The Lost Tommies by Ross Coulthart
The Lost Tommies by Ross Coulthart
It owes its existence to a string of coincidences. Ross Coulthart, an Australian journalist, heard that some old photos from the First World War had been spotted in a small town called Vignacourt in northern France. On further inquiry, he found that in 1916 Vignacourt was a rest area and casualty clearing station for thousands of allied troops moving up to and back from the battlefields of the Somme. He learnt, too, that a local couple, Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, had hit on the idea of taking portrait photos of soldiers passing through the town to send home to their anxious families.
Acting on these hints, Coulthart went to France and located the Thuilliers’ descendants. They took him to the couple’s farmhouse, now derelict and deserted, and in an attic, up an ancient wooden staircase, he found three chests containing over 4,000 glass photographic plates. With modern scanning technology, they yield astonishingly clear images, giving a resolution many times higher than was possible when they were taken. You can read the date on a newspaper, the time on a wristwatch.
The many hundreds of soldiers who stare out from Coulthart’s pages, alone or in groups, are from various nations. There are French hussars, Indian cavalrymen, Scots highlanders, Gurkhas and many Australians. But the great majority are English tommies from the county infantry regiments. Sometimes they pose with local people, especially children, as if they wished to retain some contact with innocence despite their deadly mission. Sometimes one or two of the Thuilliers’ farm dogs are co-opted into the group to give a touch of homeliness. Often nothing is known about the soldiers themselves apart from the corps or regiment on their cap badges. Their expressions are infinitely varied: mischievous, ironic, bewildered, apprehensive, stoical, haggard. Some of them lark about. One group have substituted Moroccan fezzes for their regimental headgear and face the camera with broad grins, while a tiny and obviously delighted Thuillier child in their midst wears a British service cap several sizes too large. Others, recently out of battle, gaze forlornly past the camera into the middle distance. Their traumatised look grew familiar as the war went on, and came to be known as “the thousand-yard stare”.
Doomed youth: a stretcher bearer still has mud on his boots from the front line
LOUIS AND ANTOINETTE THUILLIER © ROGER THUILLIERMany of the soldiers photographed are identified by Coulthart as belonging to the so-called “Pals” battalions. These were volunteer units, raised in response to Lord Kitchener’s appeal in August 1914 for a “New Army” of 100,000 men. The idea was to encourage men from the same trade, profession or community to enlist together and fight side by side. The response was eager: long queues formed at recruitment centres, and more than 50 towns and cities formed Pals battalions; Manchester alone raised eight.
The fate of these brave young men is the tragedy that lies at the heart of Coulthart’s narrative. The Battle of the Somme opened at 7.30am on July 1, 1916, when the first British troops were ordered to advance from their trenches. A huge allied artillery bombardment had preceded the advance, but the Germans were entrenched in a warren of dugouts and tunnels, and the bombardment left them largely unscathed. When the barrage lifted and the tommies went over the top they were cut down by machine-gun fire pouring from the German positions.Within a few minutes, most of the Leeds Pals battalion, the 15th battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, were killed or wounded. “We were two years in the making and 10 minutes in the destroying,” one survivor lamented. A similar fate befell the Bradford Pals battalions, the 16th and 18th. As one account put it: “they walked straight into the German machine guns and the battalions literally disappeared.” The wounded, screaming for help in no-man’s land, sounded like “enormous wet fingers screeching across an enormous sheet of glass”.The second wave of British infantry was due to advance at 8.40am, by which time it was clear that the attack had degenerated into a massacre. Nevertheless, they went over the top. A German observer later recalled the shock and amazement his machine-gunners felt to see the British advancing towards them “as if on parade” to be cut down in their hundreds, the dead “lying literally in rows”. On the first day of the Somme, “the blackest day in British military history”, 20,000 British troops died. The closeness of the Pals battalions, drawn from friends who lived together in the same streets, meant that entire communities were obliterated in a few moments of carnage. Yorkshire was particularly hard hit: some 2,000 men had joined the two Bradford Pals battalions and only 223 survived the Somme.
Reading these facts, and turning page after page of lively young faces, there is nothing adequate you can say or think. Your mind blanks out. It is not entirely surprising to learn that, 13 years after the war, Louis Thuillier shot himself. I found that fragments of poetry kept recurring: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”, from Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, and “Never such innocence again”, from Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV, about the young men queuing to enlist.
But most of what is said about those we euphemistically call “the fallen” seems hollow when placed in proximity to this book. “We will remember them”, for example, is clearly false. They have vanished like melted snow, and but for this astonishing cache of pictures, we should not even know how they once looked. Whatever ideas you have about the Great War, The Lost Tommies will change them.
William Collins £40 pp 400
Lost portraits of the Somme
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100 IMAGES
Product Description
‘Lost Tommies’ brings together stunning 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. With servicemen from around the world these faces are gathered together for what would become the front line of the Battle of the Somme. Beautifully reproduced, it is a unique collection and a magnificent memorial
Review
‘These photographs rank up there with one of the most important discoveries from the First World War’ Ashley Ekins, head of Military History, Australian War Memorial
‘A wonderfully produced book with exceptional images’ Richard Van Emden, bestselling author of The Last Fighting Tommy
‘The most heavenly book’ Jilly Cooper
About the Author
Ross Coulthart, is an investigative journalist for Australian news and current affairs program 60 Minutes on Channel Nine. He is also a best-selling author of three books, including ‘Lost Diggers’. He lives in Australia.
Product details
- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: William Collins (5 May 2016)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0008103313
- ISBN-13: 978-0008103316
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