The Lost Tommies

PLATE 51The glass plate’s high resolution allows us to read what he has written: ‘My dear Jeanne and my dear little Yvette’. The division was based in Vignacourt from May to June 1915.

There is no information on the Thuilliers’ camera or cameras. Their equipment was stolen by the Nazis in 1940 when Vignacourt was evacuated during the German Somme offensive (many Vignacourt homes were looted at that time). But because there are different-sized glass plates in the surviving collection, the couple probably used a camera that allowed interchangeable sizes of backing so that different sizes of glass plates could be fitted. It was also possible to have one sheet of glass – a ‘single dark’ – or a ‘double dark’, which allowed two glass sheet exposures to be taken using a sliding magazine.

PLATE 52 This Army Services Corps soldier is reading an album called ‘Album P.A.L. 1914–1915’, which means this image must date from 1916 or later.

The basic concept of glass plate photographic cameras is no different from the more modern photographic film and printing papers. All contain an emulsion of silver-halide crystals suspended in gelatin. The plate is exposed to light in the camera as the photograph is taken, then, to ‘develop’ the image, the plate is immersed in a chemical bath to render the exposed silver halides into the metallic silver that makes the image visible. To stop the silver from reacting any further to light, the image on the plate is ‘fixed’ by immersing it in a bath of ‘hypo’ (sodium hyposulphate). Any leftover chemical then has to be washed out of the image to stop the picture from leaching.

To print copies of the plate speedily for their soldier customers, Louis and Antoinette may have used a process that did not require a darkroom to develop the printing paper in a wet bath. Known as ‘POP’ – short for printing-out paper – it allows a photographer to produce a visible image upon exposure to light without using chemicals. The plate was exposed against a sheet of light-sensitive paper, producing an image the same size as the glass sheet – a technique also known as a ‘direct contact print’. One limitation of this POP technology was that the paper print tended to fade, which perhaps explains why so few of the Thuillier prints survived the past century. Those faded pieces of yellowed cardboard sitting in the family archives of old servicemen may well be the speedy postcard snaps produced in Vignacourt by the Thuilliers.

What is even more extraordinary about the images in this book is that they are reproduced at a resolution far higher than their subjects ever saw when they purchased prints around a hundred years ago from the photographers. Methodical cleaning and high-resolution scanning have reproduced digital copies of the plates, which were then optimized using computer software such as Photoshop. The rare Thuillier images that did survive the past century are those that were rephotographed after the war using more stable photographic techniques.

PLATE 53 A sharp image of an Army Services Corps sergeant on a Douglas motorcycle. During the war the Bristol-based Douglas Company supplied more than 70,000 motorcycles. They were used by dispatch riders, signallers and engineers. The ASC sergeant pictured was probably carrying medical supplies in the attached leather cases.

The photographic plate digital scanner used to reproduce the images in this book has a resolution one hundred times better than the print paper used in 1914–18. Even though Plate 55 (#ulink_6f752107-0850-5d29-9bc0-8581ba80c8a7) below is slightly damaged, it is still possible to read this soldier’s map.

PLATES 54-55 An Australian dispatch rider’s map case. A close-up shows he has a map detailing the area north of Amiens.

Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and the Town of Vignacourt (#ulink_6f166723-3499-5e8a-8b44-2cfef3bb7413)

We have little information about Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the pair behind the camera. What is known is that Louis was born on 29 July 1886 into a modest Picardy farming family, and that as well as working as a farmer he embraced the new technologies of the early twentieth century with zeal. He married a beautiful local girl, Antoinette Thuillier (same family name, but no relation), when he was twenty-six and started up what soon became a thriving farm machinery business.

PLATE 64 The Thuillier family’s farmyard, probably before or very early in the war, one of the earliest photographs in the collection. This is where Thuillier hung his backdrop and photographed thousands of soldiers throughout the war. The backyard still exists today – and still looks much the same.

