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On 28 June 1914, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, unleashed the apocalypse we now know as the First World War. Militaristic Prussians had long wanted to expand Germany’s empire; the German Kaiser Wilhelm II had launched an arms race with Britain, and scrambled to snap up colonies and global resources. After years of simmering tensions, the shooting of the Archduke in the Balkans was the spark that ignited the war. One by one the great powers of Europe plunged into the abyss as treaty obligations pushed nations on to either side of the conflict. France, bound by treaty to Russia, found itself at war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Within weeks, Germany had invaded Belgium, aiming for Paris. By 4 August 1914, Britain and soon after, its empire, had also entered the war. By late September 1914, the Allied armies and their German adversaries were locked in a trench-warfare stalemate – each side dug in to a roughly matched pair of trench lines running often just metres apart, over a distance of 700 kilometres from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast of Belgium.

PLATE 121 French soldiers head north-west along the Rue de Daours in Vignacourt towards the front line. Because the men are no longer wearing the red trousers originally issued to soldiers, this is likely to be during 1915. As the war went on, the French changed their uniform to the bluey-grey tunic worn by soldiers in this picture instead of the earlier colourful uniform which was an impractical relic of the Franco-Prussian War.

Attempts by each side to outflank the other had failed and the only solution was ‘digging in’ to trenches. The stalemate was created by modern artillery and the new machine guns, capable of extraordinary rates of fire.

During the American Civil War, just a generation earlier, soldiers took a minute and a half to reload their single-shot muskets, and so the slow rate of fire meant a frontal assault was not too catastrophic an undertaking. But by the beginning of the First World War, military strategy lagged behind new military technologies. A single machine-gunner on the Western Front could pump out a thousand bullets in the time it took a Civil War soldier to reload. Sadly, it wasn’t until later in the war that both sides began to grasp the strategies necessary to combat this new technology of killing. Military commanders persisted with a strategy of attrition, ordering troops over the top into full-frontal assaults against the enemy trenches.

PLATE 122 Trench warfare. An intriguing picture of what appears to be an Austrian mortar battalion in the trenches. Historian Laurent Mirouze believes this plate may well have been obtained by the French 47th Division which was billeted in Vignacourt. They had just returned to France from fighting with the Italians against the Austrians in northern Italy. Perhaps the intelligence service of the 47th asked Thuillier for prints off these plates.

In December 1915 General Sir Douglas Haig was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the British armies in France in place of Field Marshal Sir John French; French had commanded through the disastrous Battle of Loos in September, losing tens of thousands of troops for little gain, and hopes of a quick victory now seemed remote. As John Keegan has written, Field Marshal French

… had been worn down by the attrition of his beloved army of regulars, the old sweats of his Boer War glory days, the keen young troopers of the cavalry in which he had been raised, the eager colonels who had been his companions on the veldt and in the hunting field. The death of so many of them – there had been 90,000 casualties among the original seven infantry divisions by November 1914, rather more than a hundred per cent of mobilised strength – afflicted him …³

But there was one huge difference beginning to show by the start of 1916: as Haig planned the big breakthrough in the German lines, Lord Kitchener’s massive enlistment drive had allowed the formation of six ‘New Armies’ – each five divisions strong – to supplement the existing (now very depleted) eleven regular army divisions and the twenty-eight infantry divisions of the territorials. It meant that by the spring of 1916 Britain would have seventy divisions available for a massive offensive aimed at breaking the German lines.

PLATE 123 Royal Artillery soldiers pose with what appears to be a 6-inch howitzer on a Vignacourt street during winter on the Western Front. The wooden-spoked wheels were often fitted with girdles to get the gun over mud. One of the British Army’s most important weapons during the war, these guns fired 22.4 million rounds on the Western Front.

In late December 1915 Haig agreed with French General Joffre that 1916 would be the year that France and Britain mounted a joint offensive at the point where their two armies met in the middle of the Western Front, on the Somme. The Allied lines along this section of the Western Front – beautiful lush countryside of rolling green hills and chalky soil – had been relatively quiet since 1914 and the Germans had exploited the calm to massively reinforce their own lines, building huge underground bunkers, burying communications cables and creating arcs of fire with machine guns and barbed wire which made crossing no man’s land towards their lines a near-suicidal undertaking. Facing them were twenty relatively less well-prepared Allied divisions – most of them the New Army British recruits, the patriotic citizens who had rushed to join the Pals battalions – and there was a small number of regular army units. There were also the territorials, who had only been in France for six months; this meant that most of the Allied infantry had little or no experience of combat at all.

