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Vive la France!

Chapter 3: ILLUSTRATIONS
By E. Alexander Powell
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About This Book

A collection of frontline reports recounts life and combat on the Western battle-lines, following French and British operations in sectors such as the Vosges, Alsace, and Champagne. It blends descriptive scene-setting of trenches, artillery barrages, mines, gas and aerial encounters with accounts of assaults, captured positions, prisoners, and the work of medics and hospitals. Photographic impressions and campaign vignettes convey the physical destruction, scale of ordnance, improvisations of field services, and the endurance and sacrifices of soldiers amid sustained offensive and defensive operations.

ILLUSTRATIONS

“High-explosive!” Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
French trenches in the sand-dunes of the Belgian littoral 4
The watch on the Aisne 5
The taking of Neuville St. Vaast 12
French infantry going into action 13
Dragoons going into action 14
The effect of shrapnel from a French “seventy-five” on a German battery 15
French 155-millimetre gun shelling the German trenches on the Aisne 18
French artillery officers, in an observatory on the Aisne, watching the effect of shell-fire on the German trenches 19
In an underground first-aid station 30
Zouaves carrying a German position in the Belgian sand-dunes by storm 31
In the Argonne 38
An observing officer directing the fire of a French battery three miles behind him 39
The mass before the battle 54
What a 38-centimetre shell, fired from a gun twenty-three miles away, did in Dunkirk 55
London buses at the front 64
British field-kitchens on the march in Flanders 65
Machine-gun squad wearing masks as a protection against the asphyxiating gas with which the Germans precede their attacks 84
A British battery in action 85
“Bodies, long months dead, rotting amid the wire entanglements” Group 86
“Imagine what it must be like to sleep in a hole in the earth, into which you have to crawl on all fours, like an animal into its lair”
French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches 87
In a bomb-proof gun-pit 98
French trenches on the Somme 99
In the French trenches on the Yser 100
Campaigning in the Vosges 101
What the Germans did to the church at Ribécourt 106
On the summit of the Vosges 107
On the Lac Noir 114
The penalty for treason 115
Troglodyte dwellings in Alsace 124
The straggling columns of unkempt, unshaven men were in striking contrast to the helmeted giants on gigantic horses who guarded them 125
In the trenches in Alsace 136
Convoy of German prisoners guarded by Moroccan Spahis 137
A French smoke bomb 140
With hand-grenades in the trenches 141
Chevaux-de-frise and movable entanglements 150
Taking precautions against a gas attack 151
The battle-field of Champagne 154
Bringing in the wounded during the battle of Champagne 155
The battle of Champagne 166
The battle-field of Champagne, showing the French high-explosive shells bursting on the German trenches 167
Fighting in a quarrel that is not his own 172
The first-line German trenches captured by the French in Champagne 173
This crater, seventy feet deep and twice that in diameter, was caused by the explosion of a mine. In the terrific blast five hundred Germans perished 174
German officers captured during the battle of Champagne 175
The price of victory 176
Instruction against gas attacks 177
“Men were at work rolling up the barbed wire in the captured German entanglements” 180
The thousands upon thousands of empty brass shell-cases with which the battle-fields are strewn are collected and sent back to the factory for reloading 181
Mounted on the German trench walls were revolving steel turrets containing quick-firing guns 182
“Brown-skinned men from North Africa in turbans and burnooses” 183
Motor-buses with wire-netting tops filled with carrier pigeons 184
German prisoners came by, carrying on their shoulders stretchers on which lay the stiff, stark forms of dead men 185
Lunéville from an aeroplane 200
French antiaircraft gun in action against a German aeroplane 201
When the chickens come home to roost 206
Antiaircraft guns, posted outside the towns, are ready to give a warm reception to an aerial intruder 207
“Two soldiers lifted him onto a stretcher and carried him between interminable walls of brown earth to the dressing-station” 236
Unloading wounded at a hospital in northern France 237
Red Cross men getting wounded out of a bombarded town in Flanders 244
Bringing in the harvest of the guns 245
“Every house and farmyard for miles around was filled with wounded and still they came streaming in” 250
“The paths of glory lead——” 251

All illustrations but those specifically acknowledged were taken by the Photographic Service of the French Armies and are here reproduced by special permission.