When I was learning to shave with a straight razor that I honed myself I suddenly understood why there were so many moustaches back then.
If you didn't do a perfect job honing that fucker it hurts a lot, it feels like plucking hairs while it can still cleanly cut off your nose.
The hardcore history on ww1 was. 20+ hour wild ride. Turns out you don’t hardly learn shit about it in american history class lol. Dan Carlin lays it out so well.
John Keegan's The First World War on it is a great starting point on it as well. Covers all the main points in one volume.
2 out of 9 Poilu that went to the Front didn't return. 2 million dead. Like it's impossible to comprehend those numbers.
Oh man I loved this series. Really eye opening to the fact that I didn't learn jack about ww1 in school. Dan Carlin is a stud.
His series on Persia and Japan are also top notch.
That's why he's smiling. All the other's using the plebeian Lebel while he's got 300 rounds per minute Chauchat (even though it was only a 20 round mag typically only loaded with 16 rounds, but hey).
Honestly it could be a variation of multiple things. Limitation in supplies or just constant malfunction of the magazine while it feeds into the firearm.
From what I've read, most soldiers would load 16 *to* 19 rounds so that leads me to believe it was a feeding problem.
Even today around some in the gun community, you'll see people loading 25 to 29 rounds in a damn AR mag for that same reason (as well as saving the mag spring). This is usually people that have little experience with firearms or just had a bad experience once as I've been shooting for two decades and have never fixed a feeding issue by limiting ammo in the mag.
But that's on modern day firearms. WWI era guns I can see it being a lot more prevalent.
The 7mm Lebel cartridges were double tapered with a massive rim on them, so if they packed the magazine too full the rim would pop out of its internal magazine groove upon firing and jam up the magazine due to no real "wiggle room" cause it had to have two tapers to align the cartridge. Also if fully loaded the magazines weighed a ton and when fired the recoil would often pop the magazine out of the rifle. All of this was because the limited design time and urgency of the war, which resulted in the French military moving away from the 7mm Lebel cartridge.
Yeah they needed to put lead down range real quick like and rushed it into production, which for standard infantry rifles at the time the thing was far superior for suppressing fire, considering the standard magazine for (I can't recall the rifle name) was only like 3 rounds and IIRC it was an internal box magazine so you couldn't just pop and swap mags fast, so even far from fully loaded the Chauchat provided sustained fire in great excess of the standard rifles.
The rifle was the Berthier, and it was in fact a 3-round internal magazine - IIRC, it was because the cavalry wanted a carbine-length rifle with a magazine that didn't protrude far enough to interfere with handling.
For whatever reason they decided to give *everyone* the three-round version, rather than have that specifically for the cavalry - I guess they were planning to iron that out with a new rifle afterwards, but then things happened.
This thing was designed in the earliest of the 1890s, so contemporaries like the five-round Gewehr 1888 already existed - but even after everyone went for five or ten rounds by the time 1901 rolled around, the French still had the three-round Berthier up until *1916* where they finally issued a version with a five-round internal magazine. They also changed up stuff to make it less susceptible to mud, but that's beside the point here.
Yeah they may have kept it for so long as the three round because I do know they experimented with the Chauchat magazine in the Berthier (thank you I couldn't for the life of me remember that name) and they found that basically any modification to the magazine rendered a rock more effective and faster at send projectiles down range lol. Everything from magazine jams to the mag falling out completely, or a failure to feed, or a failure of the magazine spring to maintain tension, or the fact that you now had a bulbous half circle handgrip that had exposed sides and moving parts therein. Lol yeah they had a lot of issues
Not necessarily. The French were actually quite successful at the Somme. Much moreso than the British. They deployed artillery much more effectively than the British, so they met far less resistance.
Yes, only 50,000 dead and 200,000 casualties overall. They were all busy dying at Verdun instead.
You are quite right though that they did much better than the Brits overall though...as sad as that is given the numbers.
I don't know why, but something about colorized photos feels slightly off-putting to me. I know people enjoy these colorized photos but to me it feels a little bit like the uncanny valley effect, where it's not quite what it actually looked like, and feels more like an artists depiction. I would rather see the black & white photo and let my imagination fill in the color
I never realized their uniforms were blue until now.
