Книга - The Lost Tommies

The Lost Tommies
Ross Coulthart


‘Lost Tommies’ brings together never-before-seen images of Western Front tommies and their amazing stories in a beautiful collection that is part thriller, part family history and part national archive.For much of the First World War, the small French village of Vignacourt was always behind the front lines – as a staging point, casualty clearing station and recreation area for troops of all nationalities moving up to and then back from the battlefields on the Somme. Here, one enterprising photographer took the opportunity of offering portrait photographs. A century later, his stunning images were discovered, abandoned, in a farm house.Captured on glass, printed into postcards and posted home, the photographs enabled soldiers to maintain a fragile link with loved ones at home. In ‘Lost Tommies’, this collection covers many of the significant aspects of British involvement on the Western Front, from military life to the friendships and bonds formed between the soldiers and civilians. Beautifully reproduced, it is a unique collection and a magnificent memorial.













Copyright (#ulink_7b786911-c3a3-5a95-8a23-5e2a74e826ca)

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Ross Coulthart 2016

Ross Coulthart asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cap badges reproduced with permission of the MOD.

Photographs by North East Medals.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008103316

Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780008110390

Version: 2016-03-09











Contents


Cover (#u3d0dfd50-1ae1-58a9-9490-c957182b5622)

Title page (#ud9876f4e-1ad8-5e29-bd26-ba615a47afc2)

Copyright (#ulink_f07e6b98-927d-547d-b258-7420aa61f88d)

Prologue (#ulink_b3800ccf-a9c6-517f-a383-9f2d9a9e7f10)

The Origins of ‘Tommy’ (#ulink_08e2bd96-36cb-5507-94e3-a3610b9696e0)

Part One THE DISCOVERY (#ue54b0a79-43ca-5208-bca1-6e08569443bd)

Finding the Thuillier Photographic Plates (#ulink_ea529315-a1b7-5fc1-b372-4c5331978a85)

Identifying the Tommies (#ulink_4549e615-c0dd-5cac-b49d-439bb1cabde7)

The Backdrop (#ulink_04001017-c784-58b4-8593-cb0d3ba114e6)

The Vignacourt Bread Boy (#ulink_ca74dace-b78f-5da5-859a-0793f4d3ae99)

How the Thuilliers Took Their Photographs (#ulink_54c7e85b-3321-585b-8be9-a5c963ae77eb)

Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and the Town of Vignacourt (#ulink_9f4d2f71-b265-5010-b7e8-fdfa848815ab)

Identifying British Regiments (#ulink_dc3009ed-7728-5e02-b927-0c3addf77781)

We Are Seven (#ulink_adff988b-cd79-5eeb-b503-ae17554b9789)

The War (#ulink_f071fcf2-6d4d-51f4-a16a-f29176f7d693)

Part Two THE TOMMIES (#u5a513e09-f9fa-539d-9d1a-a853a9e0282b)

York and Lancaster Regiment (#ulink_79207bc6-dff5-53d8-b9c2-950f84f44d28)

The Prince of Wales’ Own West Yorkshire Regiment (#litres_trial_promo)

The Battle of the Somme – July (#litres_trial_promo)

The Pals (#litres_trial_promo)

The Leeds Rifles (#litres_trial_promo)

The Liverpool Pals (#litres_trial_promo)

The Stretcher-bearers (#litres_trial_promo)

The Stretcher-bearer (#litres_trial_promo)

The Durham Light Infantry (#litres_trial_promo)

Shot at Dawn (#litres_trial_promo)

The Bantams (#litres_trial_promo)

Faithful in Adversity – the RAMC (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fusiliers (#litres_trial_promo)

Military Police (#litres_trial_promo)

The Suicide Club (#litres_trial_promo)

The Lewis Machine Gun (#litres_trial_promo)

The Irish (#litres_trial_promo)

The Padres and the Chaplains (#litres_trial_promo)

The Concert Parties (#litres_trial_promo)

The Army Services Corps (#litres_trial_promo)

The Labour Corps (#litres_trial_promo)

The Scots (#litres_trial_promo)

The Black Volunteers (#litres_trial_promo)

The Sappers (#litres_trial_promo)

‘They Had No Choice’ (#litres_trial_promo)

The Gunners (#litres_trial_promo)

Sport (#litres_trial_promo)

The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry (#litres_trial_promo)

The Crosses (#litres_trial_promo)

The Royal Sussex Regiment (#litres_trial_promo)

Armistice Day (#litres_trial_promo)

Shocked (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Index of Names (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher












The men who were boys when I was a boy are dead. Indeed they never even grew to be men. They were slaughtered in youth; and the parents of them have grown lonely, the girls they would have married have grown grey in spinsterhood, and the work they would have done remains undone. J. B. Priestley








Prologue (#ulink_e8c5982e-5f12-52f8-9c81-49a5400a9ee4)


… average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war … the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. I had to revise my views on human nature.

Bertrand Russell, on 1914




There was a time before, and, for those who survived, there was a time after. But for generations of men and women, the cataclysm of the First World War left a raw emotional scar, a legacy of loss and tragedy that still lingers today. It is difficult to comprehend one century on just how readily so many young men clamoured to go to war. The patriotic fervour that followed the declaration of war in August 1914 may seem quaintly naive today but for many of the men rushing to enlist the biggest fear was that the fighting would all be over before they got the chance to teach the Germans a lesson.






PLATE 1 A soldier from the 7th or 8th Battalion, Leeds Rifles. They were part of the West Yorkshire Regiment – he wears the West Yorkshire shoulder badge.

On 4 August 1914 thousands of men already serving in territorial reserve regiments, including those with the Prince of Wales’ Own West Yorkshire Regiment, received the long green envelopes marked ‘Mobilization – Urgent’. Recruitment offices were also overwhelmed by young men rushing to enlist, willing to do their duty for King and country; a flood reaching 30,000 a day at its peak.

I went to Bellevue Barracks, home of the 6th West Yorks, a Territorial battalion, and found there were crowds round there. Everybody was excited and every time they saw a soldier he was cheered. It was very patriotic and people were singing ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, all the favourites. A challenge had been laid down over Belgium and they were eager to take it up. I should have been home at nine but I stayed there until late at night. Everybody stood in groups saying ‘We’ve got to beat the Germans’ and quite a number were already setting off to enlist.




Few anticipated the horror of what was to come. But the survivors would never forget it. George Morgan was one of the first volunteers for the West Yorkshires. When he admitted to the recruiting sergeant that he was only sixteen, the sergeant advised him to go outside, come back and tell him something different. George returned with the implausible claim that he was now in fact nineteen; he was then sworn in to service.

It was the biggest incident in my life. I’ve lived sixty years afterwards, and I’ve never, never got over it. It’s always been there in my mind. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. We’d all got to know each other very well and we were all very good comrades, in fact I don’t think there’s ever been better comradeship ever … and then all at once when this day, this terrible day of 1st July, we were wiped out.




Just two years into the war, on that first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, it was one battalion in particular of those eager West Yorkshires, the 10th, that was to earn the dubious distinction of having suffered more casualties on that dreadful day than any other British Army unit. Twenty-two officers and 688 men were either killed or wounded, from a unit normally 1,000-strong; more than two-thirds of the men failed to answer the roll call the following day. During the months the Battle of the Somme raged, some one million men from both sides of the conflict combined would be either killed or wounded – and for little discernible gain to either side.

The West Yorkshires was just one of dozens of regiments that went over the top on the first day of the Somme – over 20,000 British soldiers would die in that first twenty-four hours alone; there were 57,470 casualties. Such losses are so overwhelming in their magnitude, so great was the industrial scale of the slaughter, that one can sometimes overlook the fact that each of those broken bodies was a father, a son, a brother, a lover or friend.

Throughout the war, in a quieter corner of Picardy just behind the Somme front lines, soldiers from regiments like the West Yorkshires enjoyed brief respites from the conflict. It was in the small village of Vignacourt that thousands of soldiers met a local French couple who dedicated themselves throughout the war to photographing the soldiers – partly to supplement their income but also because they no doubt realized the profound historic significance of what they were witnessing on their doorstep. They were civilian amateur photographers Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and, as battalion after battalion visited their village of Vignacourt, the couple captured images of the men (individually and in groups) before they were once again thrown back into the trenches, all too often to suffer grievous wounding or death. Among the pictures taken by Louis and Antoinette is the one below featuring members of the 6th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment.






PLATE 3 Soldiers of the 6th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment in Vignacourt while they were billeted in the area from early April 1916 through to 9 June.

One of those West Yorkshiremen photographed was a young Bradford man, Walter Scales, a twenty-year-old clerk when his 6th Battalion West Yorkshires was mobilized. He was an officer – barely out of his teens – in a proud territorial unit made up largely of volunteer city workers like himself. Walter looked so young when he joined up that his brother officers called him ‘the Babe’. Within weeks of this photograph being taken by the Thuilliers, he was to lead his men into the horrors of the Battle of the Somme.






PLATE 2 Close-up of Captain Walter Alexander Scales, 6th Battalion West Yorkshires.

For all the troops, Vignacourt was a welcome relief from the front line. A 6th Battalion history records the eight weeks the unit spent training and resting in and around Vignacourt as one of the happier times the battalion enjoyed throughout the entire war:

If we looked at this Vignacourt period from the point of view of the official War Diary we should dismiss it in a few words, something as follows:- ‘Training carried on vigorously: Battalion and Field Days weekly: Reinforcements of three officers and 170 other ranks received in May: two officers and 100 other ranks provided for work on New Railway Sidings at Vignacourt; battalion provides Brigade Head Quarters’ Guard every fourth day, etc, etc.’ The War Diary would thus compress the life of eight weeks into as many lines, whereas a few lurid hours in the Leipzig Salient on July 15th would fill a page. Most of the members of the Battalion would reverse the emphasis, however, and become eloquent on a joy ride to Amiens: a favourite estaminet at Vignacourt: an anniversary dinner: a jolly billet; and they would dismiss the affair in the Leipzig Salient with a shrug, as hardly being worth mentioning in comparison.




