Over the top - WWI ordinary men now dressed up to die

 

Trench warfare (p.275, Britain at War; 2004 Richard Holmes)

The Battle of the Somme, July to November 1916, destroyed people and their relationships, aspirations, expertise, and memories; as well as all manner of living thing both plant and animal, together with their habitats. Materiel, too, was destroyed in the process. Later on, additional Somme battles continued, too. This snapshot shows the British point of view with men young and old lining their trench, some volunteers and others conscripted, some from the British Isles and others from the many countries administered by the British Empire. The artillery shells and mortar rounds bursting around them and the bullets from rifles and from machine guns made no distinction between one man and the next, nor between one belligerent side and the other. Death filled the fields on both sides.

Turning an anthropological lens on the moment captured, it is possible to imagine the layers of meaning attached to the image and the lives recorded in the click of the shutter. The photographer likely waited for a lull in shooting before quickly setting up the composition and exposing the film from this position above the relative safety of the ditch. He probably had an assignment or deadline to photograph and create prints for a newspaper or magazine. In the eyes of the soldiers, the stranger was there one minute and gone the next, having stolen a few glimpses of the location and those assigned to stand in harm's way. Some readers of the newspaper or magazine may have studied the image in search of a familiar face. Most readers, though, glanced at the image only long enough to take in the overall feel of the crowding, danger, and dirt. The photo functioned as anonymous illustration rather than documentation of a dear family member known personally or more casually as an acquaintance. People in 2004 when the book carrying this archival image was published may think of a grandfather or great grandfather touched by the events of July 1914 to November 1918. Other present-day viewers may drain any personal details or meaning from the troops wearing the British uniforms and perceive only "the army," forgetting that parallel meanings and dangers persisted in the other armies entangled by the military alliances obligating them to enter the armed conflict on one side or the other at great cost.

As an exercise in meaning-making, reviving the humanity of the people recorded on the print, there are several layers to peel away from the 2004 reprint before arriving at the moment that the photographer composed the image and snapped the picture, freezing it for all time, making something viewed generations later, long after the subjects were destroyed on the mud or died from wounds soon after the attack or at a later date. One layer to remove is the 2004 book: stripping off the text that frames page 275 and the caption assigned the photo. Suppose that you have the original photographic paper showing the scene and dating to a day or so from the time the image was recorded. Holding that vintage photo paper is a tangible link to the photographer's hand and by proxy, also, to the brief visit he made to the trench to capture the scene for readers. Probably something analogous was happening in the trenches of Axis armies, too: photographers preparing images for readers back at home.

Now diving into the frame of the photo to arrive at the muddy ground itself, what kinds of meanings are mingling around the time that the photographer comes upon the view? For an outsider, maybe like the photographer, the sights and sounds and smells are anonymous of "all soldiers universally" or at least all those dressed in the British Expeditionary Force clothing. But to all of the men in the photo, there is some relationship to each other: impersonally at the level of rank and military code of conduct including rules of engagement, at the organizational level of a fighting group such as 4-man squad, personally at the interpersonal level (some joined in whole neighborhoods or workplaces as "pals" to go through training and deployment without being separated from each other, except by injury or death), and some built new friendships in the course of training or deployment in the heat of danger. Among those recorded in this fraction of a second, many would be on a first-name basis, and to greater or lesser degree they might know something of the other man's family and hometown, along with personal habits and dreams and memories. In other words, what at first glance is an old black and white photo of a faraway armed conflict leading only to destruction, upon closer consideration is a bundle of interrelationships and personal meanings mingled with uncertainty about their chances of surviving the next hour or day or week. Formal structures of control and command jostle with seismic rumbling underfoot coming from existential doubts and suspicions and worries: amplified meaning from rules are cheek by jowl with expanded perception from the meaninglessness of events. Service to the nation (or at least to one's fellow trench fellows) on the one hand and extinction of self or others on the other hand.

In the end, this photo has now been republished over the decades and surrounded by the words of various authors with or without direct, personal experience of trenches and friends killed by obliteration or gently in an instant or slowly one mustard gas lungful at a time. Depending on the placement and size of the image on the page of text, readers may or may not glimpse something of the original meaning when the men were frozen in time. Only those present when the lens clicked can give a first-person account of the time that photographer framed a shot and then was gone, but to them this scene was more of a family photo than somebody's newspaper illustration or something to add visual interest to history textbooks of generations to come.

Perhaps there is a way in 2024 to honor those in the composition, and to honor the one making the image for others to see, and tacitly also to honor the brothers in arms in the opposite trenches facing those shown here. Rather than to dismiss the old-timey uniforms, doctrine of digging trenches for defense, and deadly but (today) outdated arms, taking the time and supplying the imagination in order to give them personalities, names, humanity, and connections with others; to see them as people only temporarily installed as soldiers but in the whole as being much more than name, rank, and service (serial) number. Allowing belligerents of all sides to be whole persons instead of cardboard cutouts and caricatures restores some dignity and agency to what turned out to be for many of them a violent death and hope-filled life cut short. In this photo, it may well be all were dead or wounded only hours following this photo, or became casualties maybe within a week or two.