There are 1500 or so of these news service war photographs here, and one of the remarkable things that I’ve discovered about them–trivial things to be sure compared with their overall message, ephemeral bits of semi-nothing–is that in many of the very-large-group images that there is sometimes just a single person who is doing something that no one else is doing, and it has been captured almost forever in the photo.  There are photos of thousands of troops, all facing east, with on solitary soldier facing west; there’s the solitary waver; there’s the one bare-headed man in  a sea of a thousand men with hats; there’s the one person raising his hat to the photographer in a sea of people looking at the camera but not raising their arms.  Then of course there’s the group photo of a mass of German WWI POWs, with only one soldier without a hat or helmet, and he looks just like me. 

Here’s an interesting detail:this image shows children cheering their American allies in 1917, showing one man clearly reacting to the hundreds of screams by covering his ears.  And is the only one doing so.  

The entire first image, showing the children cheering the raising of the two flags:

And this: