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Kitabı oku: «The Lost Tommies», sayfa 2
And so it happened that on a cold February morning in early 2011 in Vignacourt, we began where Laurent’s quest had ended twenty years earlier, at Vignacourt’s council building. There in the council chambers we saw the handful of tantalizing pictures hanging on the walls. The Australian War Memorial historian Peter Burness was with us and he was amazed by the quality and clarity of the images on the council chambers’ walls. The big question now was, where was the rest of the collection?
PLATES 20–21 Laurent Mirouze back where the trail started in 1989, and showing Peter Burness what he found on the walls of Vignacourt’s council chambers.
The breakthrough came after a day or so of knocking on doors led us to Madame Henriette Crognier, Robert’s widow, who still lived in the town. We were ushered into her cluttered living room and, as her cat purred under the table, Madame Crognier’s bright eyes scanned ours as we spoke of our search for the pictures. When we explained in detail the enormous historical significance of the pictures, and expressed our hopes that the Australian images at least would be displayed at the War Memorial, Madame finally let a gentle smile lift the corners of her mouth and with a twinkle in her eye she left the room.
Laurent was acting as our translator, and I anxiously asked him if we had said something to upset her. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘She says she has something for you.’ Madame Crognier had decided to trust us. Within a few minutes she returned with a couple of Second World War ammunition boxes under each arm, and a big smile on her face. She slid the metal cases over the table and, with her hand on one of them, said with a Gallic flourish, ‘Pour les Australiens,’ and flicked the lid open.
PLATE 22 Madame Crognier shows Peter Burness and Laurent Mirouze her secret stash of Thuillier plates. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)
After all these years she still had some of the Thuillier glass plates her husband had retrieved from the family’s hiding place. Better still, she believed the remaining thousands of plates were indeed still in Vignacourt in a farmhouse owned by Louis Thuillier’s grandson and granddaughter. We sat there stunned. ‘Thousands of plates?’ I asked. ‘Thousands of plates,’ Laurent confirmed the translation. I stumbled on for confirmation: ‘… that have never been seen before?’ ‘Oui,’ Madame replied, now delighted with our reaction.
Through Madame Crognier we learned of the surviving descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, among them their granddaughter, Madame Eliane Bacquet, and their grandson, Christian Thuillier. Neither of them lived in Vignacourt any more but they did still jointly own the empty farmhouse where Louis and Antoinette had offered their photographic services to passing soldiers. Finally, after days of intense negotiations, they agreed to take us to the farmhouse. As it happened, our timing was propitious because the family was thinking of selling the old farmhouse and, in a few months, we were told its contents might well have been thrown on to a rubbish heap.
PLATE 23 A wartime photograph of the front of the Thuillier home at the time when many of the photographs were taken. (From the Thuillier collection)
PLATE 24 Exterior of the Thuillier farmhouse, Vignacourt, February 2011. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)
At the old kitchen table in the run-down farmhouse, Madame Bacquet told a sad story from the Great War. Her mother, the daughter-in-law of Louis and Antoinette, had described how as a young woman during the war she had heard the screams of young wounded men passing through the village in horse-drawn ambulances. ‘They were calling for their mothers,’ she said. ‘It was very sad.’
PLATE 25 Soldiers of the Army Services Corps pose with their Dennis troop-carrier truck in the main street of Vignacourt during the war. The buildings behind them still stand today.
Madame Bacquet would have made a good probing military interrogator in another life, questioning us for several hours about our motives. As it became clear to her that our quest was an honourable one and that the proud memory of her ancestors would be fulsomely acknowledged, she brought out a collection of Thuillier family photographs. For the first time we laid eyes on Louis and Antoinette.
PLATE 26 Louis Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)
PLATE 27 Antoinette Thuillier. (Courtesy Bacquet family)
Christian Thuillier, Louis and Antoinette’s grandson, is a Normandy businessman.
