Trench Life

[PhilB]

With the approach of Armistice Day, this picture is, to me, a timely reminder of just how awful and miserable trench life must have been. And those guys stuck it for months and months. Phil B

[Apache IP]

....and months.

I was quite struck by Tommy and Deaths Men. So far two of my favorite books about the war.

That picture embodies all that I could imagine about trench warfare...and there are worse than that one.

[Apache IP]

Where and what year was the picture taken? Is there any special context we need to place it in as we approach Armistice Day other than the obvious?

[Chris Boonzaier]

"""Awaking from a leaden sleep, I saw the four corpses that the sappers had reached from underneath, hooking and then hauling them into the sap with ropes. Each of them had several adjoining wounds, bullet-holes an inch or so apart--the mitrailleuse had fired fast. The body of Mesnil André was not found, and his brother Joseph did some mad escapades in search of it. He went out quite alone into No Man's Land, where the crossed fire of machine-guns swept it three ways at once and constantly. In the morning, dragging himself along like a slug, he showed over the bank a face black with mud and horribly wasted. They pulled him in again, with his face scratched by barbed wire, his hands bleeding, with heavy clods of mud in the folds of his clothes, and stinking of death. Like an idiot be kept on saying, "He's nowhere." He buried himself in a corner with his rifle, which he set himself to clean without hearing what was said to him, and only repeating "He's nowhere."

It is four nights ago since that night, and as the dawn comes once again to cleanse the earthly Gehenna, the bodies are becoming definitely distinct.

Barque in his rigidity seems immoderately long, his arms lie closely to the body, his chest has sunk, his belly is hollow as a basin. With his head upraised by a lump of mud, he looks over his feet at those who come up on the left; his face is dark and polluted by the clammy stains of disordered hair, and his wide and scalded eyes are heavily encrusted with blackened blood. Eudore seems very small by contrast, and his little face is completely white, so white as to remind you of the be-flowered face of a pierrot, and it is touching to see that little circle of white paper among the gray and bluish tints of the corpses. The Breton Biquet, squat and square as a flagstone, appears to be under the stress of a huge effort; he might be trying to uplift the misty darkness; and the extreme exertion overflows upon the protruding cheek-bones and forehead of his grimacing face, contorts it hideously, sets the dried and dusty hair bristling, divides his jaws in a spectral cry, and spreads wide the eyelids from his lightless troubled eyes, his flinty eyes; and his hands are contracted in a clutch upon empty air.

Barque and Biquet were shot in the belly; Eudore in the throat. In the dragging and carrying they were further injured. Big Lamuse, at last bloodless, had a puffed and creased face, and the eyes were gradually sinking in their sockets, one more than the other. They have wrapped him in a tent-cloth, and it shows a dark stain where the neck is. His right shoulder has been mangled by several bullets, and the arm is held on only by strips of the sleeve and by threads that they have put in since. The first night he was placed there, this arm hung outside the heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled up on a lump of earth, touched passers-by in the face; so they pinned the arm to the greatcoat.

A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these beings with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.

When we see them we say, "They are dead, all four"; but they are too far disfigured for us to say truly, "It is they," and one must turn away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left among us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away. """

Lest we forget? ... I sometimes think to many people have already.....

[Apache IP]

Forgive me, but I am not learned enough on the subject. The wonderful yet horrible passage above - does it reference the soldiers in the picture?

[Chris Boonzaier]

No, but I am sure the men in the picture could relate to it.

All the best

Chris

[PhilB]

The picture was on http://www.geocities.com/~worldwar1/default.html

Many were of dead and mutilated men, but this one enabled me to empathise with the men who were compelled to suffer conditions which one could really describe as hellish. Phil B

[Broznitsky]

Can anybody advise if those are living French poilus, and dead Germans, or are the bodies French?

[Patrick]

Evening ,

Picture published in illustration , its a partial section

And has as caption , on hour after the attack

German trench taken at bayonet point at Haut Meuse

Have also seen same picture with caption ,mentioning Les Eparges

Assume bodies are German , as censorship did not permit showing

Dead bodies from its own army ,

just like no pictures of fallen Tomies where shown in the English papers .

here is the other left half of the image ,

very informative also as to the looks of the soldier

upon the death corpses , a penny for his thoughts !

@+

Patrick

[Landsturm]

I too have seen Les Eparges associated with this photo. Year is almost definately 1915, and early part of it.