There were also the ‘bombers’ of the West Yorkshires, who arrived in Vignacourt on 5 April 1916 for a well-earned rest from months of fighting. Among them were Bernard Coyne, John Bannister and Harry Duckett. The bombers were a unit of men specially trained in the use of hand grenades, a form of warfare that required close and bloody fighting at the sharpest point of the front lines. These men knew their odds were not good going into the coming Somme offensive. Two of that trio would fall within weeks; the other would almost make it through the war, only to fall in its final few weeks.






PLATE 4 Bombers of the 1/6th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment in Vignacourt during their eleven days in the area from 5 April 1916.






PLATES 5–7 1/6th West Yorkshire bombers Bernard Coyne, John Bannister and Harry Duckett.

For eight weeks the West Yorkshires took their rest and training in Vignacourt but they knew what was coming. One history records that the men came to regard their time in the village as their ‘fattening up for the slaughter’.




Within possibly just days and certainly weeks of his photograph being taken in Louis Thuillier’s farmyard (Plates 8 (#ulink_e21f07b9-e80b-5067-9549-0f4906df5de1) and 9 (#ulink_deed591a-33ce-5a6a-a4cc-4761bacc7f8d), below), Second Lieutenant Cuthbert George Higgins, the smooth-faced young officer sitting in the middle of the men of C Company from the 6th Battalion of the West Yorkshires, was dead. Higgins was a Londoner from Hanover Square – his father, William, is listed in the 1901 census as clerk to a brewing company – and it is not clear how his son came to be commissioned with the West Yorkshires. Within hours of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, on 1 July 1916, the twenty-four-year-old was killed in the British Army’s massive attack on the town of Thiepval. Assaulting the town required the breaching of a maze of trenches heavily protected with a huge number of machine guns, across an open and exposed no man’s land. Higgins was in the reserves, waiting in Thiepval Wood to follow the leading waves of troops that had gone over the top at 6.30 a.m. When the order finally came at around 3.30 p.m. for his company to advance, logistical failures meant the 6th Battalion had to go over alone:

It is a misnomer to say they attacked Thiepval, for not a man got more than a hundred yards across No Man’s Land. ‘The men dropped down in rows, and platoons of the other companies following behind remained in our lines, as to do anything else was suicide. It is impossible to describe the angry despair which filled every man at this unspeakable moment. It was a gallant attack,’ said the Brigade Diary, ‘but could not succeed from the first.’ The enemy’s parapet was alive with machine guns. Again and again attempts were made to climb the parapets and advance, but all in vain, those who succeeded in reaching No Man’s Land only added their bodies to the pile of dead and dying. The 1/6th was the only Battalion of the 146th Infantry Brigade which succeeded in obeying the orders to advance, with what result has been described – every third man in the Battalion had become a casualty – the results were nil!









PLATE 8 Close-up of Second Lieutenant, C. G. Higgins, C Company, 6th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, taken during the battalion’s eight-week stay in Vignacourt from April to June 1916.






PLATE 9 West Yorkshire Regiment 6th Battalion soldiers, probably from C Company under the command of then Captain R. A. Fawcett (seated, second row, second from left). The officer first from left is a Lieutenant Hornshaw. The officer third from left is Second Lieutenant C. G. Higgins.

It puts the war’s appalling losses in some perspective to pause and consider that toll; one-third of this one small battalion, men whose faces are probably among these Thuillier images, was wounded or killed on the very first day of the Somme … so many casualties in just one day of fighting, in a war that was to last for years.











PLATES 10–12 Young soldiers of the West Yorkshire Regiment just before the Battle of the Somme – a final few days’ rest in Vignacourt before the Big Push.

Almost a century later it is easy to imagine that the ghosts of these lost Tommies still linger in the ancient French farmhouse where these photographs were taken. On a bitterly cold winter morning, above the very farm courtyard where thousands of young soldiers posed, I am stumbling up an ancient wooden spiral staircase on the last leg of what has been an intriguing historical detective story chasing the clues in the Thuillier images. Each step takes me further back in history, through the detritus of a family home stretching back generations. The wobbly and uneven steps are layered with dust, and I have to steady myself against the crumbling plaster and brick walls. I feel my way in the murky gloom as I step into the attic of this old farmhouse.

The attic is a long, dusty, oak-floored room. Although I am wrapped against the bitter cold of a French winter, the biting chill still penetrates the gaps in the eaves and walls. We move aside old leather suitcases, saw blades and bottles, a stack of empty salvaged Second World War American jerrycans; in one corner is an elegant, perfectly preserved nineteenth-century baby’s carriage with large painted cast-iron wheels. Above our heads the knots of old tree limbs can still be seen in the hand-chiselled oak beams supporting the heavy tiled roof.

My breath is visible as condensation in the frigid air. There is only the sound of feet shuffling up the stairs behind me, and the muffled noise of the occasional vehicle outside. We are all mute with anticipation. It scarcely seems possible that this decrepit attic could be, after months of searching, the place where a treasure trove of extraordinary First World War photographs has lain hidden. There are mounds of old motorcycling magazines from the 1930s that we carefully lift aside, peeling back the decades of a family’s jumble. Everything is covered in a thick layer of dust.

Then, by the light of an attic window, we see three old chests.

I lift the lid of one of them, a battered ancient metal and wood chest. And there they are: thousands of glass photographic plates – candid images of First World War British soldiers behind the lines. There were also Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, American, Indian, French and other Allied troops.






PLATE 13 The battered chests in which the glass plates were stored. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)




THE ORIGINS OF ‘TOMMY’ (#ulink_edb89867-83cc-530b-939b-4f3a7a5c8282)


There was a touching naivety among the officers and men who had marched to war as ‘Pals’ and volunteers; the depth of patriotic feeling and the urge to rush off to war to defend Mother England may seem extraordinary today. But this was an era of the great British Empire and there was enormous pride and loyalty to King and country. Men were proud to be British ‘Tommies’, a curious term for British soldiers that many believe has its origins in a story that underlines the blood and sacrifice that for most Britons back then made Great Britain and its empire ‘Great’. The term ‘Tommy Atkins’ was being used as a generic description of British troops early in the eighteenth century. But one account of how First World War troops came to be known as ‘Tommies’ was that it was appropriated from the story of a British soldier named Tommy Atkins who had died in a battle in Flanders, Belgium, in 1794. The story went that the Duke of Wellington was inspecting badly wounded soldiers after a battle. One of the wounded men was named Tommy Atkins. It was the stuff of legend that Tommy, asked if he was in pain, reassured the Duke: ‘It’s all right, sir. It’s all in a day’s work.’ Tommy’s stiff upper lip just before he died was seen as exemplifying the best of British courage and dogged persistence against terrible odds.

Perhaps, as the notable historian Richard Holmes has more soberly suggested, the real derivation was an 1815 War Office publication which used the name of ‘Private Tommy Atkins’ as an example to show soldiers how to fill out their Soldiers Pocket Book.




Whatever the true reason, the term ‘Tommy’ or ‘Tommies’ became a well-known generic and affectionate name for British soldiers throughout the war.
















Finding the Thuillier Photographic Plates (#ulink_ae851f15-2dcc-5eed-bd17-07be595b2a2c)


The astonishing discovery all started with a healthy journalistic hunch. In a series of articles in May 2009, London’s Independent newspaper published images of some glass negatives of First World War soldiers. Most of the photographs were of British ‘Tommies’ and a handful depicted Allied soldiers from the far corners of the then British Empire. The accompanying articles said the photographs were rescued from a rubbish heap somewhere in northern France. The high-definition, near-century-old images generated great interest both in the United Kingdom and overseas and were by far the most visited items on the Independent’s website in that period. Intriguingly, the articles, written by John Lichfield, shed no light on who took the photographs – saying only that the photographer was ‘unknown’. The Independent stories recorded that the small cache they published had probably been stored in the attic of a barn at Warloy-Baillon, only a short distance from the original battlefield front lines. Warloy-Baillon was the site of an Allied clearance hospital during the war. In 2007 the barn was renovated and the plates were thrown into a rubbish skip but they were ‘rescued’ by passers-by. Dominique Zanardi, proprietor of the ‘Tommy’ café at Pozières, uncovered the Warloy-Baillon photographic plates with the help of a local photography enthusiast Bernard Gardin. Zanardi told the newspaper that the photographs were possibly the work of two separate photographers, but that attempts to find the location where they were shot or the photographers’ descendants had failed.

When the Independent stories were published online I was enthralled by the images – especially by the small number of images of Australian soldiers among them. There were also a handful of images held in the Australian War Memorial archives which, intriguingly, showed groups of men, clearly in a different location, photographed in front of the same distinctive canvas backdrop. Were there more? I and my colleagues wondered.






PLATE 14 A 1918 image of a group of Royal Fusiliers. The soldier seated on the ground is a machine gunner.

Outside of the war photographs taken mainly by British official photographers, there are relatively few high-quality images captured around the Western Front in France and Belgium during the First World War – especially images of the life immediately behind the lines in the rest and training areas like Vignacourt. Unlike at the Dardanelles, where many Allied soldiers took cameras into the front lines, on the Western Front the British command strictly banned servicemen from taking cameras into battle zones. From early in the war, authorized military photographers took most photographs but even these were limited for reasons of security. The images published in the Independent fuelled speculation that there might be more images like them taken by French locals or others not in an official role. Were there more photographs to be found? It seemed a reasonable prospect for further investigation.

