{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02756797583081571, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005853474320241692, 'mean_word_length': 4.925055928411633, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Hostages in the Middle Ages

War I? This is still a pressing question, as is evident from the number of books recently published marking the centennial of the Great War. Perhaps no recent book is, literally, as weighty as the British Imperial War Museums’ The Great War: A Photographic Narrative. This tome collects a mere 380 photographs, beautifully reproduced in large format, from the one million or so professional and amateur images archived at the Museums. Holborn and Roberts have organized the book largely chronologically, by year. For each year of the war, a page of text and a brief time line of the war’s developments—and developments in war photography—introduces the photographic narrative, which unfolds by further organizing the images thematically. Each photograph is identified by its photographer, when possible, and is accompanied by excellent and parsimonious explanatory captions. The goal is to let the images tell the story. What a story it was! Before we even see the mobilization, the troop movements, or the Western Front, there is a prefatory image of a gathering of an extended family, a royal one that included cousins Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V. Resplendent in sashes, medals and swords, the royals in this portrait remind us that 1914, in so many ways, marked the end of an era, the long nineteenth century, when royal families still held sway—and war was a manly, chivalrous sport. Indeed, we see numerous images of soldiers on horseback and even a late cavalry charge, soldiers holding swords high, from 1918. The more dominant narrative, though, is of trenches, machines guns, and industrial technology, all beautifully and horrifically photographed, putting an end to tradition—and any fantasy of glory in modern warfare. The images of destruction and death only punctuate this latter point. We see, for example, the grandiose, medieval Cloth Hall in Ypres bombed to ruins in 1916 and the city of Arras, Pas de Calais, reduced to skeletal edifices and rubble in 1917. Churches, too, suffered such a sacrilegious fate. More disturbing, though, is the imagery of death, which became iconic in November 1914, with the publication of a photograph of the decomposing hand of a Belgian soldier breaking through the soil of a shallow grave—as if grasping for life. More graphic, though of no less metaphoric imagining, is a photograph of a dead British soldier in No Man’s Land, mouth agape, body contorted. Death is painful, ugly, and, ostensibly, meaningless. The destructive power of industrial society knew no better witness than black and white photographs of theWestern Front. Though it is true that these shockingly beautiful photographs tell the story of the British experience—not the French, German or Russian experience—of the Great War, the narrative spun is disturbing, and not just for the formal content of the imagery. Rather, official war photographers, rather than common soldiers or civilian photographers, both of whom Britain forbade from taking pictures, took most of the images in the book. Thus, many of the photographs presented are of the highest aesthetic quality and pregnant with consciously constructed meanings— propaganda by another name, which should signal caution in interpretation. Ernest Brooks, a superb official photographer, shot many iconic images of the Great War. One, for example, was of an Australian soldier heroically carrying his wounded comrade to safety and care. We easily read in the image chivalry, brotherhood in arms, and man at his best in the worst of conditions. What are we to make of the photograph, though, knowing that it was probably staged? Other Brooks photographs are just as highly emotive— such as one of a single grave in the muck of the Somme, or another of a muddy, decomposed German soldier— and just as consciously composed. The most striking images in the book, the iconic images, are not photographs of definitive moments when history was being made, but, rather, images fraught with intentionality. Second, the photographs chosen for the book rarely show many soldiers together. It is true that there are a few charming images emphasizing the camaraderie of the soldiers, but these do not appear to be entirely candid shots. Although we do see some troop movements, it is troubling to realize that the scenes involving combat typically show only a few men, not a unit, in battle. Thismay have been a function of British restrictions on photographers, but the photographic narrative makes it impossible to understand how, on the first day of the Somme offensive, for example, Britain suffered more than 50,000 casualties. Rather, what is seen too often is the loneliness of the soldier in a hostile, desolate environment—the existential war, not the war of mass society, mass production, and mass death. In On Photography, Susan Songtag suggests that photographs give us knowledge of the world, but she perceptively goes on to argue that this type of knowledge is not actually understanding, which comes from challenging how the world looks and what the camera obscures. After reading the almost 400 images in The Great War, all of which are compelling, one still cannot truly understand the Great War in all its glory and horror. For that, we must continue to study and narrate it.