PHOTO ARTICLE: Touring the Battlefields, 1919

In 1921 Country Life published a picture book entitled: “Ypres to Verdun.” It comprised a photographic record of a trip to the Western Front made by one Alexander Kennedy. He’d visited in the last month of the war, and seen something of the devastation:

Roads, fields, orchards, were a featureless waste of shell-holes, often already covered with rank herbage altogether disguising their original nature. Villages were only recognisable by painted notices, “This is Givenchy,” or sometimes “ This was Givenchy”; not a house, not a wall, not a gate-post to show where they had been. Large towns like Ypres or Lens or Albert were little more than piles of brick, stone, and timber rubbish, through which roads were being cleared between immense piles of débris.

At the time, October 1918, it was forbidden to use a camera in Army Areas, but Kennedy resolved to return as soon as he could to better document the state of the Western Front before it was wiped off the map. It was only in September 1919 that he managed to return, taking with him an artillery officer friend wielding a camera.

I have thought that it might be interesting, both to the soldiers who fought for us all over France and Flanders and to their friends at home who heard from day to day of the places where they were fighting, to have something which would show what these places were really like, to turn the too familiar names into recognisable pictures, and this is my reason for publishing these photographs.

Taken either at the end of 1919, or Spring 1920, the images represent a snapshot of a moment in time before the cleanup had been done. I thought it would be interesting to share the images from one chapter of his book for you, so I’ve chosen the area around Verdun…