The real hero of this story is Laurent Mirouze, a Loire Valley antiques and furniture dealer as well as a published historian and experienced journalist. Late in the 1980s, one of Laurent’s friends, who knew of his passion for military history, mentioned that he had seen some beautiful photographs of First World War soldiers on the walls of a council building in the small Picardy town of Vignacourt, just north of the city of Amiens. Sensing a good story, Laurent decided to drive the few hours from his home to Vignacourt to take a look. There, hanging on the walls of the tiny council offices, were the most extraordinary pictures featuring Allied soldiers, mainly British and Australians. Only about twenty pictures were exhibited, but Laurent eventually tracked down the photographer who had printed them from the original plates, a Vignacourt resident, Robert Crognier.






PLATE 15 Robert Crognier. (Courtesy Madame Crognier)






PLATE 16 Laurent Mirouze inspecting some of the Thuillier plates in 1989 before they disappeared. (Courtesy Laurent Mirouze)

When Laurent visited Monsieur Crognier at his home in 1989, he was astonished to discover that the photographs he had seen displayed at the local council offices were just the tip of an iceberg. There were thousands of pictures on photographic glass plates, he was told. He learned of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and Monsieur Crognier told him the plates were still in the possession of the family. (Monsieur Crognier was a nephew of Louis and Antoinette, and he had reproduced the images from the plates with the permission of Roger Thuillier, one of their sons.) Monsieur Crognier explained to Laurent that the collection was housed at the time in a family home in Vignacourt and, while he let Laurent take photographic prints of several hundred of the plates, he never disclosed the precise location of the full collection. As it turned out, this was an entirely separate collection from the photographs later published by the Independent.

Laurent realized very quickly that the plates were hugely important not only to British but all other First World War Allied countries’ military history. They were also a cracking good story for this aspiring military historian. He had himself photographed reviewing the plates, thinking – not without good reason – that he would have media and military historians beating a path to his door to view the collection. With the permission of Robert Crognier, Laurent wrote an article in France and England, revealing the discovery and publishing some of the images.






PLATE 17 Two Royal Fusiliers. The soldier standing wears the stiff service cap and the soldier seated the softer cloth cap introduced after the war began.

In the spring of 1990 Laurent also rang the Australian Embassy in Paris, formally writing to them and sending them copies of some of the pictures so they could see for themselves. ‘I said there’s hundreds of them – could this be of any interest to you?’ Laurent recalls. ‘But I could feel very clearly that they were not very interested in the story. A shame!’ Laurent laconically comments today, ‘Maybe these people are not interested in the First World War.’ Laurent never heard back from anyone at the Australian Embassy, nor did he get much interest from British researchers. Despite this, he made one last effort to alert military historians to his discovery by publishing a story about the Thuillier collection in a British military magazine, Military Illustrated, in November 1991. Absurdly, nobody ever contacted Laurent Mirouze. So he got on with his life, thinking no one was interested.

But there was someone else also trying to track down the Thuillier plates. Peter Burness, a historian from the War Memorial in Australia, is a tenacious military history investigator and a passionate First World War buff. In about 1990 a small commemorative pamphlet published in Vignacourt had landed on his desk. It featured a small sample of the prints of Allied soldiers which had been retrieved from the Thuillier plates by Robert Crognier. The pamphlet even helpfully told readers that these pictures were a fraction of the 3,000 or more images taken by Thuillier and his wife. ‘The photographs of this booklet are only samples of the collection,’ the pamphlet reads.






PLATES 18–19 The cover and images from the Vignacourt brochure featuring some of the Thuillier pictures.

The pamphlet had been produced for a commemorative ceremony on 22 April 1988 in Vignacourt. The guests included dignitaries and officials from the Australian Embassy in France. They were there for the dedication of one of the town’s streets to Australia, to be called ‘Rue des Australiens’, a tribute organized by Robert Crognier, the mayor Michel Hubau, and René Gamard, a Vignacourt historian. The Frenchmen were honouring a promise made back in 1918 by the town’s then mayor, Monsieur Thuillier-Buridard, to keep an ‘eternal bond’ with Australia and other Allied nations that had fought for France’s freedom.

For the ceremony, a small number of the Thuillier images were displayed by the proud locals. Like so many French people, the villagers of Vignacourt still honour the Allied soldiers who died for their freedom. Unfortunately the visiting officials seemed to have had no idea of the significance of the photographs and were still ignorant of their importance two years later when Laurent approached the Australian Embassy in Paris. However, gazing at the pamphlet on his desk, Peter Burness recognized the plates’ historical importance and set about trying to track down the source. Sadly, by the mid-1990s, Robert Crognier was ill and in 1997 he passed away. Repeated efforts to contact the remaining Thuillier relatives through the town council offices failed. Despite years of searching, it seemed the more Peter hunted for the elusive Thuillier collection, the more he sensed a deliberate evasiveness by some around Vignacourt. So the whereabouts of these photographic plates remained unknown.

In the course of our investigations, we approached a British historian, Paul Reed, who is well known for his books on the First World War and who also lives part of the year in a house in the Somme countryside. Paul was unable to shed any further light on the provenance of the Warloy-Baillon collection, but he did tell us about Laurent Mirouze, whom he had heard might know something about another collection of photographs.

From the moment we first spoke to Laurent, the Frenchman was overjoyed that somebody had finally contacted him. ‘I’ve been waiting twenty years for this,’ he said to us in our first phone call late in 2010. He told us that his photographer friend Robert Crognier had died in 1997, but Laurent agreed to help in the search for the full collection of plates. It was not an easy task. Each time we rang Vignacourt locals, our efforts to find Thuillier relatives were met with a polite rebuff. The family members with knowledge of the collection seemed to have disappeared. It was only later, when we actually knocked on their door, that we learned of an internal family rift; some members of the Thuillier family did not want the collection to be found. We learned that the Thuillier images had ‘disappeared’, probably because some family members, now dead, resented the way that all First World War memorabilia was being acquired by the French government in order to build up the collections of its war museums – including the large regional museum in nearby Péronne. It would seem the Thuillier plates went underground after the 1988 ceremony because some locals did not want the French government to plunder a piece of Vignacourt heritage without giving adequate compensation in return.

And so it happened that on a cold February morning in early 2011 in Vignacourt, we began where Laurent’s quest had ended twenty years earlier, at Vignacourt’s council building. There in the council chambers we saw the handful of tantalizing pictures hanging on the walls. The Australian War Memorial historian Peter Burness was with us and he was amazed by the quality and clarity of the images on the council chambers’ walls. The big question now was, where was the rest of the collection?






PLATES 20–21 Laurent Mirouze back where the trail started in 1989, and showing Peter Burness what he found on the walls of Vignacourt’s council chambers.

The breakthrough came after a day or so of knocking on doors led us to Madame Henriette Crognier, Robert’s widow, who still lived in the town. We were ushered into her cluttered living room and, as her cat purred under the table, Madame Crognier’s bright eyes scanned ours as we spoke of our search for the pictures. When we explained in detail the enormous historical significance of the pictures, and expressed our hopes that the Australian images at least would be displayed at the War Memorial, Madame finally let a gentle smile lift the corners of her mouth and with a twinkle in her eye she left the room.

Laurent was acting as our translator, and I anxiously asked him if we had said something to upset her. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘She says she has something for you.’ Madame Crognier had decided to trust us. Within a few minutes she returned with a couple of Second World War ammunition boxes under each arm, and a big smile on her face. She slid the metal cases over the table and, with her hand on one of them, said with a Gallic flourish, ‘Pour les Australiens,’ and flicked the lid open.






PLATE 22 Madame Crognier shows Peter Burness and Laurent Mirouze her secret stash of Thuillier plates. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)

After all these years she still had some of the Thuillier glass plates her husband had retrieved from the family’s hiding place. Better still, she believed the remaining thousands of plates were indeed still in Vignacourt in a farmhouse owned by Louis Thuillier’s grandson and granddaughter. We sat there stunned. ‘Thousands of plates?’ I asked. ‘Thousands of plates,’ Laurent confirmed the translation. I stumbled on for confirmation: ‘… that have never been seen before?’ ‘Oui,’ Madame replied, now delighted with our reaction.

Through Madame Crognier we learned of the surviving descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, among them their granddaughter, Madame Eliane Bacquet, and their grandson, Christian Thuillier. Neither of them lived in Vignacourt any more but they did still jointly own the empty farmhouse where Louis and Antoinette had offered their photographic services to passing soldiers. Finally, after days of intense negotiations, they agreed to take us to the farmhouse. As it happened, our timing was propitious because the family was thinking of selling the old farmhouse and, in a few months, we were told its contents might well have been thrown on to a rubbish heap.






PLATE 23 A wartime photograph of the front of the Thuillier home at the time when many of the photographs were taken. (From the Thuillier collection)






PLATE 24 Exterior of the Thuillier farmhouse, Vignacourt, February 2011. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)

At the old kitchen table in the run-down farmhouse, Madame Bacquet told a sad story from the Great War. Her mother, the daughter-in-law of Louis and Antoinette, had described how as a young woman during the war she had heard the screams of young wounded men passing through the village in horse-drawn ambulances. ‘They were calling for their mothers,’ she said. ‘It was very sad.’






PLATE 25 Soldiers of the Army Services Corps pose with their Dennis troop-carrier truck in the main street of Vignacourt during the war. The buildings behind them still stand today.

Madame Bacquet would have made a good probing military interrogator in another life, questioning us for several hours about our motives. As it became clear to her that our quest was an honourable one and that the proud memory of her ancestors would be fulsomely acknowledged, she brought out a collection of Thuillier family photographs. For the first time we laid eyes on Louis and Antoinette.






PLATE 26 Louis Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)






PLATE 27 Antoinette Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)

Christian Thuillier, Louis and Antoinette’s grandson, is a Normandy businessman.

