Anschluss of March 1938, but, well, the Prime Minister had Hitler’s signature. It would not take long for this picture, and for the newsreel, and for Mr. Chamberlain’s face and even his very umbrella, to be used as iconic symbols of disastrous failure.

The Militant Christian Patriots were faithful to none of the words they used to identify themselves–after all, calling yourself something does lead to some sort of expectation…

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Tramp-Speak of Antiquarian Road Warriors: ABC’s of Tramps, Hobos and Vagabonds

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve written a little about dictionaries and words–Sam Johnson, Ambrose Bierce, specialized dictionaries, canting dictionaries, dictionaries of vulgar and coarse language, dictionaries of first uses, dictionaries in distinct fields.

Hobo dictionaries, guides to hobo slang, are different from those of robbers and thieves and rogues. They may borrow from one another, but the hobo language seems a little more dignified, and not as directed towards crime as that of, well, the criminals. An even greater distinction is the hobo alphabet, a Morse Code if you will, a hieroglyphics, for hobos-to-hobos, written in chalk without the benefit of electricity. (I’ve written about that phenomenon here, though I’ll at least reproduce an extraordinary map of a “begging district” found as the frontispiece to the lusciously-titled The Slang Dictionary; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and Fast Expression of High and Low Society… printed in London by John Camden Hotten, in 1870.)

Back to words.

Part I: Hobo Slang Collected by a Common and Perhaps Make-Believe Hobo

Hobo Exposed, or How to be a Hobo, at pamphlet with no claim for a writer but copyrighted by “Kelly’s Specialities” in 1946, is dedicated to Sun Down Slim, Boston Blackie, Sticks Red and Commissary Blackie. [This item is available at our blog bookstore.] It gets right to the point of my interest, the Hobo Slanguage. The collection here is not quite as road-elegant as the collection of the Hobo King, below–not that it is less “regal”, just more common and less imaginative.

For example, “Wingey” is the name for a hobo without an arm; “Sticks” is a tramp who sues a crutch; “Legs”, well, you know. On the other hand I find “grouch bag” (which was a bag of Bull Durham tobacco worn around the neck, which was either valuable enough to be worn that way to keep people out of your pockets or you just didn’t have any pockets), “hogger” (a railroad engineer), “dice box” ( a large discarded merchandise box to sleep in), “slippins” (gravy), “canned heater” (an unfortuate tramp who drinks sterno), “Jingle Buzzard” (a tramp who begs food from other tramps) and so on.

There are many others:

[This section continued below.]

Part II: Hobo Slang Collected by the King of Hobos

There have been many Kings of the Hoboes, and Emperor of the Hobos, in the history of American Hobodom. The most widely recognized of all this royalty is, probably, Mr. Jeff Davis, who was elected King of Hobos each year from 1908 to 1935, until in 1935 at the Pittsburgh meeting of the annual “Hobos of America” his minions gave up elected him King for Life. Of hobos, that is, the Knights of the Road; he was also a real hobo, unlike the pretenders, who in general were not. (Nels Anderson in his Men On The Move, written just as the Depression was broken, (1940) observed: “Whatever else may be said of King Jeff, his romanticizing the hobo is not without a basis in reality, and his poetic interest in the species arose from experience. But King Jeff has placed on a pedestal a man who belongs to the past. The hobo belongs with the pre-Hollywood cowboy and the lumberjacks of the Paul Bunyan legends.”)

Mr. Davis was certainly very effective in getting the message out—on freedom and responsibility to irresponsibility—and was a great organizer and popularizer. He helped to establish hobo meetings, newspapers and literature (a sample of which is at left). He also had a few movie appearances: in The Arkansas Traveler, 1938 and The Bridge of Sighs, 1915, he ably played the role of a hobo.

And what about the missing counterpart of Jeff Davis–Queen of the Hobos? There were certainly allot of women hobos during the Depression; Harry Hopkins estimated that there were something like 13,000 “sisters of the road” who were out and about in the 1930’s. I guess the most famous of them though was one who did not exist; and what parts of her that were real were mostly those of one man: Ben Reitman. Sister of the Road (1940) was supposed to be an autobiography of legendary Boxcar Bertha, but it was really an assimilation of Reitman’s own experiences sprinkled about those of women from his life. Reitman, who was described (by himself) as a “hobo, whorehouse physician, musician and tour manager/lover of Emma Goldman” (??) was probably not without enough experiences to float another character or two, had his story of Bertha wind up in the hands of exploitation movie maker Roger Corman. The good news about that though was that Corman gave the project to the very young Martin Scorcese who produced an odd and not bad film on no budget, and Boxcar got to live again.

