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Animation from Archival Negatives
1900
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1915
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Poster showing a column of soldiers marching into the distance, while being joined in the foreground by a variety of men in civilian attire.
1914 - 1918
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The Numbers Game: an excerpt
“By the end of 1914 four months after the outbreak of the Great War, 300,000 Frenchmen had been killed, 600,000 wounded, out of a male population of twenty million, perhaps ten million of military age.” 1
1.John Keegan, The First World War, (New York, Knopf), 6
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Image shows crippled German soldier riding a bicycle adapted for use for those without hands.
1917
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“Getting to bed about 11 I looked at the cloudless sky, or my little patch from my window and thought how clear a night for an airplane raid, and went to bed. I had just gotten to settled for sleep when I heard a siren in the distance and wondered if this was the alarm, for we were told they went through the streets with sirens blowing if the Boche machines were coming. I did not have long to wonder, for soon the bells on my floor began to ring and someone came swiftly but with all composure to each floor saying the airplanes were coming, but you didn't have to get up unless you wish. I was nearly dressed by that time and went out to see what the rest were doing. All the lights were turned out over the house and candles set in shielded spots in the halls…”
1917
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“I happened too to meet a lady who knows the man who invented poison gas. His wife, it appears, was a doctor of chemistry too, and they used to work together. When the war came, and she saw what use was being made of her inventions, she committed suicide. Her husband, though, is proud of the valuable service he is doing for the Fatherland, and says he is even proud that he was called upon to sacrifice his wife to the cause. How different human beings are!” 1
1. Evelyn Mary Blucher, An English Wife in Berlin, (New York, E.P.Dutton & CO, 1920) 88
1914
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1915
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"[This phrase] assumes a future whose moral and social pressures are identical with those of the past…The Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where meanings of abstraction seemed permanent and reliable. Everyone knew what Glory was and what Honor meant. It was not until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A Farewell to Arms that 'abstract words such as glory, history, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." 1
1. Fussell, The First World War and Modern Memory, 22
1917
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Photograph shows the interior of a recruiting office for the U.S. Navy, on the walls are several recruiting and enlistment posters.
"Gee!! I wish I were a man.
I'd join the Navy"
"A wonderful opportunity for you".
"Keep him free"
1916
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The firing line for consisted of 1 field gun every twenty yards, and 1 heavy gun or howitzer every fifty yards. 1
1. Keegan, Thae First World War, 291
1918
Animation from Archival Negatives and Re-Photographed Lithograph
"The surviving Grande Mutiles included 44,657 who lost a leg 20,877 who lost an arm, 136 who lost both arms and 1,264 who lost both legs. There were also 2,547 war blind, a fraction of those seriously wounded in the head, of whom most died." 1
1. John Keegan, The First World War, (New York,Knopf), 7
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DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owens 1918
1918
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General Haig surveying his troops: “ a little gray old man on a great black horse, with a glittering escort of Lancers, pennants fluttering in the wind.” 1
1. Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 80
1920
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Several crippled boys were present with some of their handywork(sic)."
Caption taken from reverse of image.
1914 - 1918
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1915
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“Shelter pits, which one man could dig at the rate of one cubic foot of earth removed in three minutes, or enough to give him cover in a half hour, became trenches when joined up. More often, the first shelter was an existing ditch of field drain; when deepened, or as rain fell, these ready made refuges filled with water and proved habitable only at the expense of great labor or not habitable at all.” 1
1. Keegan, The First World War, 177
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1917
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"This afternoon I went to the big American ambulance hospital at Neuilly. It's the most wonderful and awful place I have yet seen. It is more they were doing such marvelous work rebuilding phrases that had been partially blown away. The head nurse took us unto a big laboratory and they brought out photographs of cases. They showed the men as they were when admitted with the most ghastly wounds: noses blown off, jaws gone, foreheads shattered. How the men live is a miracle to me. Then the pictures of the various stages of the cure up to the final photograph taken at the time of discharge.”
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