Vignacourt locals knew Louis as ‘Peugeot’ Thuillier because he also set up a Peugeot bicycle repair shop in 1907 in addition to his own agricultural machinery hire firm. To this day the backyard of his old farmhouse complex is cluttered with rusting machinery, old wheels and the well-tooled workshop of an avid machinist who was clearly very good with his hands. At some stage Thuillier taught himself glass plate photography and he began photographing local villagers.

PLATE 56 A British supply wagon outside the Thuillier farmhouse during the First World War. Note the ‘photo’ sign in the window above the front door at the left of the image.

PLATES 57 – 58 A local Vignacourt woman poses in a beautiful polka-dot dress and a boy poses with a garland and communion Bible.

PLATES 59 – 60 Two young lads – one smoking! – pose for the Thuilliers and (right) a sobering illustration of how the war influenced young local children: this boy has a toy machine gun and uniform.

The Peugeot sign he placed on the front of his house as an advertisement to passing cyclists also appears in his images (see Plates 65–66 (#ulink_5d4e3360-0152-531c-81f7-6da053027a99), below).

PLATES 65 – 66 Exteriors of the Thuillier home, with Peugeot sign. Both soldiers are members of the Royal Horse Artillery.

Louis enlisted soon after war broke out, but his war service is something of a mystery because his service file was one of many destroyed in a bombing raid in 1940. He was a dispatch rider, taking signals and documents between positions on the front lines, a job that almost certainly cemented Louis’s lifelong passion for motorcycles (which feature in many of the Thuillier pictures, and explain the piles of motorcycle magazines in the attic). Louis was wounded and after recuperating in a hospital he was demobilized and home in Vignacourt by 1915. The war also took its toll on Antoinette’s family. She had two brothers, Louis (another Louis, to confuse matters) and Gustave. Brother Louis was captured by the Germans and became a prisoner of war, but he survived to return home after the Armistice. Gustave, who served with the 72nd Infantry Regiment, was killed in a German gas attack on 20 March 1918, aged twenty-four.

PLATE 61 Louis Thuillier (from the Thuillier collection), probably taken by his wife, Antoinette.

PLATE 62 Antoinette Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)

PLATE 63 Louis Thuillier in French army uniform, c. 1915, with an unidentified child (perhaps Robert Thuillier, born 1912). (Courtesy Bacquet family)

By the time Louis Thuillier returned home from his wartime service as a dispatch rider, the town was full of French troops waiting to head up to the front lines, and he began photographing them for extra money. He taught Antoinette how to take photographs as well because he also had to run the family farm. Vignacourt was becoming a key rest and hospital village behind the front lines, and the couple realized they could make good money selling portraits to the passing French and Allied soldiers.

IDENTIFYING BRITISH REGIMENTS (#ulink_498f7465-bdaa-5672-9754-acde1bdda3cb)

During the First World War every British regiment and corps had its own cap badge and it is these badges, worn on the uniform or caps of soldiers, which have allowed us to identify the individual British Army regiments in the Thuillier collection. For example, close examination of Plates 68 and 69 reveals that all the soldiers featured have the distinctive Royal Welsh Fusiliers cap badge.

PLATE 67 A version of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers cap badge.

PLATES 68 – 69 A corporal and a lance corporal of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (left), and a major (right). The Royal Welsh Fusiliers were probably one of the first British regiments to be based around Vignacourt in late September 1915.

A diary kept by Abbé Leclerq, the Vignacourt village priest at the time,

reveals that the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of the British Army’s oldest regiments, was one of the first regiments to be based in and around Vignacourt during the First World War. On 27 September 1915 he noted the arrival of the first British troops in the area – the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of the South Wales Borderers regiments and a platoon of Royal Engineers, who settled in and around Vignacourt in billets and nearby camps. Vignacourt was to become home to the staff of the British 13th Army Corps between January and July of 1916. The Royal Engineers are very nearly the most photographed unit among those in the Thuillier collection, probably because, as Abbé Leclerq recorded, they came to Vignacourt so early in the war, and units of engineers were there for the duration.