He had been nominated by the family to show us around the farmhouse, and it was Christian who, with a wry smile, conceded that the answer to our quest for the photographs might lie in the attic above the building. We stepped out of the kitchen anteroom into a huge outside courtyard, our hearts missing a beat or two as he led us up several flights of stairs to the attic where the Thuillier photographic plates had been stored for nearly a century. It was as if Louis and Antoinette had just walked away from their massive project and dumped everything upstairs. In the gloom we could discern boxes of unused glass plates and empty bottles that had once no doubt contained the chemicals used to develop the prints. No sign of the original camera. But there, under the light of an attic window … three chests. As soon as we opened the first of them we knew our search was over.






PLATE 28 Antoinette Thuillier poses with her son in the same position where she and her husband photographed thousands of Allied soldiers during the First World War.






PLATE 29 The man in the bottom of this single four-exposure slide is a young Louis Thuillier, almost certainly taken by his wife, Antoinette – perhaps while she was learning to use the cameras?






PLATE 30 Ross Coulthart looks at the Thuillier plates with, from left, Laurent Mirouze, Christian Thuillier and Peter Burness. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)






PLATE 31 An original Takiris silver bromide photographic paper box found in the attic. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)

Laurent recognized some boxes immediately. He had helped Robert Crognier sort through them nearly a quarter of a century earlier, but he had never learned of their hiding place. After Robert’s death, the plates had clearly been dumped and forgotten here in the attic. As we excitedly searched through box after box, we could hardly believe what we were seeing. The battered boxes were filled with thousands of glass negative photographic plates, and for hours we held them up to the attic window light, revealing often perfectly preserved ghostly negative images of thousands of British Tommies, Welshmen, Irishmen, Scots, Australian ‘diggers’, turbaned Sikhs, and French, Canadian and American soldiers. There were gasps of awe and excitement from all of us, especially Peter Burness, as he pulled out plate after plate. It seemed scarcely possible that this dusty attic, freezing in winter and no doubt stifling in the French summer, could have preserved the photographs so well. On this especially chilly winter’s day, it was sobering for all of us to think what it must have been like for the young soldiers in a French winter, nearly a hundred years earlier, as they endured the appalling conditions in the open trenches just twenty to thirty kilometres to the north-east.

Our quest for the elusive Thuillier collection was over, but our investigations into the stories behind the thousands of plates had only just begun.






PLATE 32 Labour Corps.






PLATE 33 Royal Army Medical Corps.






PLATE 34 Royal Engineers.






PLATE 35 Dorsetshire Regiment.




Identifying the Tommies (#ulink_0ca1c135-2b78-596a-81a0-fda0b20cb97c)







PLATE 36 A sad soldier of the Royal Fusiliers – a close-up from the high-resolution scan of his fatigued face shows him lost in thought. This same soldier also appears in Plate 216 (#litres_trial_promo).

In February 2011, the Australian Channel Seven TV Network aired a documentary about the discovery of the Thuillier glass plates. Shortly after that ‘Lost Diggers’ story was broadcast, we posted thousands of the Thuillier collection photographs of the Allied soldiers on the programme’s website and also on a specially created Facebook page, which still exists today. It became an unprecedented social media phenomenon for a history archive, with millions viewing the pictures online from all over the world. Within days, the volume of emails, excited phone calls, letters and Facebook messages we were receiving showed just how much the images had touched so many. Hundreds of thousands of viewers wrote us emotional and passionate accounts of their response to the faces of the Australian diggers and British Tommies in particular:

Goose bumps watching the show …

This is so wonderful, I can barely believe it’s true. Many of the faces showed signs of great fatigue and yet they managed to smile and pose for a photo forever preserving the moment in time …

A few tears shed knowing some of these fellows never made it home. What a wonderful discovery for many families around the world.

For so many of the people who have since viewed the photographs online it has become a personal odyssey to find a connection with the as yet unidentified soldiers:

These photos brought tears to my eyes. I had eight great uncles who all fought on the western front. Five of them were brothers. One of them was killed in action five weeks before Armistice Day, after surviving three years of that bloody hell. He is our only Digger out of eight that we have no photographic record of. Maybe he is one of these men.

Thank you so much for making these great photographs available. My mother lost her uncle in France in 1915. We have no info’ on him, not even a photo. We have always tried to find his records but without a regiment number, we are up against a brick wall. I sit here with tears in my eyes, wondering if he is one of these brave men. You have done a wonderful thing.

Our grand uncle … died of wounds … How amazing to think his image could be among these photos.

I carefully examined each and every photo looking for any resemblance to the many family members who fought in WW1, some of whom never returned.

Then began the calls for the Australian images to be brought home:

Don’t let them be forgotten. Bring these historical plates to their rightful home.

These photos … should be treated as national treasures and every single one of them should be brought home immediately.

These young men gave their lives in order to protect and fight for our country; these photos are an amazing part of the history of Aussie diggers in battle and the campaign they were involved in … Lest we forget.

Many relics of these men may remain in France but these treasured photos need to be honoured on Australian soil. It is now our turn to answer the call of duty and return these photos to their home for safekeeping.

Ohh I have tears of pure joy and total sadness after looking through these pics … History in front of our very own eyes … Thank you for sharing. Never forgotten.

In July 2011, with the generous support of the Seven Network’s chairman, Kerry Stokes AC, the entire Thuillier collection of around 4,000 glass photographic plates, including the British images, was purchased from the living descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the couple who had supplemented their farming income during the First World War by selling pictures to passing Allied soldiers. If Louis and Antoinette were alive today they would no doubt be chuffed and probably very surprised to see just how much passion their portraits of thousands of young soldiers from a war so long ago has aroused.






PLATE 37 An equally sad-looking soldier – no regimental badge.

In late 2011 the precious glass plates did finally ‘come home’, in a gigantic packing case, purpose-built to carry them, along with the Thuilliers’ canvas backdrop. After months of planning, cataloguing, careful cleaning and scanning, the Australian digger plates were gifted to the Australian War Memorial for permanent display. Many of the more intriguing images and the stories behind them formed the basis of a nationwide touring photographic exhibition organized by the AWM. The remaining thousands of British and other Allied soldier plates have been preserved by the Kerry Stokes Collection in a secure repository in Perth, Australia.

More than once in our research it has struck us how impermanent many of the records that we rely on today are in comparison with the handwritten files, letters, printed photographs and glass photographic plate negatives that have made this such a rich collection. As we began examining the plates, drawing on the expertise of people like Peter Burness, it was a revelation to discover how, in many ways, the photographic plates used by the Thuilliers are actually a superior storage medium to the standard celluloid photographic negative, let alone digital imaging. Not only have they already lasted nearly a century, but so much information is packed into these enormous negative plates that it was often possible for us to zoom in on a colour patch, medal ribbon or cap badge to help identify a soldier. There is something terribly poignant about being able to zoom in to the pained and weary eyes of an individual soldier – actually to see the mud on his boots and the texture of his uniform.

As we applied modern photo-processing software, it was astonishing to see faces emerge from the murk of so many plates – images that could so easily have been lost forever. We have asked ourselves many times how much of today’s history will survive to the same extent. How many personal handwritten letters have we preserved today that will record the thoughts and experiences of our loved ones for future generations to read? What was once recorded in a letter just a few decades ago is now just an electronic impulse stored on magnetic media whose lifespan can still currently only be surmised. Will the digital records of today – the photographs, emails and the writings on other online ephemera such as Facebook, Twitter and websites – allow people in a hundred years to explore the history of our present era with as many resources as remain from the First World War? How much of our heritage and experiences will be lost as contemporary storage media slowly fade or are carelessly deleted?

The process of identifying, at least by regiment, as many of the Thuillier images as possible for this book has been a painstaking and often frustrating process. Many of the soldiers were photographed in front of the distinctive painted canvas backdrop and that has been a useful fingerprint in identifying Thuillier pictures which made their way back home into family collections or regimental history books. On rare occasions the identification was easy because a particular soldier features and is actually named in one of the rare Thuillier images reproduced in regimental history books or contained in personal collections. There have been other occasions where photographs taken of soldiers after the war have allowed us to ‘match’ them with a soldier in a Thuillier image (see the Royal Fusiliers). Once identified, it has also been difficult to find out more about a particular soldier because so many of the British service files are incomplete or were destroyed completely in German bombing raids during the Second World War.






PLATE 38 An unidentified soldier. No clues as to his regiment can be seen in the photograph.




The Backdrop (#ulink_cf0fdb2d-e579-5fce-9b19-6ead46e43b5c)


One of the key clues that helped us track the Thuillier collection was the distinctive backdrop that appears behind soldiers and civilians in many of the pictures. Well before the discovery of the Thuillier portraits, historians at the Australian War Memorial had noticed the length of painted canvas in a handful of images of different soldiers held in its collection, and they were excited by what it implied. If a photographer had taken the trouble to paint a backdrop for posed photographs somewhere behind the front line, maybe there were more to be found than the dozen or so that had made their way into official collections.






PLATE 39 An excellent Thuillier image showing how the backdrop was used – the soldier is probably from the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons.

Never did we think it possible that the backdrop used by Louis and Antoinette Thuillier could have survived nearly a century in a dusty attic. But, as we fumbled around in the eaves of the family attic in Vignacourt back in early 2011, we found, wedged between two roof beams, a tight roll of canvas mounted on a wooden pole. Eager to see what was inside, but anxious not to damage it, we lugged the dusty canvas roll down the three flights of stairs to the courtyard … and gently unrolled it.






PLATE 40 Unfurling the backdrop. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)

It is a little damaged from its near-century in a draughty attic, but the distinctive double archway seen in many of the photographs is still clearly visible.






PLATE 43 Close-up of the backdrop. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)

There are hundreds of photographs in the Thuillier collection which clearly predate the painted canvas backdrop – many of them are probably pre-war images of French civilians and then, when war broke out in 1914, they feature the French soldiers who used the town as a staging post before they headed up to the front lines. As business picked up, Louis and Antoinette must have decided that a painted canvas backdrop offered a more professional look for their clients and so the first images using the backdrop began to appear.