He had been nominated by the family to show us around the farmhouse, and it was Christian who, with a wry smile, conceded that the answer to our quest for the photographs might lie in the attic above the building. We stepped out of the kitchen anteroom into a huge outside courtyard, our hearts missing a beat or two as he led us up several flights of stairs to the attic where the Thuillier photographic plates had been stored for nearly a century. It was as if Louis and Antoinette had just walked away from their massive project and dumped everything upstairs. In the gloom we could discern boxes of unused glass plates and empty bottles that had once no doubt contained the chemicals used to develop the prints. No sign of the original camera. But there, under the light of an attic window … three chests. As soon as we opened the first of them we knew our search was over.
PLATE 28 Antoinette Thuillier poses with her son in the same position where she and her husband photographed thousands of Allied soldiers during the First World War.
PLATE 29 The man in the bottom of this single four-exposure slide is a young Louis Thuillier, almost certainly taken by his wife, Antoinette – perhaps while she was learning to use the cameras?
PLATE 30 Ross Coulthart looks at the Thuillier plates with, from left, Laurent Mirouze, Christian Thuillier and Peter Burness. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)
PLATE 31 An original Takiris silver bromide photographic paper box found in the attic. (Photo: Ross Coulthart)
Laurent recognized some boxes immediately. He had helped Robert Crognier sort through them nearly a quarter of a century earlier, but he had never learned of their hiding place. After Robert’s death, the plates had clearly been dumped and forgotten here in the attic. As we excitedly searched through box after box, we could hardly believe what we were seeing. The battered boxes were filled with thousands of glass negative photographic plates, and for hours we held them up to the attic window light, revealing often perfectly preserved ghostly negative images of thousands of British Tommies, Welshmen, Irishmen, Scots, Australian ‘diggers’, turbaned Sikhs, and French, Canadian and American soldiers. There were gasps of awe and excitement from all of us, especially Peter Burness, as he pulled out plate after plate. It seemed scarcely possible that this dusty attic, freezing in winter and no doubt stifling in the French summer, could have preserved the photographs so well. On this especially chilly winter’s day, it was sobering for all of us to think what it must have been like for the young soldiers in a French winter, nearly a hundred years earlier, as they endured the appalling conditions in the open trenches just twenty to thirty kilometres to the north-east.
Our quest for the elusive Thuillier collection was over, but our investigations into the stories behind the thousands of plates had only just begun.
PLATE 32 Labour Corps.
PLATE 33 Royal Army Medical Corps.
PLATE 34 Royal Engineers.
PLATE 35 Dorsetshire Regiment.
Identifying the Tommies
PLATE 36 A sad soldier of the Royal Fusiliers – a close-up from the high-resolution scan of his fatigued face shows him lost in thought. This same soldier also appears in Plate 216.
In February 2011, the Australian Channel Seven TV Network aired a documentary about the discovery of the Thuillier glass plates. Shortly after that ‘Lost Diggers’ story was broadcast, we posted thousands of the Thuillier collection photographs of the Allied soldiers on the programme’s website and also on a specially created Facebook page, which still exists today. It became an unprecedented social media phenomenon for a history archive, with millions viewing the pictures online from all over the world. Within days, the volume of emails, excited phone calls, letters and Facebook messages we were receiving showed just how much the images had touched so many. Hundreds of thousands of viewers wrote us emotional and passionate accounts of their response to the faces of the Australian diggers and British Tommies in particular:
Goose bumps watching the show …
This is so wonderful, I can barely believe it’s true. Many of the faces showed signs of great fatigue and yet they managed to smile and pose for a photo forever preserving the moment in time …
A few tears shed knowing some of these fellows never made it home. What a wonderful discovery for many families around the world.
For so many of the people who have since viewed the photographs online it has become a personal odyssey to find a connection with the as yet unidentified soldiers:
These photos brought tears to my eyes. I had eight great uncles who all fought on the western front. Five of them were brothers. One of them was killed in action five weeks before Armistice Day, after surviving three years of that bloody hell. He is our only Digger out of eight that we have no photographic record of. Maybe he is one of these men.
Thank you so much for making these great photographs available. My mother lost her uncle in France in 1915. We have no info’ on him, not even a photo. We have always tried to find his records but without a regiment number, we are up against a brick wall. I sit here with tears in my eyes, wondering if he is one of these brave men. You have done a wonderful thing.
Our grand uncle … died of wounds … How amazing to think his image could be among these photos.