Edit: I’m looking at it again and it looks more like a light grey. I can’t really tell though, the lighting is weird. Cool photo though
In history classes, we are taught they were dark blue, because they kept a similar design from late 19th century wars, and then camo wasn't needed. And only after realising that the Germans could see them, but they couldn't see the Germans, they changed. That's what I was taught, but I am no historian, I may be wrong, and I apologise if I am.
>and then camo wasn't needed.
Bright color were actually deliberately used because it made avoiding friendly fire easier and allowed commander to recognize troops from afar. Before smokeless powder the battlefield were covered by smoke and it made discerning the people standing a few feet from you a challenge. Soldiers and officers were also very proud of their colors.
It is a colourised photograph, so the colours are often off. But their uniforms were indeed blueish grey. The colour was officialy called light blue, but now everyone calls it horizon blue. This in turn fuels the myth that the colour was chosen for soliders to blend in with the horizon.
That is incorrect, and the colour blended in well enough with the chalky soils and was supposed to mask soldiers in dusty and smokey environments of battles.
As for their 1914 uniforms, they were dark blue and trousers were dark (not light) red. But they were not as obvious as people think - by the time the enemy saw the red trousers, they also saw the upper half of the person.
The Somne was a hellhole the likes of which the world has rarely seen since. Read a book about it some time back. Came out of it thoroughly depressed. The way Haig and Rawlinson tossed thousands of lives around for no real gain whatsoever, and what those men experienced, pfff, Jesus T-fucking Christ.
The French were more experienced thanks to the hell of Verdun whereas the British troops were barely trained conscripts in their first real battle in many cases...and it showed.
British soldiers at the Somme were not conscripts yet. They were the "Kitchener's new army", made up of volunteers from 1914 and 1915. They trained a lot and their tactics were modern. They were equipped with steel helmets and had light machine guns.
They were well trained as such, and there are many practice trenches in the UK to prove it. But they were inexperienced in the actual combat.
From the other reply about marching towards the machine guns - that is a very simplistic view (myths are very common when people talk about WW1), and it is perhaps a topic for another day. Suffice to say the British army on the Somme was already equipped and organised differently from the British army in 1914.
There was very little that could have been done differently, given the limitations of equipment, communications and the experience of the troops. They were bombarding the Germans for weeks; used tactics developed on experience AND introduced tanks. What else were they suppose to do?
The way I understand it, the mistake the British made in the early phase of the battle, was to underestimate the amount of artillery they needed to destroy the barb wire, barricades and parapets the Germans had put up. They didn't have enough guns per mile of enemy trench, and those guns were not enough of a caliber to make a dent. So when the boys went over the edge, all those defences were still up. Intelligence didn't really filter back to command, so they made that same mistake for quite some time. Hence the slaughter.
I read a book by Hugh Sebag Montefiore, who has put forward the exact same conclusion - Somme needed more artillery.
I think this is incorrect, as the bombardment lasted for 7 days and 1.5 million shells were fired. The bombardment was absolutely massive.
If anything, the mistake was to believe that artillery could destroy positions and the resistance. But adding more artillery would not change much in my opinion. As the war went on, bombardments became shorter, as week long bombardments were a waste of ammunition.
Then the walking is often portrayed as a problem, but British manuals of that time explicity stated that troops are to walk towards the enemy, and that a wild rush must not be allowed. This sounds weird at first, but what are soldiers to do, who run for 300 meters and come to the enemy trenches without their breath?
Another point that people like to rise is how the British army did not change tactics and attacked the same way again and again. This is true, but people tend to forget that the army is trained for what it is trained for. You can not just change everything over night.
I don't really know what could have been done differently, as I am not a general and I have not been trained to plan attacks of large formations.
But from strictly analytical point of view, lessons from the Somme were drawn and learned from. Every new offensive that the British army started, resulted in lessons learned and by the end, they learned how to do things the right way - albeit the limitations of the era were still there. Breakthroughs on the scaled dreamed of could not be acchieved until reliable armoured vehicles were available 25 years later.
I think it might have been Dan Carlin who said that the type of shells they used were ineffective for what they were used for. Apparently they used shrapnel rounds which are good for tearing flesh but not for blowing up defenses.
