JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post  Part of the series on World War I    

This wonderful, contemplative, lonely, sad, and ultimately draining photograph depicts a camouflaged road somewhere on the Western Front.  That’s rather a prosaic term for that atrocious line of battle that stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland, where hundreds/thousands of miles of trenches were dug and filled and fought over, where millions of shells were shot and exploded, and millions of soldiers and civilians killed and wounded. 

The “Western Front” really doesn’t quite do as a descriptor.

But here we are, just the same.  And so the image above, with the man on a bicycle on a well-used road–he’s moving along under a long canopy of netting designed to obscure/hide the road from telescopic viewing or eyes-in-the-sky.   When this photo was made for the Western Newspaper Union, mid-1918, the war was nearly over.  But still there was the fighting, and the supply lines for the millions of troops, right to the bitter end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. 

And the full version:

The photograph itself is one from a collection of hundreds here from news photo service agencies, images made of the War from a pool of photographers who covered the action for American newspapers and magazines, and whose work was necessarily censored. The photographs would be selected/ordered by a news agency, and the caption of explanation would be provided by the news photo service (as seen above).