ARTICLE: A General's Eye View of WW1

This was the article I originally intended to give you when I started going through the photo albums of General Charles Mangin last week. I got sidetracked, and so on Monday I focussed on some of the hundreds of images he compiled of ordinary people throughout the French Empire and beyond. Now, you have the First World War through the lens of one of France’s most prolific generals, with a few added extras from my favourite French archive…

Many of the album images show Mangin out and about, amongst his men. I’m going to hazard a guess that although he is in a trench in this one, he’s nowhere near the actual front line, otherwise everyone would have had their heads blown off. He was, however, documented as putting himself in dangerous positions. At one point in 1918, he received a bullet wound to the chest. Arguably, he had no business taking such risks. It takes a lot to replace a dead man with more than two decades of training and experience, but there are also images of him in an observation balloon.

These two images are from the first part of the war, when Mangin was based in Artois, in command of 5th Division. He has lots of pictures of early trench construction, accumulating wood for building, and various stages of work that give an insight into how the Western Front emerged. In the photo below, you can see an example of an early trench, and how it differs from later on, when all sides had learned much about entrenching themselves.