Trench Ghosts part 4
Langemark A few trench ghosts I did last week then got distracted and forgot about. One of Langemark and one of the Sugarloaf salient at Fromelles. The Langemark rephoto leaps out straight away. It’s also familiar to anyone that’s ever visited the German...
Aerial ghosts: Messines updated
I had a very interesting email today from Gil Bossuyt of frontaaltours.com which has prompted this post. Gil has been looking at the image I originally colourised in this piece. It goes thus: “I went searching on trench maps to recognize some road structures,...
WW1: Aerial Trench Ghosts Part 3 – Lens
Someone asked if I’d done any Loos aerials, I hadn’t, it’s not an area I’m hugely familiar with, it does tend to get forgotten in between all the noise about the Battle of the Somme and The Ypres Salient. There’s plenty of front in...
Vanishing Point: Dartmoor – father and son
There’s a focus, out there. You’ll see it in most cemeteries on the old front. The famous dead, the men, and boys who achieve some infamy by dint of their bravery, age or circumstances. Sometimes it’s a footballer who scored big in 1912 before...
Vanishing point: Courcelette
I’ve been fortunate at times out on the front, walking the levelled trenches, across the flattened shell holes and in the regrown woods. You meet people, some you know via the curious enmeshed world of social media, shared interests in a shared space eventually...
Vanishing point: Guillemont, Trones and Jünger’s Lane.
It suddenly struck me yesterday, what I’m trying to finish the unfinishable. The Great War may have ended in 1918, but it didn’t, and so it goes, new layers of images, understanding and history being laid down with every word typed and shutter click....
Great War: Verdun in postcards
Fort Vaux – Artillery observation post. A century on from events. These are in fact a post-war set of tourist cards I bought as part of an album at a flea market in France. These are basically Verdun through a lens from some time after everything had been...
Great War postcards: Blinded
Blinded A set of six postcards produced by the National Institute of the Blind, now RNIB for St Dunstans in Regent’s Park. These were fundraisers for the trust. A slightly mawkish view of something fairly horrific, but then how do you honestly portray being...
Vanishing points: The Bull Ring, Etaples
Etaples was one of the main base camps along the coast of Northern France, being a port, a lot of men, thousands of them would have disembarked here. Many more would have embarked. It was known as “The Bullring”, as were most of the base camps, but this...
Join hands: Poppy day
I am afraid I am heartily sick of poppies. I was in Ypres in the late summer of 2014 and started to write something about what the centenary of the war meant and how it was making me feel. It was the week the commemoration started for real, the end of the phoney war....