PLATE 41 An early Thuillier photograph of a French second lieutenant, of the 4th Colonial Infantry Regiment, and his wife, without the distinctive backdrop. Likely to have been taken sometime in July 1915 when the French 1st Colonial Corps was billeted in Vignacourt.






PLATE 42 A French soldier and his family in front of the distinctive Thuillier canvas backdrop.






PLATE 44 A soldier poses in front of the Thuillier backdrop, using a chair as a prop. The distinctive high table used in many other photographs can be seen just to the left. This soldier has two good-conduct chevrons on his lower left sleeve, indicating that he has six years with a clean record of service on his army record.






PLATE 45 A soldier from the Royal Engineers. His armbands show he is a qualified signaller. Possibly taken when the engineers were in and around Vignacourt in early 1916 preparing transport links and hospitals for the Somme offensive.






PLATE 46 Soldiers of the Royal Artillery Regiment, two with good-conduct chevrons. Clearly Thuillier moved his backdrop according to the state of the weather. The soldier in Plate 44 (#ulink_99bcd87b-b06a-5819-a0eb-7959a1db9c5e) stands on a smooth cement floor in a covered area. This image is taken outside on cobblestones. It seems likely the smoother-floored area was used by Thuillier later in the war – hence this image predates Plate 44 (#ulink_99bcd87b-b06a-5819-a0eb-7959a1db9c5e). However, the tunic worn by the soldier seated left is an ‘economy tunic’ without pleated pockets and without the rifle patches over the shoulders – which was issued only in 1916.




THE VIGNACOURT BREAD BOY (#ulink_afb84022-44d7-5ff7-b9ed-1b4599e3d228)


The discovery of the Thuillier glass plate images has been as moving for many of the villagers of Vignacourt as it has been for the numerous families who have searched for their relatives among them. In November 2011 hundreds of townsfolk came to Vignacourt’s town hall to view the two Australian Seven Network television documentaries that had been produced at that time on the ‘Lost Diggers’, subtitled in French for the occasion. For the village it was a chance to learn more about a chapter in the region’s history that only a few of the elderly villagers still recalled. Around the walls of the town hall, many poster-sized prints of some of the iconic Thuillier photographs also drew an excited response. For even after nearly a hundred years, some Vignacourt families were excitedly identifying their loved ones among several of the pictures taken of civilians during the conflict.

The young lad in Plate 47 (#ulink_fdcad0ac-f181-55ff-8c72-16c3f3cf688a) was recognized by his family as Abel Théot. At the time this photograph was taken by the Thuilliers, the boy’s life was one of hardship and sadness brought about by the war. Abel was one of five brothers, two of whom died fighting in the French army against the Germans. His father was away at war, too, and Abel sold bread and pastries to Allied troops to bring in extra money to help his mother and family survive. Tragically, after this photograph was taken, Abel learned that his father had also died in the fighting; another of his brothers returned with serious wounds.






PLATE 47 Abel Théot, the Vignacourt bread boy.




How the Thuilliers Took Their Photographs (#ulink_4d1d3971-807e-59f7-8466-ef480b73862f)


It was another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, who had invented one of the most important precursors of modern photography, the daguerreotype, in the 1830s – the Polaroid of its day. The daguerreotype produced a single image, which was not reproducible. In the 1850s, more than sixty years before the outbreak of the First World War, William Henry Talbot devised the negative process in which a glass plate negative allowed any number of prints to be made. But the glass plate technology came under threat from the nascent celluloid film cameras produced by Kodak in the late 1880s. By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, black and white box brownie cameras were relatively common and it is intriguing to speculate just why Louis and Antoinette Thuillier did not opt for the much cheaper film cameras that were by then available. Perhaps the pair were purist professional photographers – and there were many right up even to the 1970s – who continued to favour glass plates because of concerns that the early celluloid films could not provide the sharp images so beautifully rendered by the older glass plate negative technology. Glass plates are still used for photography today in some scientific applications. The problem of sharpness in the early celluloid film cameras was caused by the poor lenses; and nor could early film camera technology provide a sufficiently reliable flat focal plane compared with that provided by a glass plate camera. This was because the celluloid film, although stretched across the back of the camera, still curved slightly and this made for less crisp images. All the better for amateur historians a century later, because the glass plate negatives used by the Thuilliers allow for an extremely high-quality print in comparison with the old celluloid film negatives, most of which have degraded to the point where they are unusable.











PLATES 48–49 An example of the high resolution possible from modern scanning of the Thuillier plates – the date on the Parisien newspaper in this elderly Frenchwoman’s lap can be read in the close-up image. Translated, it says either ‘Tuesday, 4 May 1915’ or ‘Tuesday, 14 May 1918’.

Another good reason for photographers like Louis and Antoinette Thuillier to use glass plates could have been one of economy: they had the option to reuse the glass plates once they had developed them and sold the positive prints. Reusing a plate would have simply entailed cleaning off the silver image on it. But the Thuilliers clearly kept most, if not all, of the plates they shot. What is exciting about this is what it suggests about their motives for taking the photographs in the first place. For if Louis and Antoinette Thuillier had only cared about their portrait subjects as commercial transactions, they could easily have recycled the plates once they had sold each soldier his picture. For whatever reason, Louis and Antoinette preserved the exposed plates; and, by the look of it, they kept nearly all of them, filling their attic with thousands. It is possible they realized the wartime portraits they were taking would one day be of enormous historical significance and worth. Even today in the Thuillier family attic there are sections of what appear to be old glass window plates from which Louis and Antoinette had cut glass in the size and shape of negatives. Glass was clearly so precious a commodity during the war that they were removing it from windows to fulfil demand.






PLATE 50 A French cavalryman of the 1st Cavalry Division writes a letter to his family on 20 June 1915.






PLATE 51The glass plate’s high resolution allows us to read what he has written: ‘My dear Jeanne and my dear little Yvette’. The division was based in Vignacourt from May to June 1915.

There is no information on the Thuilliers’ camera or cameras. Their equipment was stolen by the Nazis in 1940 when Vignacourt was evacuated during the German Somme offensive (many Vignacourt homes were looted at that time). But because there are different-sized glass plates in the surviving collection, the couple probably used a camera that allowed interchangeable sizes of backing so that different sizes of glass plates could be fitted. It was also possible to have one sheet of glass – a ‘single dark’ – or a ‘double dark’, which allowed two glass sheet exposures to be taken using a sliding magazine.






PLATE 52 This Army Services Corps soldier is reading an album called ‘Album P.A.L. 1914–1915’, which means this image must date from 1916 or later.

The basic concept of glass plate photographic cameras is no different from the more modern photographic film and printing papers. All contain an emulsion of silver-halide crystals suspended in gelatin. The plate is exposed to light in the camera as the photograph is taken, then, to ‘develop’ the image, the plate is immersed in a chemical bath to render the exposed silver halides into the metallic silver that makes the image visible. To stop the silver from reacting any further to light, the image on the plate is ‘fixed’ by immersing it in a bath of ‘hypo’ (sodium hyposulphate). Any leftover chemical then has to be washed out of the image to stop the picture from leaching.

To print copies of the plate speedily for their soldier customers, Louis and Antoinette may have used a process that did not require a darkroom to develop the printing paper in a wet bath. Known as ‘POP’ – short for printing-out paper – it allows a photographer to produce a visible image upon exposure to light without using chemicals. The plate was exposed against a sheet of light-sensitive paper, producing an image the same size as the glass sheet – a technique also known as a ‘direct contact print’. One limitation of this POP technology was that the paper print tended to fade, which perhaps explains why so few of the Thuillier prints survived the past century. Those faded pieces of yellowed cardboard sitting in the family archives of old servicemen may well be the speedy postcard snaps produced in Vignacourt by the Thuilliers.

What is even more extraordinary about the images in this book is that they are reproduced at a resolution far higher than their subjects ever saw when they purchased prints around a hundred years ago from the photographers. Methodical cleaning and high-resolution scanning have reproduced digital copies of the plates, which were then optimized using computer software such as Photoshop. The rare Thuillier images that did survive the past century are those that were rephotographed after the war using more stable photographic techniques.






PLATE 53 A sharp image of an Army Services Corps sergeant on a Douglas motorcycle. During the war the Bristol-based Douglas Company supplied more than 70,000 motorcycles. They were used by dispatch riders, signallers and engineers. The ASC sergeant pictured was probably carrying medical supplies in the attached leather cases.

The photographic plate digital scanner used to reproduce the images in this book has a resolution one hundred times better than the print paper used in 1914–18. Even though Plate 55 (#ulink_6f752107-0850-5d29-9bc0-8581ba80c8a7) below is slightly damaged, it is still possible to read this soldier’s map.






PLATES 54-55 An Australian dispatch rider’s map case. A close-up shows he has a map detailing the area north of Amiens.


































Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and the Town of Vignacourt (#ulink_6f166723-3499-5e8a-8b44-2cfef3bb7413)


We have little information about Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the pair behind the camera. What is known is that Louis was born on 29 July 1886 into a modest Picardy farming family, and that as well as working as a farmer he embraced the new technologies of the early twentieth century with zeal. He married a beautiful local girl, Antoinette Thuillier (same family name, but no relation), when he was twenty-six and started up what soon became a thriving farm machinery business.






PLATE 64 The Thuillier family’s farmyard, probably before or very early in the war, one of the earliest photographs in the collection. This is where Thuillier hung his backdrop and photographed thousands of soldiers throughout the war. The backyard still exists today – and still looks much the same.

Vignacourt locals knew Louis as ‘Peugeot’ Thuillier because he also set up a Peugeot bicycle repair shop in 1907 in addition to his own agricultural machinery hire firm. To this day the backyard of his old farmhouse complex is cluttered with rusting machinery, old wheels and the well-tooled workshop of an avid machinist who was clearly very good with his hands. At some stage Thuillier taught himself glass plate photography and he began photographing local villagers.






