“This is one of the few photographs which shows the moment of an attack.  It shows an officer of the Scottish Rifles leading his men out of a trench for a raid on German trenches near Arras on 24 March 1917.”

I found this image on the Grafton Galleries website, the link which was provided on angel. I chose this image because of how rare it is; capturing the powerful, overwhelming moment of men leaving the trenches to go into battle.

During the war, soldiers lived in the trenches. Life in the trenches was described as “one of the most sustained onslaughts of the human sensorium. It thrust man’s fragile body between the ooze of primordial slime on the one hand and the terrors of shellfire on the other…” (Das). I found this poignant because it gives me the sense that soldiers lived in fear day to day. They never knew what to expect and as this photo captures, even crawling out of the trenches they do not know what to expect. They do not know what is on the surface, and as a viewer of the image, neither do we. This image would have made the civilian at home use their imagination as to the terror present beyond what is shown. Something else I notice about this picture is how they soldiers are in a line, just waiting to crawl out of the trench and fight. This may present a somewhat negative connotation that the soldiers were made to live in these narrow, obviously unexplainably dirty trenches, to be filtered out one by one to fight. I don’t believe that this is the intent however, it is a thought that came to mind.

I believe civilians living at home who would have seen this image would have been filled with grief, horror, and worry. The soldiers in this image are brothers, sons, fathers, husbands; loved ones. The lack of identity being shown leaves the viewer wondering if this is someone they know? Is this my loved one? Not having that answer I can only imagine as one of the worst feelings. However, during World War I being able to stay in touch with family while on the front was a priority. Soldiers were able to write home to their families and give them a sense of what the war was like however frequently they wanted. Therefore, the worrying of family members was able to be subsided eventually. They were not left wondering if their loved one was dead or alive for an extreme extended amount of time.

The strongest message I take from this image is the lack of identity. None of the soldiers faces are shown which, as already discussed, leaves you curious as to who these men were. It also makes the connection between all civilians being soldiers and fighting the war. Just because civilians were not on the front, they were making great efforts at home to support the cause.