The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

67 A version of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers cap badge.

      PLATES 68 – 69 A corporal and a lance corporal of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (left), and a major (right). The Royal Welsh Fusiliers were probably one of the first British regiments to be based around Vignacourt in late September 1915.

      A diary kept by Abbé Leclerq, the Vignacourt village priest at the time,¹ reveals that the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of the British Army’s oldest regiments, was one of the first regiments to be based in and around Vignacourt during the First World War. On 27 September 1915 he noted the arrival of the first British troops in the area – the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, one of the South Wales Borderers regiments and a platoon of Royal Engineers, who settled in and around Vignacourt in billets and nearby camps. Vignacourt was to become home to the staff of the British 13th Army Corps between January and July of 1916. The Royal Engineers are very nearly the most photographed unit among those in the Thuillier collection, probably because, as Abbé Leclerq recorded, they came to Vignacourt so early in the war, and units of engineers were there for the duration.

      PLATE 70 Two soldiers of the Royal Engineers Corps pose in the Thuilliers’ farmyard. Both wear armbands indicating they were in the Royal Engineers Signal Service. The soldier on the left wears the distinctive ‘T’ of the territorial force on his left shoulder.

      PLATE 71 A lance corporal in the Royal Engineers photographed in the Thuilliers’ farmyard. Probably taken in the first half of 1916

      PLATES 72-73 The haggard faces of these Royal Engineers, especially the man seated on the right (and shown in close-up above), suggest these men have not been long away from the front lines.

      PLATE 74 A young soldier from the Royal Engineers Signal Service.

      PLATE 75 Another image featuring the young man from Plate 74 wearing a Royal Engineers cap badge and posing with a friend. Both men wear shorts and the lad on the right is wearing the winter service dress ‘Gorblimey’ cap with its distinctive flaps issued in early 1915. This picture is probably from the warmer months in 1916, the year after the Royal Engineers first arrived in Vignacourt and before the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in July.

      The Thuillier images also trace the movement of French troops through the Picardy town, many of them dressed in colourful, antiquated nineteenth-century-style uniforms; there are even cavalrymen posing with their lances, relics of an earlier type of warfare. The British and the French both deployed lancers in early First World War battles but they were woefully ineffective against the machine gun and modern artillery.

      PLATE 76 A French cavalryman holds the 2.97-metre steel lance used by dragoon and cavalry regiments during the war. The lance was soon abandoned after the war’s disastrous early battles using such antiquated weapons.

      It is sobering to think of the hell these French troops went into, their quaint and colourful nineteenth-century-era uniforms absurdly impractical for the industrial warfare they were to face. Just like the Germans on the other side, everyone thought the war would be over soon. On the Somme alone, within just a few months, from 1 July to 18 November 1916, when the Battle of the Somme was finally called off, there would be 195,000 French casualties (and 425,000 British).

      PLATE 77 A rushed wedding before the new husband heads off to defend his homeland? A French soldier with his bride.

      PLATE 78 ‘Honour to 9 May’: almost certainly a reference by these French soldiers to the disastrous Second Battle of Artois a year earlier (9 May–18 June 1915), which resulted in 102,500 French and 27,809 British casualties but failed to break through the German lines. The shadow of another negative – featuring a ghostly image of a soldier on horseback – has adhered to this plate from when they were stacked in the Thuillier attic.

      PLATE 79 Proud French colonial troops, cavalrymen of the 8th Regiment of Hussars, strike a pose – summer 1915.

      PLATE 80 The French soon abandoned such nineteenth-century uniforms because their bright colours made them easy targets for German gunners.

      PLATE 81 French soldiers pose with a dedication to the mitrailleurs – the machine-gunners – probably honouring their comrades who fell in the battles of 1915.

      PLATE 82 Moroccan tirailleurs. The soldier on the right sports the typical Berber haircut of the day.

      PLATE 83 Moroccan light infantrymen – or tirailleurs – in Vignacourt. North African tirailleurs served with distinction on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. They were assigned their own regiment in 1914 and suffered heavy losses.

      In late 1915 Vignacourt came under the military control of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), and the Thuillier images reflect that change, thousands of the plates showing British Tommies and kilt-wearing Scots.

      PLATE 84 A Thuillier image of some hard-looking Scots soldiers in kilts, most probably Gordon Highlanders.

      Louis Thuillier also roamed the streets and the nearby army camps in search of subjects to photograph.

      PLATE 85 A dapper lieutenant colonel with the South Staffordshire Regiment in front of the stairs that today still lead up to the Thuillier attic where the photographic plates were discovered. He is a decorated officer who has been twice wounded, as indicated by the two wound stripes on his left sleeve. The three small chevrons on his right sleeve show he is in his third year of overseas service. These chevrons were introduced in January 1918, which places this image in the final year of the war.

      PLATE 86 Royal Engineers dispatch riders in Vignacourt – a typically humorous and informal Thuillier picture.

      PLATE 87 A sergeant and a private soldier in front of their tent, probably at one of the many military camps.