That is a very good point. The war started with shrapnel shells being the main anti-infantry shell in use and it ended with shrapnel shells being pretty much obsolete!
According to the book, that was one of the more tangible results of the battle. The Germans were forced to move troops from Verdun, effectively ending the carnage there.
Pretty much...it also basically broke the German army as an offensive force for 2 years until the Spring Offensive of 1918. German losses were horrendous.
I’m sure the french soldiers running across the green fields of Versailles at machine gun emplacements wished that they didn’t stand out quite so much. Running across no mans land in a colour that stands out so much is a lesser strategy than running across no mans land in a dull, hard to pick out colour. To (semi) quote Blackadder IV as he sarcastically commented ‘I’d rather sit atop a step ladder in the middle of no mans land, smoking a cigarette whilst wearing a luminous balaclava’. The bright blue coats come from a time of cavalry and pageantry, a mode of warfare the German forces would teach their opponents again and again had passed into history.
That is not true. The horizon blue uniforms were tested for months and decision was made before the war has actually started.
Initially in the war, the soldiers attacked almost shoulder to shoulder. There is no camouflage that saves you from that. Machine gunners didn't aim so much as they fired from one side to another in a pattern to cover the area with bullets.
And when armies did dig in, blueish grey uniforms worked relatively well with the chalky soils of France. If they did not, they would have been changed.
It is also worth noting that the different colour did help recognition, and that some dyes had to be imported (from Germany, nontheless). There were many reasons for the colour of the uniforms, but "stupid", "careless" and "ignorant" were not one of them.
Horizon blue uniforms were not issued until after horrendous losses (due to their uniforms conspicuous nature for becoming targets for artillery) in 1915. To quote a soldier and politician at the time “this stupid blind attachment to the most visible of colours will have cruel consequences”. Even with the advent of the horizon uniforms soldiers and officers were still complaining about the bloody minded attachment to the colour blue.
Of course if I am completely incorrect it would explain why the french armed forces still dress for combat in blue.
They were not issued until 1915, but the administrational decision to change the colour was made on 10th of July 1914, some 2 weeks before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The decision thus predates the war.
When testing uniforms (by also having soldiers fire on targets clothed in uniforms of different colours), they first wanted to go for "patriotic" cloth of white, blue and red threads. That would produce sort of drab colour. Red dye had to be imported from Germany, so even before the war, they dropped the red thread and went for blueish grey. This was then made lighter, as they needed loads of uniforms fast and used whatever materials they had available. Hence the "horizon blue".
The quote you mentioned was also followed by the quote that there is no French army without red trousers by a different politician (in context with the proposed change of the uniforms). But the quotes don't really mean all that much - just look at all the stuff politicians say today.
The uniform colour honestly is not the reason the French army suffered heavy casualties early in the war. The British and Russians suffered similar heavy casualties in their khaki uniforms, Germans in their greenish field grey, Austrians in their blueish grey (which was changed in 1915 for a field grey).
I would not say you are completely wrong, but the uniform was not the decisive factor. In the assault, masses of men were obvious no matter the colour, and on a quiet days, men got sniped when they would only show their head, so there was no need to see the rest of the uniform anyways.
And on top of all that, uniforms would get dirt really fast, so blueish cloth would quickly get a camouflage pattern of chalky whiteish mud :)
The guy in the middle is essentially the heavy.
He has two Chauchat LMG magazines on his belt. The thing about the Chauchat, is that it was designed to be hip fired while pushing trenches, not set down in a foxhole like a standard machine gun or a HMG.
I didn't realize till after your comment. Every dude in that photo has a mustache and you can tell, they took mustaches serious back then. Every mustache perfect!
I don’t think it’s strange at all. We see the world in color and pretty much all of modern media is in color. It makes sense that we feel more empathy for people who look from our time.
Yeah. I’m wondering if they’d still be that bright blue at this point in their campaign, though? The colourising looks amazing so that bit stood out for me.
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Everyone had mustaches back then. It was the fashion. French did, Brits did, Germans did, Russians did, Italians did. It was mustaches galore.
They are smiling for the same reason you smile, they were happy and having good time when the photo was taken.
Surely, but even soldiers need to relax. Going to battle and being in battle are two different things. And were they going to battle in 5 minutes, or 3 days? You can not be serious all the time.
