I recently came across a remarkable display of old photographs on the Daily Telegraph web site. Coincidentally, this was the day after I’d received a new issue of the Saint Austin Review, the theme of which is World War One.
The photographs are here:
A dustman – someone we call a trash collector in the US – has found over the years discarded photographs of the men of the First World War. They are rare, sometimes intimate and sometimes posed – but always “right there”, not dated but contemporary, extraordinarily real.
This is how it looks, and almost feels, to get up after a sleep in a trench, and then light the morning’s first pipe.
It makes one think: Suppose photography had been invented in 1806 instead of thirty years later. Could we be looking at the British troops at Waterloo getting up one morning to fight Napoleon’s Imperial Guard?
My grandmother told me that her great-grandmother had described seeing, as a small child, Napoleon’s forces marching into Poland. What if someone in the crowd had been able to snap a photo with a primitive camera?
What can strike us if we think about it is how the people of generations past must have looked and behaved exactly the way we do. Julius Caesar may have resembled your Uncle Frank, and Henry the Fifth your Uncle Bill, and they may have yawned and smiled and blown their noses the same way. The haircuts may have differed, and the clothing, but that’s about all.
Someday, God willing, people may look at pictures of us and say: Imagine, they’re just like we are! Or let’s hope they can, in the ways that are most important to our human identity.
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