PLATE 56 A British supply wagon outside the Thuillier farmhouse during the First World War. Note the ‘photo’ sign in the window above the front door at the left of the image.






PLATES 57 – 58 A local Vignacourt woman poses in a beautiful polka-dot dress and a boy poses with a garland and communion Bible.






PLATES 59 – 60 Two young lads – one smoking! – pose for the Thuilliers and (right) a sobering illustration of how the war influenced young local children: this boy has a toy machine gun and uniform.

The Peugeot sign he placed on the front of his house as an advertisement to passing cyclists also appears in his images (see Plates 65–66 (#ulink_5d4e3360-0152-531c-81f7-6da053027a99), below).






PLATES 65 – 66 Exteriors of the Thuillier home, with Peugeot sign. Both soldiers are members of the Royal Horse Artillery.

Louis enlisted soon after war broke out, but his war service is something of a mystery because his service file was one of many destroyed in a bombing raid in 1940. He was a dispatch rider, taking signals and documents between positions on the front lines, a job that almost certainly cemented Louis’s lifelong passion for motorcycles (which feature in many of the Thuillier pictures, and explain the piles of motorcycle magazines in the attic). Louis was wounded and after recuperating in a hospital he was demobilized and home in Vignacourt by 1915. The war also took its toll on Antoinette’s family. She had two brothers, Louis (another Louis, to confuse matters) and Gustave. Brother Louis was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war, but he survived to return home after the Armistice. Gustave, who served with the 72nd Infantry Regiment, was killed in a German gas attack on 20 March 1918, aged twenty-four.






PLATE 61 Louis Thuillier (from the Thuillier collection), probably taken by his wife, Antoinette.






PLATE 62 Antoinette Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)






PLATE 63 Louis Thuillier in French army uniform, c. 1915, with an unidentified child (perhaps Robert Thuillier, born 1912). (Courtesy Bacquet family)

By the time Louis Thuillier returned home from his wartime service as a dispatch rider, the town was full of French troops waiting to head up to the front lines, and he began photographing them for extra money. He taught Antoinette how to take photographs as well because he also had to run the family farm. Vignacourt was becoming a key rest and hospital village behind the front lines, and the couple realized they could make good money selling portraits to the passing French and Allied soldiers.




IDENTIFYING BRITISH REGIMENTS (#ulink_498f7465-bdaa-5672-9754-acde1bdda3cb)


During the First World War every British regiment and corps had its own cap badge and it is these badges, worn on the uniform or caps of soldiers, which have allowed us to identify the individual British Army regiments in the Thuillier collection. For example, close examination of Plates 68 and 69 reveals that all the soldiers featured have the distinctive Royal Welsh Fusiliers cap badge.






PLATE 67 A version of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers cap badge.






PLATES 68 – 69 A corporal and a lance corporal of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (left), and a major (right). The Royal Welsh Fusiliers were probably one of the first British regiments to be based around Vignacourt in late September 1915.

A diary kept by Abbé Leclerq, the Vignacourt village priest at the time,


reveals that the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of the British Army’s oldest regiments, was one of the first regiments to be based in and around Vignacourt during the First World War. On 27 September 1915 he noted the arrival of the first British troops in the area – the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of the South Wales Borderers regiments and a platoon of Royal Engineers, who settled in and around Vignacourt in billets and nearby camps. Vignacourt was to become home to the staff of the British 13th Army Corps between January and July of 1916. The Royal Engineers are very nearly the most photographed unit among those in the Thuillier collection, probably because, as Abbé Leclerq recorded, they came to Vignacourt so early in the war, and units of engineers were there for the duration.






PLATE 70 Two soldiers of the Royal Engineers Corps pose in the Thuilliers’ farmyard. Both wear armbands indicating they were in the Royal Engineers Signal Service. The soldier on the left wears the distinctive ‘T’ of the territorial force on his left shoulder.






PLATE 71 A lance corporal in the Royal Engineers photographed in the Thuilliers’ farmyard. Probably taken in the first half of 1916






PLATES 72-73 The haggard faces of these Royal Engineers, especially the man seated on the right (and shown in close-up above), suggest these men have not been long away from the front lines.






PLATE 74 A young soldier from the Royal Engineers Signal Service.






PLATE 75 Another image featuring the young man from Plate 74 (#ulink_274e588b-7a74-56b2-9873-2bbb633a0acc) wearing a Royal Engineers cap badge and posing with a friend. Both men wear shorts and the lad on the right is wearing the winter service dress ‘Gorblimey’ cap with its distinctive flaps issued in early 1915. This picture is probably from the warmer months in 1916, the year after the Royal Engineers first arrived in Vignacourt and before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in July.

The Thuillier images also trace the movement of French troops through the Picardy town, many of them dressed in colourful, antiquated nineteenth-century-style uniforms; there are even cavalrymen posing with their lances, relics of an earlier type of warfare. The British and the French both deployed lancers in early First World War battles but they were woefully ineffective against the machine gun and modern artillery.






PLATE 76 A French cavalryman holds the 2.97-metre steel lance used by dragoon and cavalry regiments during the war. The lance was soon abandoned after the war’s disastrous early battles using such antiquated weapons.

It is sobering to think of the hell these French troops went into, their quaint and colourful nineteenth-century-era uniforms absurdly impractical for the industrial warfare they were to face. Just like the Germans on the other side, everyone thought the war would be over soon. On the Somme alone, within just a few months, from 1 July to 18 November 1916, when the Battle of the Somme was finally called off, there would be 195,000 French casualties (and 425,000 British).






PLATE 77 A rushed wedding before the new husband heads off to defend his homeland? A French soldier with his bride.






PLATE 78 ‘Honour to 9 May’: almost certainly a reference by these French soldiers to the disastrous Second Battle of Artois a year earlier (9 May–18 June 1915), which resulted in 102,500 French and 27,809 British casualties but failed to break through the German lines. The shadow of another negative – featuring a ghostly image of a soldier on horseback – has adhered to this plate from when they were stacked in the Thuillier attic.






PLATE 79 Proud French colonial troops, cavalrymen of the 8th Regiment of Hussars, strike a pose – summer 1915.






PLATE 80 The French soon abandoned such nineteenth-century uniforms because their bright colours made them easy targets for German gunners.






PLATE 81 French soldiers pose with a dedication to the mitrailleurs – the machine-gunners – probably honouring their comrades who fell in the battles of 1915.






PLATE 82 Moroccan tirailleurs. The soldier on the right sports the typical Berber haircut of the day.






PLATE 83 Moroccan light infantrymen – or tirailleurs – in Vignacourt. North African tirailleurs served with distinction on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. They were assigned their own regiment in 1914 and suffered heavy losses.

In late 1915 Vignacourt came under the military control of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), and the Thuillier images reflect that change, thousands of the plates showing British Tommies and kilt-wearing Scots.






PLATE 84 A Thuillier image of some hard-looking Scots soldiers in kilts, most probably Gordon Highlanders.

Louis Thuillier also roamed the streets and the nearby army camps in search of subjects to photograph.






PLATE 85 A dapper lieutenant colonel with the South Staffordshire Regiment in front of the stairs that today still lead up to the Thuillier attic where the photographic plates were discovered. He is a decorated officer who has been twice wounded, as indicated by the two wound stripes on his left sleeve. The three small chevrons on his right sleeve show he is in his third year of overseas service. These chevrons were introduced in January 1918, which places this image in the final year of the war.






PLATE 86 Royal Engineers dispatch riders in Vignacourt – a typically humorous and informal Thuillier picture.






PLATE 87 A sergeant and a private soldier in front of their tent, probably at one of the many military camps.






PLATE 88 These men have adopted a local dog.






PLATE 89 Two British lads or the Royal Field Artillery – friends or perhaps brothers? – send a message home during the colder months on the Western Front – possibly leading into the winter of 1916–17. For reasons of security ‘Somewhere in France’ was all they were allowed to say about their location. They are wearing variations of the animal-skin vests the soldiers used to keep warm.






PLATE 90 A Royal Engineers private, ‘somewhere in France’.




WE ARE SEVEN (#ulink_28e7e101-d55d-5cab-ab44-c65b27d25cb4)


In 1798, the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a poem called ‘We Are Seven’, asking:

A simple Child,

That lightly draws its breath,

And feels its life in its every limb,

What should it know of death? …

In the poem, the questioner meets a little girl who initially seems to know very little about death because she appears to be in denial about the death of her siblings and she still sings and talks to them. It ends, though, with the notion that maybe the little girl knows more about death than the adult to whom she is speaking. The little girl refuses to be wretched about death or to forget about the dead, and she gets on with her life as happily as she can:

How many are you, then, said I,

If they two are in heaven?

Quick was the little maid’s reply,

O Master! We are seven.



But they are dead; those two are dead!

Their spirits are in heaven!

Twas throwing words away; for still

The little Maid would have her will

And said, Nay, we are seven!

Perhaps these seven young British soldiers posing in front of this sign simply did not realize the significance of their words in terms of Wordsworth’s poem, but is it possible they were sending a gentle message to their loved ones back home? That whatever happened to them in the war, they preferred their families not to become incapacitated by grief – or ever to forget them, just like the little girl.






PLATE 91 ‘We Are Seven’ might be a reference by these soldiers of the Machine Gun Corps to a William Wordsworth poem of the same name.