But what brought me here to begin with was Davis’ breakdown of some very colorful hobo slang, all of which was found int eh little yellow pamphlet (pictured above), and published as a “reference manual” in 1947. And so:

Gay Cat. Someone who “beats it from town”, settles down with a job and puts together some money so that he can get on the road again.

Gandy Dancer. “Is a hobo shovel stiff, a muck-stick artist”, a common laborer

Pearl Diver. A hobo dishwasher and who works for his meal.

Mush fakir. A hobo umbrella mender with a patch kit and a second-hand umbrella strapped to his back. (Evidently these guys were put out of business when larger stores began offering umbrella repair on their own.)

Bindle stiff. A hobo who carries his stuff in a sack on a stick, including toothbrush, “but he does NOT carry blankets”.

Kywah. An honest hobo pitchman peddling soap, perfume, jewelry, novelties, pens, knives and potatoes peelers.

Kewah. :Makes and sells articles such as willow stands…”

Scenery Bum. “A young tramp who bums it around the country, just for the fun of it.”

Ring-tail. “An ignorant, harmless tramp.”

Fuzzy tail. “A smart aleck tramp, jack of all trades, a fourflusher, big bluff, false alarm, and piker of the worst sort, who most always carries a “punk kid” or “road kid” (a runaway boy).”

Dingbat. “An old tramp professional beggar who dings the main stem (begs on the main street).”

Stew bum. “An elderly tramp who wastes his time continually drinking rot booze.”

Jungle Buzzard. “A tramp who loves to eat but is too lazy to get the ingredients for a mulligan stew. He eats what is left when the gang leaves the jungle fire.” Yum.

Road Yegg. “A vicious tramp of the petty larceny type, a cheap crook.”

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The Importance of Mistakes: Kircher’s Table of Transformations, 1664

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1325

The great semi-mystifying polymath Athanaseus Kircher (1602-1680) lived for a long time and filled his life with ideas and words, producing dozens of books during his time on Earth, some of which were never published even though written, some manuscripts lost forever. His was a massive output of extraordinary breadth. He wasted little time what I can see, writing on a spectacular range of subjects, enlightening people, confusing people, generating great theories and some bad ideas.

The image below comes from his Mundus Subterraenus, published in 1664, and which was concerned mainly with geology and the theory of the Earth. He postulated the structure of the interior of the Earth, the origin of heat, the source of the tides, the composition of light, and of course the existence of the Virgin Mary in amber. There was also a fair amount of work on one of his side interests that populated a number of hs works, alchemy and the search for the organization of materials.

This image, “Tabula Combinatoria” (combinatory table or table of combinations) was an attempt to classify the alchemical transformation of metals and nonmetals via solve and coagula (mediante igne solvuntur et coagulatur), of solution and coagulation, a Curiosi Lectoris of Chymicas operationes, in a search for the key to all transformations, the prima materia. [The original erngraving is available from our blog bookstore, here.]

Kircher as I said exceeded his learning and logic all throughout his life, usually with positive results to us here in his future; but in this case, his alchemical quest–like the million words and countless hours and lead-based brain damage undertaken by Sir Isaac–proved to be a dry hole. But dry holes like mistakes in general are not necessarily without importance–they are valueless if and only if nothing comes of them, or nothing is recognized in i n the method of leading to the mistake, or if by our using the mistake it didn’t allow you to pursue something else. Science life is filled with almost nothing but error to the observer–it is our job to do something with the stuff that doesn’t work.

[the image is continued but trailed off of my scanner.]

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Mistakes, The Importance of — Perception — Perspective
The Guts of Mathematics, Archimedes’ Dog, and the Greaseless Anatomy of Machines

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1326

“…with his blood he confused the lines of his art”—On the death of Archimedes, in Valerius Maximus

“….Bark, bark bark!”–Archimedes’ dog

I came across this unusual and not-web-reproduced image of an infamous scene in the history of mathematics, the murder of Archimedes.(The original is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.) There have been a number of depictions of the event, a few dozen artists it seems–including Daumier and Delacroix and others whose name do not begin with “d”–who have chosen to try and capture the moment. (The website at NYU reproduces some of them; Drexel also has a very good space devoted to Archimedes and is a great source for quotes dealing with the event.) This one comes from (I think) Histoire Universelle published by the ubiquitous Peter van der Aa in Amsterdam at the turn of the 18th century, and falls in line with many of its comrades in that it depicts the tragedy in the second before it occurred. One thing it has that other scenes do not–a barking dog. Maybe it belonged to Archimedes, maybe not. But there was a dog depicted here, and it was barking at the scene, probably barking at the man about to stab the mathematician, which means it would’ve been the mathematician’s dog. But Archimedes certainly didn’t hear the dog if he couldn’t be interrupted by the battle outside his door or the Roman who yelled at him to turn. (I believe Roger Clemens when he says that he didn’t realize he was throwing that bat fragment at someone, saying he was in the zone. It happens.)

