World War I, focus

War will not leave the storm. Although he was demobilized in February, 1919, the Old Comrades Association commissioned him to write the history of the battalion between 1915 and 1918. Tempest borrowed the unit’s diary—a day-by-day chronicle of its actions, often scribbled in pencil by a junior officer—and placed advertisements in Bradford newspapers, asking to speak to other surviving members of the Sixth. nightadmitting that many soldiers disobey orders that do not keep their diaries when fighting in war. The text states: “These people now need these fanatical dangers to help him in order to help him work.” Given the pellet details in his account, there are no prosecution dangers for violations of the regulations now. His approach to the book project is to evoke the factual loyalty required by the history of the formal camp with the life on the front line. To enrich his narrative, he made a pilgrimage to the battlefield where six people fought. His private album shows photos of tree stumps in the woods near Aveluy.

Another official, Herbert Read, was completing his work when Tempest wrote his book. Read had fought in places where the storm was deployed and contained a copy of Thoreau’s “Walden” in his backpack. He ended up being one of the most influential art critics in Britain. In 1919, Read attempted to find a publisher who “retreats” the publisher, which was his brief, arrest statement about the spring 1918 offensive. No one will print it. The problem Read believes is that the argument about war is trapped in “emotional fantasy: it’s sad, cliché, even a topic of rationalization. There’s no time to achieve simple facts.” In the first few years of peace, there was a “black screen of terror and aggression” that separated men who had been serving non-combat publicly, Red wrote. It was in his twenties that the famous prose now works on wars – Edmund Blunden’s “War background“; Robert Graves’s “goodbye”; Siegfried Sassoon Sherston Trilogy;And, in translation, Erich Maria Remarque’s “It’s quiet on the Western Front” – Began to be published, attracting a wide range of readers. (Read’s books were published in 1925 and achieved moderate sales.)

Tempest’s books were delivered in 1921 and are in many ways documented. Its title,History of the Sixth Battalion of West Yorkshire“hidespising its emotional power. On its page, a writer who feels he can add his own name to the canon. But he might be known for that reputation if he wants. He has almost no writer’s self at all. In the later period of Julienne, she was often asked to tell a picture of herself in her husband’s story, and he used a photo on the book.

When Tempest wrote his “history”, Louis and Antoinette Serell stopped taking pictures. With the end of the war, practice now seems meaningless. Louis fell into depression. Apparently, he was tortured by the cache of collected images, partly because he didn’t know which of his subjects were still alive. In 1931, he shot deadly. The glass plate now connected to Louis’s suicide stigma is hidden in a farmhouse loft, rarely said again.

Some printed images are retained, but because they are quickly made and cheap, these images are usually hazy and most images fade rapidly. Some prints don’t even have a year. Even if portraits are copied onto regular paper, few of this century have survived. Tempest’s book contains at least two Thuillier images: the sixth shot in 1916, before the Battle of Somme.

In 1988, a Paris antique dealer named Laurent Mirouze visited Vignacourt. He followed a friend’s tip, and he had seen amazing images of World War I soldiers hanging from town hall. The town is celebrating the seventh anniversary of the Armistice Day to mark a pair of local roads for Australian forces. Mirouze asked the Vignacourt resident who printed the image, who was pointed to photographer Robert Crognier, who apparently made a copy from the original plate. Crognier is the nephew of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier. He told Mirouze that the twenty or so photos in Vignacourt Hall are a small part of the huge collection that still belongs to the family and are stored somewhere in the village. But Cronier won’t disclose where the plate is reserved.

Mirouze quickly realized that the Thuillier series might be historical: other collections of World War I weren’t as good or as comprehensive. He contacted Australian diplomats and British archivist, but no one seemed interested in the series. By 1991, Mirouze gave up on searching. In 1997, Crognier died.

Then, in 2010, Australian investigative journalist Ross Coulthart called Mirouze about the photos. “I’ve been waiting for twenty years,” Miloz told him. Hundreds of Australian soldiers stayed in Vignacourt for months, sitting with almost as many portraits as the British. Mirouze said he will help Coulthart and Australian historian Peter Burness track the glass panels. The investigation team contacted various thuillier relatives and found that there were cracks in the family and some members did not want to give up on the negative factors, believing that the French government had seized the souvenirs of World War I without sufficient compensation.

Finally, the three met with Cronier’s widow Henriet. She decided to help the people when they told her that their purpose was to commemorate the death of Australians by displaying pictures at the National War Memorial in Canberra. She gave them an ammunition box filled with dozens of glass plates. Apparently, her husband kept some of the Thuillier sections he developed in 1988. ”Defeat AustraliaShe said.

Coultart convinced his TV network chairman, Australian billionaire Kerry Stokes, to buy the entire series from Thuilliers and digitize the images. After that, Stokes delivered the plates to Western Australia, which is currently housed. (2016, Coulthart’s “Digital Photos” ChoiceLost Tommy,” a large book.)

The digital image is very clear: you can read the dates folded in the newspaper. “I found it so interesting us Kursat told me. Portraits are also full of life. The soldiers smiled, frowned, and flirted. The local kids on their knees, pampering dogs, dressing in stupid costumes, and sitting on horseback.

Coulthalt and his wife Kerrie Douglass identified the subject of some photos by decoding visual cues such as Colments-Cap badges and cross-references with images from other sources. However, despite constant efforts to identify the soldiers in the collection, Facebook page Allow users to search for images – many are still unknown, including dozens of American infantry. Almost every soldier of color in the archive remains unknown, just like the thousands of British people in the series, including most of the sixth place. Although Kerry Stokes hopes to find a permanent home in the UK that can use glass panels of 1,500 British soldiers, no museum is willing to buy them.

In hindsight, looking at the sixth portrait, one feels a terrible premonition. In one photo, Second Lieutenant Cuthbert Higgins stares at the intensity of the movie stars. A few weeks later, he died on Somme’s first day in a futile attack described by Tempest. Higgins can be named because his portrait appears in “History”. But it’s hard for other men to identify. Ken Bloomer’s Tempest’s classmate was a private student at Higgins and died next to him that afternoon. I’ve seen a portrait of Bloom in the school’s archives, but I can’t find it if his childlike face is in the group photo. Louis Thuillier was upset by the inability to know the plight of his subjects. To view photos a century away, you can bring the audience into similar melancholy.

The trailer is not just history. By April 1916, these people had experienced horrible things, and worse, waiting for them. Several photos of Lieutenant Walter (The Babe) scale for the sixth show, earning his nickname for his boyish appearance. In one image, Scales wins a military cross for his courage in front, wearing a curved face that hints at the recent pain. In the most affected image in the collection, a still unidentified official linked the weapon to the scale to support him. (The scale was killed in January 1918, when a Royal Flying Army plane he was flying as an observer colliding with another observer, colliding above the Somme Valley.) While browsing the photos, I thought of a violent man observing one of the concerts in a concert party: “In all cases, the occasional exhausted or melancholy appearance: although instantaneous, though instantaneous, more generally known, more average, expresses the average level.