Early in the war Vignacourt was designated as one of the main rest areas for Allied soldiers. An easy day’s march from the Somme front lines, it offered exhausted troops the opportunity to rest and revive themselves in the local bars, called estaminets, but it was close enough to allow an easy deployment back into the fighting. The town also had a large hospital and the engineers helped build a new railway siding that brought wounded men straight from the front. There was also a small British airfield (but most of the aviation casualties at Vignacourt came from the main Allied base at Poulainville). What made Vignacourt especially popular with the soldiers was that it had large bathing and resupply facilities for the soldiers. The military bath was one of Vignacourt’s main attractions. Soldiers filthy and lice-ridden from the front lines would be issued with a new uniform, which perhaps explains why so many of the soldiers in the images are not wearing the requisite regimental identification – because often they had only just been issued with fresh clothing. In the images below, the soldiers appear to have newly washed and combed hair, ready to have their photographs taken for loved ones back home; or perhaps they have just had a bath and been issued with a new uniform after weeks in the trenches.






PLATE 92 This private with his clean uniform and freshly combed hair probably wanted a photograph to remind him of this French family who perhaps boarded him as a billet while he was behind the lines. Most of these French villagers never saw their British soldier friends again.






PLATE 93 A sergeant from the Durham Light Infantry with a French family and a family member or friend from the French navy. Perhaps the sergeant was billeted with them in Vignacourt.






Vignacourt soon became a veritable United Nations of nationalities from across the British and French colonial empires. As well as soldiers from the French and British armies, including English, Scots, Welsh and Irishmen, there were Australians, Canadians, Moroccans and Nepalese soldiers all passing through, often sharing a glass of wine or two in the local bars.

The Chinese men in the Thuillier images were all non-combatants; while China joined the Allied nations in declaring war on Germany on 14 August 1917, the French government had earlier contracted their Chinese counterparts in May 1916 to supply 50,000 labourers – sadly, known by a racial slur as ‘coolies’. The British followed suit to form the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) and the men from that corps are probably the Chinese nationals featured in these images since Vignacourt was a British base. They were prodigiously hard workers, labouring long hours every day digging trenches, transporting supplies and building and repairing roads and railways. They came mainly from Shandong Province but also from Liaoning, Jilin, Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, Anhui and Gansu. About 140,000 Chinese labourers served on the Western Front, several winning awards for bravery, and at least 2,000 (and probably many more) died during the conflict, mostly from the Spanish influenza epidemic at the end of the war. All were classified as war casualties and are buried in graveyards on the Somme battlefields.






PLATE 94 Chinese labourers in a relaxed pose with a local child.






PLATES 95 – 96 A Chinese Labour Corps soldier with CLC insignia over his breast pocket and (right) the same soldier dressed in civilian clothes.






PLATES 97 – 98 Chinese labourers in Vignacourt.






PLATE 99 A Chinese labourer with local children.






PLATE 100 The Chinese labour camp at Vignacourt.






PLATE 101 A delightful picture of a child, probably Robert Thuillier, the photographers’ son, with Indian Rajput Cipaye cavalrymen.






PLATE 102 Gurkhas from Nepal.






PLATE 103 An Indian cavalryman towers over a local lady.






PLATE 104 Nepalese Gurkhas fix the camera with their trademark gaze.

The first Australians moved into the Somme valley in July 1916, and Vignacourt was soon full of the Australian diggers as well as British Tommies. Within weeks, the Australian and British soldiers from here would experience a baptism of blood just to the north of the river Somme at a town called Pozières. There were also large Australian camps very close by, at Pernois and Flesselles, and many of the diggers who appear in the photographs are likely to have walked several kilometres into Vignacourt from those camps to have their picture taken by the Thuilliers. One of the best descriptions of these rest towns appears in the book The Gallant Company: An Australian Soldier’s Story of 1915–18, by Harold R. Williams, in which he describes going to a rest camp at the town of Buire:

Its one main street was churned into mud with the ceaseless stream of transports and marching infantry passing to and from the line. Its inhabitants consisted of aged men, frightened looking children and women with care-lined faces … Every second house was an estaminet which dispensed vin blanc and vin rouge of dubious vintage. These places were open for troops only during certain hours … its immediate merit was that the Army here provided steaming hot baths … no words can describe the desire for it of men whose bodies and clothes were overrun with vermin and foul with trench mud … Dried, we went to the store and were issued with garments in lieu of those we had handed in. Sometimes this underclothing was new, but mostly it was the laundered and disinfected wear of others who had been through the baths. Invariably these contained the eggs of lice which survived treatment and eventually hatched out …




So while it was a supply and support hub for the war effort, Vignacourt became a place primarily for rest and recreation – a sanctuary from the horrors of the war just twenty to thirty kilometres to the north-east.






PLATE 105 Soldiers of the Australian 5th Battalion pose with Robert Thuillier.






PLATE 106 A smiling Australian corporal in the Signals Corps sits a young local girl on his lap.

Unlike so many of the soldiers they photographed, Louis and his wife survived the war. Perhaps because he had been exposed to so many motorcycles during the conflict – there are many in his photographs – Louis indulged a passion post-war for motorbike racing and, ever one with an eye for an opportunity, in 1920 he became a dealer in army surplus. Judging from his attic, and the mountains of early motorcycle-racing magazines strewn around his photographic gear, it seems the Thuillier photographic plates were left exactly as they were immediately the war ended, forgotten until Robert Crognier first tried and then Laurent Mirouze succeeded in bringing them to the world’s attention decades later. There are no plates in the Thuillier collection beyond about 1919 or 1920, so it seems likely Louis and Antoinette wanted a break from photography after the war years.






PLATE 107 British Army Services Corps soldiers with troop-carrier vehicle in the Vignacourt main street.






PLATE 108 Another image of ASC soldiers with troop vehicles in Vignacourt. The churned-up condition of the road is clear.






PLATE 109 British Royal Flying Corps soldiers outside the nearby aerodrome.






PLATE 110 A rare Thuillier image of the nearby British aerodrome at Vignacourt. This is a British Royal Aircraft Factory SE5 or SE5A biplane.






PLATE 111 A private of the Royal Engineers on his motorcycle. The chevrons on his lower right sleeve show he is in his third year of overseas service and date this image to January 1918 or later.






PLATE 112 A proud young Tommy from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment with all his kit.






PLATE 113 Two seated sergeants (the one on the left has a Military Medal ribbon on his left breast). A corporal stands on the left and a private on the right, regiment unknown.

There is a tragic twist to the story of Louis Thuillier, related by his nephew Robert Crognier, in a letter he wrote to Laurent Mirouze shortly after they met, in 1989. For years after the war, Louis struggled with depression and, despite the concern and care of his family, he withdrew from them and sank into a deep despair. One early morning in January 1931, a furious knocking on the door of their house woke Robert’s parents. It was the husband of Louis’s sister, Louisa, who lived nearby. They were told ‘Louis Peugeot’ had committed suicide at the age of forty-four. He had shot himself in the head.

There is no one from the family who knows for sure what drove Louis to end his life. But it is entirely plausible that he was traumatized and pushed into depression by his own wartime experiences; tormented by the memory of the thousands of young men who went on to their deaths after sitting or standing before his camera in his Vignacourt courtyard. There was not the understanding back then that there is today of the effects of battlefield trauma on a human soul.

Louis’s suicide perhaps explains why the extraordinary photographic collection was placed in the family attic after his death and forgotten. For Antoinette, who lived until the 1970s, it may well have been too painful for her to recall this enormously creative period during the First World War when she and her husband lived such a vital and social life, welcoming soldiers from all over the world into their home, Louis often working well into the night to print the latest photographs.

The couple had two children, both boys, Robert and Roger. Robert was born in 1912 and features in many of the ‘Lost Diggers’ wartime pictures. Roger was born after the war, in 1920.






PLATE 114 A Thuillier family photograph – Robert and Roger Thuillier, after the war. (Courtesy Bacquet family)

For the many Allied soldiers, a child’s innocent face was doubtless a blessed relief after everything they had experienced in the trenches. The delightful, happy images of the town’s children sitting with soldiers suggests they clearly enjoyed playing with the troops, many of whom were fathers themselves.






PLATE 115 Soldiers, possibly of the Army Services Corps, with Roger Thuillier, on the right, and another little friend.






PLATE 116 A slightly damaged plate of Royal Engineers soldiers posing with a Thuillier child and another local.






PLATE 117 Two Army Cyclist Corps privates with a young French girl.






PLATE 118 An Army Services Corps lance corporal with bandolier and spurs, posing in front of a bus.






PLATE 119 A Royal Artillery Regiment soldier (left) with two Army Services Corps men, clearly in the winter.






PLATE 120 A classic informal Thuillier image of three Royal Artillery soldiers with three Australian diggers and a young Thuillier relative.

Robert Thuillier never married and had no children. Roger’s children are Madame Eliane Bacquet, born in 1945, and Christian Thuillier, born in 1947, both of whom we have already met. It is with their kind cooperation that the entire Thuillier collection was carefully removed from the family farmhouse attic, cleaned, packed and then brought to Australia for preservation.




The War (#ulink_bf07593a-1c9d-5c65-b23e-fb7d3ed72a41)


On 28 June 1914, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, unleashed the apocalypse we now know as the First World War. Militaristic Prussians had long wanted to expand Germany’s empire; the German Kaiser Wilhelm II had launched an arms race with Britain, and scrambled to snap up colonies and global resources. After years of simmering tensions, the shooting of the Archduke in the Balkans was the spark that ignited the war. One by one the great powers of Europe plunged into the abyss as treaty obligations pushed nations on to either side of the conflict. France, bound by treaty to Russia, found itself at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Within weeks, Germany had invaded Belgium, aiming for Paris. By 4 August 1914, Britain and soon after, its empire, had also entered the war. By late September 1914, the Allied armies and their German adversaries were locked in a trench-warfare stalemate – each side dug in to a roughly matched pair of trench lines running often just metres apart, over a distance of 700 kilometres from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast of Belgium.






PLATE 121 French soldiers head north-west along the Rue de Daours in Vignacourt towards the front line. Because the men are no longer wearing the red trousers originally issued to soldiers, this is likely to be during 1915. As the war went on, the French changed their uniform to the bluey-grey tunic worn by soldiers in this picture instead of the earlier colourful uniform which was an impractical relic of the Franco-Prussian War.

