I recall, I think, that this was the largest photograph of war printed during World War I, looking to be something on the order of 8×16 feet or so.  This photo of the photo was printed by Underwood & Underwood, and stamped “British Official Photograph”, printed sometime in 1918.  It seems that this is an actual battle scene, which was a very uncommon thing among war photographs for the Great War–more so for this group of photographs(News Photo Service)  produced by pool photographers for equal distribution among subscribing newspapers and periodicals. Actual combat photos distributed by the News Photo Service agencies were not a high priority, unless they depicted routed or retreating or being-defeated Germans–it was not a popularly-disributed subject, mainly for propagandist purposes.

I expect that this photo would’ve given the view a you-are-there effect, as the main characters in the composition were about life-sized–an attempt of slice-of-life experience.  There is a surprising amount of foreground in this picture, though.

I just finished posting this from yesterday on a sea of shells and what those explosives meant in terms of overall destructive firepower for WWI.  This explosives image is a little easier, in a way, just showing hints of the vastness of what might be an acre of large ammunition.  

This photo (dated 15 April 1916 by the news photo service of Underwood and Underwood) shows a French senator–H. Charles Humbert–viewing “a field literally covered with shells”,  the photo really only giving some glimpse of the extent of the palleted shells, which fade into the distance behind M. Humbert and extend deeply into the field in front of him.

M. Humbert (1866-1927) would’ve had more of an interest in this scene than most, as he represented the Meuse district, and at this point int he war the shells were headed to a part of that area, Verdun. Verdun of course was one of the major battles of WWI, fought from  21 February to 18 December 1916, in the hills and dales of north-eastern France, at Verdun-sur-Meuse. There were 306,000 battlefield deaths at Verdun, plus another 500,000 wounded, in what may have been one of the most gruesome battles of modern times. 

Humbert was also an Army veteran and wrote on the military, and as it turns out, as the war approached he adopted a call to arms for more canons and more shells for the defense of France the inadequacy of the defenses of the French Army, and the insufficiency of officers and munitions  (“Des canons, des munitions!”).  He certainly would’ve been relieved with what he saw here.  Of course this is photo would represent a percentage well to the right of the decimal place of all those shells used at Verdun, which numbered an inconceivable 40 million.  When this photo was made in April the battle was already wicked and had been fought for two months–there were still eight months of gore to go. 

Ostende, a port city of West Flanders on the North Sea in  northwestern  Belgium, was an important stronghold and also a  key to holding the inland port of Bruges, which is something that the Germany Army was able to do until the very end of World War I.  Under constant occupation by an invading force, the city was only liberated by the armistice signed two days before this photo was made, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. 

Some of these children might still be alive, though all but two of the soldiers of this war are all dead.  I remember talking to my grandmother ten years or so ago, asking her about what she did to celebrate the end of the war.  She laughed, and then told me that she and her sisters and brothers went out to the street (in their small town of Housatonic, Massachusetts) and danced and danced.  She then said that a few other children went to their kitchens to come out with pots to bang with wooden spoons–and then it struck me, taking away my breath, that what she was talking about was celebrating the end of WWI, not WWII, which is what I thought she was going to talk about. 

“Will Cut its Way Through Hun Entanglements” reads the header to the caption for this new photo service war photo from the Central News Photo Service, published nearly at the end of 1918, just a few months before the end of the war. The inventor, John E. Logan, was demonstrating his invention “before senators and representatives of Congress” on a “miniature tank wire entanglement”.  The “entanglement” wire was much nastier than what you’d think of as the “barbed wire” of today–not concertina wire, but something small and nasty that was meant to catch soldiers, to pin them more deeply in the wire like a sharp metallic quicksand, stopping their advance and making them meat bait for machine gunners and everyone else. 

Logan attracted a fair size crowd for his demonstration in the vicinity of the Capitol.  His machine seemed to work well, too, cutting through 72 strands of wire in about a half minute.  I’m not sure how many of these machines were produced (can’t find anything on them offhand)  but there would’ve been a need for a great number of them, given that since there was something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during the war that there must’ve been millions of miles of barbed wire produced.  (That’s an off-hand guess, but it probably isn’t horribly wrong.)