And a detail of the dog: shows him barking from a reclined position. Jarred awake by the intruder, he sees the action just before the critical motion–not quite awake, no time to stand, the dog (snarling with teeth barred) tries its best. (I am romanticizng the dog part of course. My own dog, Bluey, now 14 or so, simply stared at the people who walked into my house last night with their luggage, thinking that mine was the bed and breakfast where they had their reservations. He sat and stared, and they stared at him. Missing their destination by one house, how disappointed they must’ve been to think that their retreat was filled with an old dog, kid toys, a dead Christmas tree, and the rest of the jumble.)

I’m not aware of any artist who steals the moment quite so graphically at Jost Ammon (below) does, though. He also makes no effort to remove the millenium-old event from his own Renaissance environment.

Seldom do we see a maxim so vividly depicted as with these lines from Valerius Maximus: Archimedes trying to hold a thought in his head while a Roman soldier comes tugging at him, Archimedes pushing the soldier away to protect the geometrical work that he was scribbling in the sand, and then having his head full of thoughts spilled onto the drawing he was trying to protect. What we see in the detail is almost exactly (or on the verge of being exactly) from the Valerius quote fragment “…with his blood he confused the lines of his art”: Archimedes has spoiled his geometry in the moment before his cleaved head releases the control of his muscles. It is a nasty image, the pissed-off Roman soldier—who theoretically was just looking for spoils in the looted city of Syracuse—having had enough of the three-second hesitation by the old man and reacts badly, beheading him the hard way. (I’ve written about this pirnt earlier in this blog, here.)

This is definitely the great CSI moment in the history of mathematics, so far as Mr. Ammon is concerned. There is no chance not to see that there is no heraldry to the moment, no faint-away moment, just blood in the sand.

And for some reason–except for the dog part–all I can really think about here is the anatomy of the machines that were shown by the great Precisionists of early 20th century art, the artists who depicted the modern industrial landscape and its tools with fantastic precision and modern-Gothic-y grace.

The artists who found modernity–a modernity found mostly in America–in massive factories, and shining metal, and spokes and gears and all of the other components of factories. There was of course the Marinetti manifesto preceding all of this, and the 1913 69th St Armory Show, and the coming of the French (Duchamp and Picabia & Co.) in 1915 and the Tzara/Huelsenbeck/Ball Dadaist 1916 movements and the rest….but what I’m reaching for is the slightly later work, the early ‘twenties, with Hartley and Stella and Sheeler And Demuth and Schamberg (and even the early O’Keefe). This is where I think we see machine art, an oddly realistic semi-cubist something, depicting the power and form and grace of the machine itself rather than the expression of its dynamism.

But what happens (for me, anyway) is this–that when the guts of the machines are revealed, that when we see inside to the components, the very anatomy of modernity, we see a clean, rustless, oil-less, greaseless, world. Big and heavy, massive things of terrific density, and they smell like nothing except their own immobility, which so far as I know smells like nothing. As much as I find these artworks beautiful, I miss that their core wasn’t represented–I’d would’ve liked a little more mess. This is antithetical I’m sure to the message, but it is the essence of the machine.

[Charles Sheeler, Stacks in Celebration, 1954.] And humans didn’t often make it into these images–as much as I like the artwork of Louis Lozowick, I like it more when he peoples-up his ultra-tech/urban images. That’s another story.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — mathematics, logic — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Ghost March–Doughboys in London and Four Years of Mist, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1328

.003% That’s what I reckon this column of soldiers would represent of the total casualties of WWI.

Generally images like this are a virtual image-host for me, a bucket of ice cold water thrown onto a sizzling summer sidewalk, all sorts of ideas steaming from it. But for photographs of Doughboys¹ marching, especially assembling for parade, this one struck me a little more oddly than most, giving instant pause, making me concentrate on the haze, or dust, that allowed the columns of soldiers to blend into one another and fade, losing their boundaries with their mass receding into a dull blur.