PLATE 70 Two soldiers of the Royal Engineers Corps pose in the Thuilliers’ farmyard. Both wear armbands indicating they were in the Royal Engineers Signal Service. The soldier on the left wears the distinctive ‘T’ of the territorial force on his left shoulder.

PLATE 71 A lance corporal in the Royal Engineers photographed in the Thuilliers’ farmyard. Probably taken in the first half of 1916

PLATES 72-73 The haggard faces of these Royal Engineers, especially the man seated on the right (and shown in close-up above), suggest these men have not been long away from the front lines.

PLATE 74 A young soldier from the Royal Engineers Signal Service.

PLATE 75 Another image featuring the young man from Plate 74 (#ulink_274e588b-7a74-56b2-9873-2bbb633a0acc) wearing a Royal Engineers cap badge and posing with a friend. Both men wear shorts and the lad on the right is wearing the winter service dress ‘Gorblimey’ cap with its distinctive flaps issued in early 1915. This picture is probably from the warmer months in 1916, the year after the Royal Engineers first arrived in Vignacourt and before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in July.

The Thuillier images also trace the movement of French troops through the Picardy town, many of them dressed in colourful, antiquated nineteenth-century-style uniforms; there are even cavalrymen posing with their lances, relics of an earlier type of warfare. The British and the French both deployed lancers in early First World War battles but they were woefully ineffective against the machine gun and modern artillery.

PLATE 76 A French cavalryman holds the 2.97-metre steel lance used by dragoon and cavalry regiments during the war. The lance was soon abandoned after the war’s disastrous early battles using such antiquated weapons.

It is sobering to think of the hell these French troops went into, their quaint and colourful nineteenth-century-era uniforms absurdly impractical for the industrial warfare they were to face. Just like the Germans on the other side, everyone thought the war would be over soon. On the Somme alone, within just a few months, from 1 July to 18 November 1916, when the Battle of the Somme was finally called off, there would be 195,000 French casualties (and 425,000 British).

PLATE 77 A rushed wedding before the new husband heads off to defend his homeland? A French soldier with his bride.

PLATE 78 ‘Honour to 9 May’: almost certainly a reference by these French soldiers to the disastrous Second Battle of Artois a year earlier (9 May–18 June 1915), which resulted in 102,500 French and 27,809 British casualties but failed to break through the German lines. The shadow of another negative – featuring a ghostly image of a soldier on horseback – has adhered to this plate from when they were stacked in the Thuillier attic.

PLATE 79 Proud French colonial troops, cavalrymen of the 8th Regiment of Hussars, strike a pose – summer 1915.

PLATE 80 The French soon abandoned such nineteenth-century uniforms because their bright colours made them easy targets for German gunners.

PLATE 81 French soldiers pose with a dedication to the mitrailleurs – the machine-gunners – probably honouring their comrades who fell in the battles of 1915.

PLATE 82 Moroccan tirailleurs. The soldier on the right sports the typical Berber haircut of the day.

PLATE 83 Moroccan light infantrymen – or tirailleurs – in Vignacourt. North African tirailleurs served with distinction on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. They were assigned their own regiment in 1914 and suffered heavy losses.

In late 1915 Vignacourt came under the military control of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), and the Thuillier images reflect that change, thousands of the plates showing British Tommies and kilt-wearing Scots.

PLATE 84 A Thuillier image of some hard-looking Scots soldiers in kilts, most probably Gordon Highlanders.

Louis Thuillier also roamed the streets and the nearby army camps in search of subjects to photograph.

PLATE 85 A dapper lieutenant colonel with the South Staffordshire Regiment in front of the stairs that today still lead up to the Thuillier attic where the photographic plates were discovered. He is a decorated officer who has been twice wounded, as indicated by the two wound stripes on his left sleeve. The three small chevrons on his right sleeve show he is in his third year of overseas service. These chevrons were introduced in January 1918, which places this image in the final year of the war.

PLATE 86 Royal Engineers dispatch riders in Vignacourt – a typically humorous and informal Thuillier picture.

PLATE 87 A sergeant and a private soldier in front of their tent, probably at one of the many military camps.