The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

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

York and Lancaster Regiment

      PLATE 126 The cap badge of the York and Lancaster Regiment.

      PLATE 127 Two of the highest-ranking officers identified in the Thuillier collection: 9th Battalion York and Lancaster commander Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Addison (left) poses with his second-in-command Major Harry Lewis (right) at Vignacourt in late March 1916. On the following 1 July, both men elected to lead their men into battle on the first day of the Somme – and both would die, within three months of this photograph being taken.

      ‘Going in with the lads’

      By the time the photograph above was taken, these two high-ranking officers of the 9th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment had been through more than eighteen months on the Western Front, including the Battle of Loos in late September 1915. For months since the disastrous British losses at Loos, the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Addison, and his second-in-command, Major Harry Lewis, had pushed their men – most of them Yorkshire miners – extremely hard in training near the French town of Saint-Omer, preparing them for an assault somewhere on the entrenched German front lines that they knew was soon to come. Both officers finally learned the attack would be on the Somme when, in January 1916, their 9th York and Lancaster Battalion was deployed 100 kilometres south from Saint-Omer to Vignacourt. We know this photograph was taken sometime in late March 1916, in the final weeks of their time there – and, sadly, we also now know it to be the final months of both their lives.

      It is wonderful to be able to identify these two dignified-looking senior officers because their faces and story might so easily have been lost in the fog of war; and they are two of the highest-ranking officers identified up to now in the Thuillier images. For within a few months of their photographs being taken by the Thuilliers, Lieutenant Colonel Addison and Major Lewis would be two of the thousand or so British officers who would die ‘on the German wire’ on the very first day of the Somme. We only know who they are because, over half a century later, in February 1970, an elderly gentleman by the name of Philip Brocklesby, who had been a lieutenant in the 13th York and Lancasters, and was clearly a chum of Addison and Lewis, took the trouble to remember both men because, he lamented, so little was told of their steadfastness and courage in the regiment’s official history. He sent his story and a faded print of the Thuillier image to the regimental journal’s editors.

      Brocklesby had been an orderly room clerk private with the 9th from May to November 1915, no doubt winning a commission after Loos, but he wrote of the warm affection and regard in which all the men of the 9th held both Addison and Lewis. Of Colonel Addison he quoted one soldier describing him as a ‘pleasant, quiet, Regular officer recalled from half-pay, not a dynamic man but a responsible soldier with right principles about training troops’.¹