The Western Newspaper Union was selling this image for insertion in newspaper or journal stories about the war, for a small use fee. There were a few American organizations like Western Newspaper that were created to photographically cover the war, using pools of photographers who would distribute their work anonymously and which was available for common, general use for a small charge. The photographs allowed out were certainly restricted and censored, though in my stash of these of objects (numbering about a thousand) I’d say that 10% of them look pretty edgy to my eyes. Most of the action of war was not covered, but then again this aspect was still fairly technically difficult in 1918. Images of pain were almost never allowed, and certainly not pain of Allied troops. Aid stations were almost never covered as well, as were dead bodies, or at least those again of Americans or Brits or French or Canadian. The imaging of the war was certainly under a fair amount of supervision and control. (The original is available for purchase through our blog bookstore. here.)

The image shows American troops assembling for a parade through the streets of London before being deployed. The mistiness of the composition looks like a statistic to me, these men standing for those who had come before and fallen.

The U.S. lost .13% of its population to casualties (125,000 killed and 205,000 wounded) during the war–a war which by the time America got here had already been visciously fought for three years, costing dozens of millions of lives. The figures for everyone else weren’t nearly so “fortunate” as the U.S.: New Zealand’s 18,000/41,312 killed/wounded amounted to 1.6% of its population. The U.K. lost 2.19% (964,000/1,663,000), Italy was 3.48% (650,000/953,000 plus 650,000 civilian casualties), while France suffered a 4.29% (1.4 million/4.27 mil) blow of its total population to war. Things were worse on the other side: Germany 3.82% (2 mil/2.4 mil plus 426,000 civilian deaths, and the Ottoman Empire 12% (400,000/771,000 plus 2.1 million civilian deaths.   Worst of all was the Ally Serbia, suffering a catastrophic 16% loss of its population to war, including 275,000/725,000 plus 426,000 civilian casualties. As gruesome as the numbers were, the Americans felt only a small percentage of the total sting of war–by 11 November, more than 21 million soldiers would have been wounded, with 9.7 million soldiers and 6.8 million civilians killed. It was an enormous price.

And that’s what I see in the mist of what may be something like 10,000 soldiers on display n this photograph. .003% That’s two of these columns every day, twice a day, for the entire 1550 or so days of the war.

Notes

1. The origin of the term “Doughboy” is unclear, or varied, or rich, but it is at least pretty oldm beginning around the time of the Mexican American War in 1846-1848–evidently when the soldiers marched through dry, tough terrain they wound up being covered by earth with the color of dough. Doughboy.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Goodbye — Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Perspective — Photography — World War I
Survivors on the Little Train to Hot Showers–WWI Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1329

I suppose there there was little to lift morale more than to have troops return to divisional from the front line to enjoy a hot shower–outside of course than to be brought home away form the fighting, entirely. These soldiers were about to enjoy what I am sure was a well worn break from the action. (The original photo is available for purchase at our blog bookstore.)

The soldiers were riding a narrow gauge railroad, brought to France from Canada, headed back to safety and “the baths”.

[Also, in keeping with my previous post, to represent all of the casualties of WWI you would need this trainload of men to extend from NYC to L.A. and almost all the way back again, about 6,000 miles of people.]

And this, below–I see the soldier at the far right is reading a letter, I’m guessing a letter from home, as he has his knees tucked up maybe trying to protect its contents from prying eyes. The soldier to his right is engaging in the age-old custom of reading someone else’s mail over their shoulder, desperate for any news from anywhere. Who knows–maybe the guy was sharing.

And then–as we are told in the caption for the photograph–they were given as much time in hot water as they wanted. And then:

I think the return trip would’ve looked much different.

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Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — World War I
Alphabet of Retro-Vision Women –1940’s/1950’s

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1329

In a continuing series of odd alphabets (Occupational Alphabet, Action Alphabet and a Touch of Evil, Alphabet of Giants) that I’ve posted to this blog I offer this, a collection of covers of paperback novels, pulps, mystery magazines, true loves, romance, and of course astonishing science fiction. That these are considered “Golden Age” is interesting–I understand the overall feel of what “Golden Age” is supposed to mean, though the messages in the images (even exclusive of their texts) are definitely not-so-golden from where we sit in 2011.

I think that looking at this sort of material is important when considering the fleeting history of normalcy, and that these images help to define what was popularly considered to be the edge of “normal” for that time.

A is for Ambidextrous

B is for Blonde

C is for Complete Love

D is for Dumb

E is for Effortlessness

F is for Future (Love)

G is for GI Jane

H is for Hope

I is for Insist

J is for Junk

K is for (amazon) Knights

L is for Lonely

M is for My, Mine, Maybe

N is for Night

O is for Out

P is for Popular
Q is for Queer (“Society’s Greatest Curse”) In 1959–the year this book was published–the gay issue outranked nuclear holocaust, civil rights, the Cold War, and everything else according to the cover copy.