General Haig transformed the thirty kilometres west of the Somme front lines into a massive armed camp, building new roads and railway lines, artillery emplacements and shell dumps, that would provide the support for the massive infantry attack. Even at Vignacourt, a brand-new casualty clearing station was being built and, as the soldiers caroused in the estaminets and restaurants of Vignacourt and nearby Amiens’s red light district, all knew there was hell to pay on the horizon.

Haig’s plan was to break the German lines by levelling their front lines with a massive bombardment in the week before the attack. Nineteen British and three French divisions would then advance across no man’s land in the expectation that the enemy would be so shattered that barbed wire could be cut and their trench lines seized, allowing them to advance into the open country behind. As John Keegan explains, Haig and his advisers were so confident of the impact of their artillery that ‘… they had decided not to allow the inexperienced infantry to advance by the tried and tested means of “fire and movement”, when some lay down to cover with rifle volleys the advance of the rest, but to keep them moving forward upright and in straight lines’.⁴ The advancing troops would walk straight across with a creeping barrage of artillery falling ahead of them, which was designed to keep the Germans out of their parapets before the Allies were on top of them. But, as history records, the coming attack would prove to be an unmitigated disaster; all the Allied expectations would be dashed in a dreadful and bloody carnage of machine-gun- and shellfire. And, as Keegan comments, the generals should have known: ‘The simple truth of 1914–1918 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers.’⁵

As will be evident in the following photographs, what makes them so special is their intimacy and humour. Madame Thuillier took many of the portraits and perhaps it was the sight of her beautiful face that sparked a smile from the weary men straight from the trenches. It is the very special humanity and humour of the Thuillier pictures, their normality at a time when so many of these young men went off to their deaths, that makes them so distinctive. Perhaps these soldiers realized their chances of surviving this war unscathed were remote and that this was a last opportunity to send a photograph back home.

PLATE 124 These three soldiers from an unidentified regiment wear identity bracelets on their wrists. The flags on the sleeve of the private in the middle show he is a qualified signaller. His friends hold the rank chevrons of a corporal (the soldier on the left) and lance corporal.

Most of the photographs are of British soldiers and a few airmen, Scots in their kilts and English, Welsh and Irish regiments. But there were also Indians, Nepalese and a host of other nationalities from across the British Empire. For one brief, horrific moment in history they were all thrust together into a brutal, ghastly killing maw only a short distance from the ordinary daily life of this small French country town. And when those soldiers came to rest, recuperate and nurse their wounds before they returned to the front lines, Vignacourt was where they relaxed and tried to forget the war.

PLATE 125 The service caps on the ground represent several famous British regiments: (left to right) Essex, Royal Berkshire, Suffolk (two caps) and Norfolk.

During research for this book, the common and frequently voiced refrain from descendants of First World War veterans is how little their fathers or grandfathers ever spoke about their experiences on the Western Front. Sebastian Faulks described this conspiracy of silence admirably in his historical novel Birdsong through his fictional character Captain Stephen Wraysford, writing of his time on the Western Front:

No child or future generation will ever know what this was like. They will never understand. When it is over, we will go quietly among the living and we will not tell them. We will talk and sleep and go about our business like human beings. We will seal what we have seen in the silence of our hearts and no words will reach us.⁶

This unwillingness by the soldiers who came home to tell of what they had seen perhaps explains why the Thuillier images, nearly a century on, now arouse so much emotion. One hundred years’ passing has healed much of the initial grief felt by the families of those who died, those who were horribly maimed or those who were simply never seen or heard of again. The temptation to put that horror in the past, to tell the children never to talk about it, must have been intense. Now, with the centenary of 1914–18, there is renewed focus on the grief but there is also an intense pride and curiosity. The names of the battles of the First World War stand as grim metaphors for suffering: Mons, Ypres, Arras, the Somme, Fromelles, Pozières, Passchendaele … and the men who fought in them are long dead. But the soldiers you see in these pages strode those fields; many died, many were wounded and every one of them suffered.

‘Never before in our history had such an army been gathered, and never again would such an army be seen … True we launched greater armies and won greater victories in the two years that followed; but – the very flower of a race can bloom but once in a generation. The flower of our generation bloomed and perished during the first four months of the First Battle of the Somme. We shall not look upon their like again.’

Major J. H. Beith in The Willing Horse (1921) by Ian Hay