I carefully examined each and every photo looking for any resemblance to the many family members who fought in WW1, some of whom never returned.
Then began the calls for the Australian images to be brought home:
Don’t let them be forgotten. Bring these historical plates to their rightful home.
These photos … should be treated as national treasures and every single one of them should be brought home immediately.
These young men gave their lives in order to protect and fight for our country; these photos are an amazing part of the history of Aussie diggers in battle and the campaign they were involved in … Lest we forget.
Many relics of these men may remain in France but these treasured photos need to be honoured on Australian soil. It is now our turn to answer the call of duty and return these photos to their home for safekeeping.
Ohh I have tears of pure joy and total sadness after looking through these pics … History in front of our very own eyes … Thank you for sharing. Never forgotten.
In July 2011, with the generous support of the Seven Network’s chairman, Kerry Stokes AC, the entire Thuillier collection of around 4,000 glass photographic plates, including the British images, was purchased from the living descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the couple who had supplemented their farming income during the First World War by selling pictures to passing Allied soldiers. If Louis and Antoinette were alive today they would no doubt be chuffed and probably very surprised to see just how much passion their portraits of thousands of young soldiers from a war so long ago has aroused.
PLATE 37 An equally sad-looking soldier – no regimental badge.
In late 2011 the precious glass plates did finally ‘come home’, in a gigantic packing case, purpose-built to carry them, along with the Thuilliers’ canvas backdrop. After months of planning, cataloguing, careful cleaning and scanning, the Australian digger plates were gifted to the Australian War Memorial for permanent display. Many of the more intriguing images and the stories behind them formed the basis of a nationwide touring photographic exhibition organized by the AWM. The remaining thousands of British and other Allied soldier plates have been preserved by the Kerry Stokes Collection in a secure repository in Perth, Australia.
More than once in our research it has struck us how impermanent many of the records that we rely on today are in comparison with the handwritten files, letters, printed photographs and glass photographic plate negatives that have made this such a rich collection. As we began examining the plates, drawing on the expertise of people like Peter Burness, it was a revelation to discover how, in many ways, the photographic plates used by the Thuilliers are actually a superior storage medium to the standard celluloid photographic negative, let alone digital imaging. Not only have they already lasted nearly a century, but so much information is packed into these enormous negative plates that it was often possible for us to zoom in on a colour patch, medal ribbon or cap badge to help identify a soldier. There is something terribly poignant about being able to zoom in to the pained and weary eyes of an individual soldier – actually to see the mud on his boots and the texture of his uniform.
As we applied modern photo-processing software, it was astonishing to see faces emerge from the murk of so many plates – images that could so easily have been lost forever. We have asked ourselves many times how much of today’s history will survive to the same extent. How many personal handwritten letters have we preserved today that will record the thoughts and experiences of our loved ones for future generations to read? What was once recorded in a letter just a few decades ago is now just an electronic impulse stored on magnetic media whose lifespan can still currently only be surmised. Will the digital records of today – the photographs, emails and the writings on other online ephemera such as Facebook, Twitter and websites – allow people in a hundred years to explore the history of our present era with as many resources as remain from the First World War? How much of our heritage and experiences will be lost as contemporary storage media slowly fade or are carelessly deleted?
The process of identifying, at least by regiment, as many of the Thuillier images as possible for this book has been a painstaking and often frustrating process. Many of the soldiers were photographed in front of the distinctive painted canvas backdrop and that has been a useful fingerprint in identifying Thuillier pictures which made their way back home into family collections or regimental history books. On rare occasions the identification was easy because a particular soldier features and is actually named in one of the rare Thuillier images reproduced in regimental history books or contained in personal collections. There have been other occasions where photographs taken of soldiers after the war have allowed us to ‘match’ them with a soldier in a Thuillier image (see the Royal Fusiliers). Once identified, it has also been difficult to find out more about a particular soldier because so many of the British service files are incomplete or were destroyed completely in German bombing raids during the Second World War.
PLATE 38 An unidentified soldier. No clues as to his regiment can be seen in the photograph.