(Couldn’t not include this one, possibly the first of its genre when published in 1950, and which over time has sold – 4 million copies.)

R is for Rope

S is for Soalr is for Sun

T is for Temptation

U is for Under (the Whip) [See STRANGE SISTERS for more.]

V is for Venus

W is for Whirling

X is for X-Ray

Z is for Zzzzzs

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Map of Newsboy Work Violators, 1915–Child Labor & Child Scavengers

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1330 [Part of a developing series in the History of Normalcy]

“There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.” — Lewis Hine, 1908

As rudimentary as the title of this pamphlet seems, it isn’t really quite so, not really completely in the column of not having child laborers and exploiting children. There is a degree of exploitation allowable–yes it was a different time–and the map that I’ve plucked from this work shows the extent of rough-edging of the law that was tolerated. The authors weren’t so much concerned that there were 2500 newsboys in Boston-proper hawking newspapers morning/noon/night, but rather that they found over a third of them weren’t wearing their Newsboy Selling Badge when confronted. And it wasn’t that they were under-aged–just that they were badgeless.

On the other hand, the Massachusetts Child Labor Law Committee cited unidentified “critics” (and I don’t doubt that there were many) saying that “children don’t work enough nowadays, and that child labor laws have left nothing for children to do, especially in the cty where there are no chores”. (This work is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.)

And they did do a study of child scavengers, reporting that in “one dump in a Massachusetts city fifty-five children from five to fourteen years old were moving slowly over an acre of rubbish…” The authors report (unfortunately without reference) that in one Boston school distict of 2,128 children that 125 of them “do this work”, and that 500 children in Boston “are so engaged”. This didn’t include the children who “gathered refuse” from martketsm freight yards, and ash barrells” or who were sent out collected odd bits of dropped wood and coal.

But the fact of the matter is that these folks were just knocking at the big door of child labor reform, a big piece of which would come into being in the next year (1916) with the Keating-Owens Act, which began the strict reulation of child labor, defining what the terms “labor” and “child” were. (The act restricted minig occupations to children 16 and over, and for 14 years of age for the manufacturing industries; no night work was any longer permitted, and the work day was limited to eight hours. This was the reform, so one can imagine what the labor was like before this legislation.) In 1890 there were something like 1.5 million children in the workforce, a figure which was raised to 2 million by 1910, and which was nearly halved (because of awareness and federal oversight) by 1920.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940)–who gives us the quote to lead this short post–was a school teacher and sociologist who was extremely aware of the plight of the children around him–well, children, and immigrants, and laborers; people without voices, or representation, poor working people. He was a pioneering photographer whose images of these classes of people were revoltuionary, a tremendously important documentarian of a societal symptom that was pretty much misdiagnosed, or at least was chosen as something to not be seen. That was hard to do when you had actual photographs of the grim situaiton.

This could’ve been my grandmother. At about this same time.

Hine also made some of the most iconic labor images in American history, a vastly underappreciated heroic figure duirng his lifetime.

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Anticipation, History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Perception — Photography — Social History
Inverted Iwo–Sappers and Blowing Up Trees, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1331

Most of the stuff that was blown up in WWI was an end result of explosive shells being fired from canons–only a miniscule amount of the percentage of all bombing done during WWI was from airplanes, and another very slight percentage from tanks. On the other hand sappers played a much larger role in WWI than in just about any other war, placing explosives by hand and then detonating them. (I wrote earlier in this blog about the extensive underground trench fighting that went on with sappers tunneling under No Man’s Land and placing explosives underneath an enemy’s trenches. And I guess you could tunnel under the tunnel, and so on. This sort of warfare is extremely old, though the name is not, being about 150 years old. These soldiers were forward combat engineers, and had training across a number of different areas—they were responsible for many technical chores, like building (and blowing up) bridges, laying/clearing minefields, general demolition, defense construction, and, of course, fighting. It could be a tremendously difficult job, unimaginable.)

This photograph reminds me in some odd way of Arthur Rothstein’s iconic photograph of Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, but only a little. (This photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

The caption of this news photo service image identified these soldiers for blowing up trees to obstruct the canal in the background. If you land enough trees in a canal like this you are definitely going to cause corruption and heart attacks for anyone trying to move men or ordnance down the canal.

And this detail:

I thought for a bit that these men might actually be threading barbed wire through the trees to make the job of removing that even more heinous. But there’s no way that you could lay hundreds of yards of barbed wire without gloves and without slicing your hands up–maybe you could do it carefully for a little bit, but not for long.

But I’ve got to say that this really doesn’t look like demolition materiel….

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Militaria — Photography — World War I