Attempts by each side to outflank the other had failed and the only solution was ‘digging in’ to trenches. The stalemate was created by modern artillery and the new machine guns, capable of extraordinary rates of fire.

During the American Civil War, just a generation earlier, soldiers took a minute and a half to reload their single-shot muskets, and so the slow rate of fire meant a frontal assault was not too catastrophic an undertaking. But by the beginning of the First World War, military strategy lagged behind new military technologies. A single machine-gunner on the Western Front could pump out a thousand bullets in the time it took a Civil War soldier to reload. Sadly, it wasn’t until later in the war that both sides began to grasp the strategies necessary to combat this new technology of killing. Military commanders persisted with a strategy of attrition, ordering troops over the top into full-frontal assaults against the enemy trenches.






PLATE 122 Trench warfare. An intriguing picture of what appears to be an Austrian mortar battalion in the trenches. Historian Laurent Mirouze believes this plate may well have been obtained by the French 47th Division which was billeted in Vignacourt. They had just returned to France from fighting with the Italians against the Austrians in northern Italy. Perhaps the intelligence service of the 47th asked Thuillier for prints off these plates.

In December 1915 General Sir Douglas Haig was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British armies in France in place of Field Marshal Sir John French; French had commanded through the disastrous Battle of Loos in September, losing tens of thousands of troops for little gain, and hopes of a quick victory now seemed remote. As John Keegan has written, Field Marshal French

… had been worn down by the attrition of his beloved army of regulars, the old sweats of his Boer War glory days, the keen young troopers of the cavalry in which he had been raised, the eager colonels who had been his companions on the veldt and in the hunting field. The death of so many of them – there had been 90,000 casualties among the original seven infantry divisions by November 1914, rather more than a hundred per cent of mobilised strength – afflicted him …




But there was one huge difference beginning to show by the start of 1916: as Haig planned the big breakthrough in the German lines, Lord Kitchener’s massive enlistment drive had allowed the formation of six ‘New Armies’ – each five divisions strong – to supplement the existing (now very depleted) eleven regular army divisions and the twenty-eight infantry divisions of the territorials. It meant that by the spring of 1916 Britain would have seventy divisions available for a massive offensive aimed at breaking the German lines.






PLATE 123 Royal Artillery soldiers pose with what appears to be a 6-inch howitzer on a Vignacourt street during winter on the Western Front. The wooden-spoked wheels were often fitted with girdles to get the gun over mud. One of the British Army’s most important weapons during the war, these guns fired 22.4 million rounds on the Western Front.

In late December 1915 Haig agreed with French General Joffre that 1916 would be the year that France and Britain mounted a joint offensive at the point where their two armies met in the middle of the Western Front, on the Somme. The Allied lines along this section of the Western Front – beautiful lush countryside of rolling green hills and chalky soil – had been relatively quiet since 1914 and the Germans had exploited the calm to massively reinforce their own lines, building huge underground bunkers, burying communications cables and creating arcs of fire with machine guns and barbed wire which made crossing no man’s land towards their lines a near-suicidal undertaking. Facing them were twenty relatively less well-prepared Allied divisions – most of them the New Army British recruits, the patriotic citizens who had rushed to join the Pals battalions – and there was a small number of regular army units. There were also the territorials, who had only been in France for six months; this meant that most of the Allied infantry had little or no experience of combat at all.

General Haig transformed the thirty kilometres west of the Somme front lines into a massive armed camp, building new roads and railway lines, artillery emplacements and shell dumps, that would provide the support for the massive infantry attack. Even at Vignacourt, a brand-new casualty clearing station was being built and, as the soldiers caroused in the estaminets and restaurants of Vignacourt and nearby Amiens’s red light district, all knew there was hell to pay on the horizon.

Haig’s plan was to break the German lines by levelling their front lines with a massive bombardment in the week before the attack. Nineteen British and three French divisions would then advance across no man’s land in the expectation that the enemy would be so shattered that barbed wire could be cut and their trench lines seized, allowing them to advance into the open country behind. As John Keegan explains, Haig and his advisers were so confident of the impact of their artillery that ‘… they had decided not to allow the inexperienced infantry to advance by the tried and tested means of “fire and movement”, when some lay down to cover with rifle volleys the advance of the rest, but to keep them moving forward upright and in straight lines’.


The advancing troops would walk straight across with a creeping barrage of artillery falling ahead of them, which was designed to keep the Germans out of their parapets before the Allies were on top of them. But, as history records, the coming attack would prove to be an unmitigated disaster; all the Allied expectations would be dashed in a dreadful and bloody carnage of machine-gun- and shellfire. And, as Keegan comments, the generals should have known: ‘The simple truth of 1914–1918 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers.’




As will be evident in the following photographs, what makes them so special is their intimacy and humour. Madame Thuillier took many of the portraits and perhaps it was the sight of her beautiful face that sparked a smile from the weary men straight from the trenches. It is the very special humanity and humour of the Thuillier pictures, their normality at a time when so many of these young men went off to their deaths, that makes them so distinctive. Perhaps these soldiers realized their chances of surviving this war unscathed were remote and that this was a last opportunity to send a photograph back home.






PLATE 124 These three soldiers from an unidentified regiment wear identity bracelets on their wrists. The flags on the sleeve of the private in the middle show he is a qualified signaller. His friends hold the rank chevrons of a corporal (the soldier on the left) and lance corporal.

Most of the photographs are of British soldiers and a few airmen, Scots in their kilts and English, Welsh and Irish regiments. But there were also Indians, Nepalese and a host of other nationalities from across the British Empire. For one brief, horrific moment in history they were all thrust together into a brutal, ghastly killing maw only a short distance from the ordinary daily life of this small French country town. And when those soldiers came to rest, recuperate and nurse their wounds before they returned to the front lines, Vignacourt was where they relaxed and tried to forget the war.






PLATE 125 The service caps on the ground represent several famous British regiments: (left to right) Essex, Royal Berkshire, Suffolk (two caps) and Norfolk.

During research for this book, the common and frequently voiced refrain from descendants of First World War veterans is how little their fathers or grandfathers ever spoke about their experiences on the Western Front. Sebastian Faulks described this conspiracy of silence admirably in his historical novel Birdsong through his fictional character Captain Stephen Wraysford, writing of his time on the Western Front:

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over, we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.




This unwillingness by the soldiers who came home to tell of what they had seen perhaps explains why the Thuillier images, nearly a century on, now arouse so much emotion. One hundred years’ passing has healed much of the initial grief felt by the families of those who died, those who were horribly maimed or those who were simply never seen or heard of again. The temptation to put that horror in the past, to tell the children never to talk about it, must have been intense. Now, with the centenary of 1914–18, there is renewed focus on the grief but there is also an intense pride and curiosity. The names of the battles of the First World War stand as grim metaphors for suffering: Mons, Ypres, Arras, the Somme, Fromelles, Pozières, Passchendaele … and the men who fought in them are long dead. But the soldiers you see in these pages strode those fields; many died, many were wounded and every one of them suffered.

‘Never before in our history had such an army been gathered, and never again would such an army be seen … True we launched greater armies and won greater victories in the two years that followed; but – the very flower of a race can bloom but once in a generation. The flower of our generation bloomed and perished during the first four months of the First Battle of the Somme. We shall not look upon their like again.’

Major J. H. Beith in The Willing Horse (1921) by Ian Hay
















York and Lancaster Regiment (#ulink_30dd2a02-c261-5c8f-9fbe-813c6cd13cf0)







PLATE 126 The cap badge of the York and Lancaster Regiment.






PLATE 127 Two of the highest-ranking officers identified in the Thuillier collection: 9th Battalion York and Lancaster commander Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Addison (left) poses with his second-in-command Major Harry Lewis (right) at Vignacourt in late March 1916. On the following 1 July, both men elected to lead their men into battle on the first day of the Somme – and both would die, within three months of this photograph being taken.

‘Going in with the lads’

By the time the photograph above was taken, these two high-ranking officers of the 9th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment had been through more than eighteen months on the Western Front, including the Battle of Loos in late September 1915. For months since the disastrous British losses at Loos, the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Addison, and his second-in-command, Major Harry Lewis, had pushed their men – most of them Yorkshire miners – extremely hard in training near the French town of Saint-Omer, preparing them for an assault somewhere on the entrenched German front lines that they knew was soon to come. Both officers finally learned the attack would be on the Somme when, in January 1916, their 9th York and Lancaster Battalion was deployed 100 kilometres south from Saint-Omer to Vignacourt. We know this photograph was taken sometime in late March 1916, in the final weeks of their time there – and, sadly, we also now know it to be the final months of both their lives.

It is wonderful to be able to identify these two dignified-looking senior officers because their faces and story might so easily have been lost in the fog of war; and they are two of the highest-ranking officers identified up to now in the Thuillier images. For within a few months of their photographs being taken by the Thuilliers, Lieutenant Colonel Addison and Major Lewis would be two of the thousand or so British officers who would die ‘on the German wire’ on the very first day of the Somme. We only know who they are because, over half a century later, in February 1970, an elderly gentleman by the name of Philip Brocklesby, who had been a lieutenant in the 13th York and Lancasters, and was clearly a chum of Addison and Lewis, took the trouble to remember both men because, he lamented, so little was told of their steadfastness and courage in the regiment’s official history. He sent his story and a faded print of the Thuillier image to the regimental journal’s editors.

Brocklesby had been an orderly room clerk private with the 9th from May to November 1915, no doubt winning a commission after Loos, but he wrote of the warm affection and regard in which all the men of the 9th held both Addison and Lewis. Of Colonel Addison he quoted one soldier describing him as a ‘pleasant, quiet, Regular officer recalled from half-pay, not a dynamic man but a responsible soldier with right principles about training troops’.








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