The Backdrop
One of the key clues that helped us track the Thuillier collection was the distinctive backdrop that appears behind soldiers and civilians in many of the pictures. Well before the discovery of the Thuillier portraits, historians at the Australian War Memorial had noticed the length of painted canvas in a handful of images of different soldiers held in its collection, and they were excited by what it implied. If a photographer had taken the trouble to paint a backdrop for posed photographs somewhere behind the front line, maybe there were more to be found than the dozen or so that had made their way into official collections.
PLATE 39 An excellent Thuillier image showing how the backdrop was used – the soldier is probably from the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons.
Never did we think it possible that the backdrop used by Louis and Antoinette Thuillier could have survived nearly a century in a dusty attic. But, as we fumbled around in the eaves of the family attic in Vignacourt back in early 2011, we found, wedged between two roof beams, a tight roll of canvas mounted on a wooden pole. Eager to see what was inside, but anxious not to damage it, we lugged the dusty canvas roll down the three flights of stairs to the courtyard … and gently unrolled it.
PLATE 40 Unfurling the backdrop. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)
It is a little damaged from its near-century in a draughty attic, but the distinctive double archway seen in many of the photographs is still clearly visible.
PLATE 43 Close-up of the backdrop. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)
There are hundreds of photographs in the Thuillier collection which clearly predate the painted canvas backdrop – many of them are probably pre-war images of French civilians and then, when war broke out in 1914, they feature the French soldiers who used the town as a staging post before they headed up to the front lines. As business picked up, Louis and Antoinette must have decided that a painted canvas backdrop offered a more professional look for their clients and so the first images using the backdrop began to appear.
PLATE 41 An early Thuillier photograph of a French second lieutenant, of the 4th Colonial Infantry Regiment, and his wife, without the distinctive backdrop. Likely to have been taken sometime in July 1915 when the French 1st Colonial Corps was billeted in Vignacourt.
PLATE 42 A French soldier and his family in front of the distinctive Thuillier canvas backdrop.
PLATE 44 A soldier poses in front of the Thuillier backdrop, using a chair as a prop. The distinctive high table used in many other photographs can be seen just to the left. This soldier has two good-conduct chevrons on his lower left sleeve, indicating that he has six years with a clean record of service on his army record.
PLATE 45 A soldier from the Royal Engineers. His armbands show he is a qualified signaller. Possibly taken when the engineers were in and around Vignacourt in early 1916 preparing transport links and hospitals for the Somme offensive.
PLATE 46 Soldiers of the Royal Artillery Regiment, two with good-conduct chevrons. Clearly Thuillier moved his backdrop according to the state of the weather. The soldier in Plate 44 stands on a smooth cement floor in a covered area. This image is taken outside on cobblestones. It seems likely the smoother-floored area was used by Thuillier later in the war – hence this image predates Plate 44. However, the tunic worn by the soldier seated left is an ‘economy tunic’ without pleated pockets and without the rifle patches over the shoulders – which was issued only in 1916.
THE VIGNACOURT BREAD BOY
The discovery of the Thuillier glass plate images has been as moving for many of the villagers of Vignacourt as it has been for the numerous families who have searched for their relatives among them. In November 2011 hundreds of townsfolk came to Vignacourt’s town hall to view the two Australian Seven Network television documentaries that had been produced at that time on the ‘Lost Diggers’, subtitled in French for the occasion. For the village it was a chance to learn more about a chapter in the region’s history that only a few of the elderly villagers still recalled. Around the walls of the town hall, many poster-sized prints of some of the iconic Thuillier photographs also drew an excited response. For even after nearly a hundred years, some Vignacourt families were excitedly identifying their loved ones among several of the pictures taken of civilians during the conflict.
The young lad in Plate 47 was recognized by his family as Abel Théot. At the time this photograph was taken by the Thuilliers, the boy’s life was one of hardship and sadness brought about by the war. Abel was one of five brothers, two of whom died fighting in the French army against the Germans. His father was away at war, too, and Abel sold bread and pastries to Allied troops to bring in extra money to help his mother and family survive. Tragically, after this photograph was taken, Abel learned that his father had also died in the fighting; another of his brothers returned with serious wounds.
PLATE 47 Abel Théot, the Vignacourt bread boy.