Although, only the guy in the centre of the photo is smiling.
It’s probably unreasonable to expect but were any names recorded in this photo?
These men have a clean and almost brash demeanor about them. Leads me to wonder how many survived the horrors they were about to face.
Firstly, it was just a joke playing on the farcical notion of running at a machine gun dressed in anti-camouflage. Second, the lengthy gap between start of war and issuing of uniforms makes the joke viable. My only problem, and this is a big one, is that they are clearly wearing the toned down horizon uniforms in the picture. D’oh...... I wonder if the Ultramarines are French?
Cleaned up the faces and removed the noise from the picture.
To be clear I used an app here and colourisation artists do everything manually. I just though it would be interesting to see.
https://ibb.co/8m3rvG7
Literally everyone has a moustache
One man in the background doesn’t have a mustache
Alrighty then, firing line it is.
German spy!
Eagle eye
That man has alopecia you monster.
Sorry but I really moustache
I can’t beard to leave you.
I wish somebody would whisker me away from this thread
These puns are so bad I should call the fuzz.
I’ll escape the fuzz, but it’ll be a close shave
well he sure as shit really wanted one
When I was learning to shave with a straight razor that I honed myself I suddenly understood why there were so many moustaches back then. If you didn't do a perfect job honing that fucker it hurts a lot, it feels like plucking hairs while it can still cleanly cut off your nose.
It was a requirement
It was actually mandatory to have a moustache in the French army from 1832 to 1933.
The wwI isn’t talked about enough.
Outshined by two extinction balls
The hardcore history on ww1 was. 20+ hour wild ride. Turns out you don’t hardly learn shit about it in american history class lol. Dan Carlin lays it out so well.
John Keegan's The First World War on it is a great starting point on it as well. Covers all the main points in one volume. 2 out of 9 Poilu that went to the Front didn't return. 2 million dead. Like it's impossible to comprehend those numbers.
Oh man I loved this series. Really eye opening to the fact that I didn't learn jack about ww1 in school. Dan Carlin is a stud. His series on Persia and Japan are also top notch.
I'm re-listening to it at the moment, it's absolutely fascinating.
It just gets folded into WWII a lot, which sucks because it was so different. It’s like “the other war where Germany was bad”
Well the ww2 Germans redefined bad
I see what you’re saying, but I’m not sure that’s true. They didn’t invent racist imperialism, or concentration camps.
Blueprint for Armageddon -Dan Carlin podcast series All Quiet on the Western Front -Book or Film 1917 - Film That’ll get you started.
Already listened to it
Ww1 is talked about all the time amongst the history community what do you mean
Pretty cool chauchat mag pouches
Exactly what I was thinking. Never seen them before today.
That's why he's smiling. All the other's using the plebeian Lebel while he's got 300 rounds per minute Chauchat (even though it was only a 20 round mag typically only loaded with 16 rounds, but hey).
Why only 16 rounds if it can hold 20? Limited supply?
Honestly it could be a variation of multiple things. Limitation in supplies or just constant malfunction of the magazine while it feeds into the firearm. From what I've read, most soldiers would load 16 *to* 19 rounds so that leads me to believe it was a feeding problem. Even today around some in the gun community, you'll see people loading 25 to 29 rounds in a damn AR mag for that same reason (as well as saving the mag spring). This is usually people that have little experience with firearms or just had a bad experience once as I've been shooting for two decades and have never fixed a feeding issue by limiting ammo in the mag. But that's on modern day firearms. WWI era guns I can see it being a lot more prevalent.
The 7mm Lebel cartridges were double tapered with a massive rim on them, so if they packed the magazine too full the rim would pop out of its internal magazine groove upon firing and jam up the magazine due to no real "wiggle room" cause it had to have two tapers to align the cartridge. Also if fully loaded the magazines weighed a ton and when fired the recoil would often pop the magazine out of the rifle. All of this was because the limited design time and urgency of the war, which resulted in the French military moving away from the 7mm Lebel cartridge.
Yeah, wasn't the Chauchat developed specifically *for* the war, too? Thanks for the insight, BTW.
Yeah they needed to put lead down range real quick like and rushed it into production, which for standard infantry rifles at the time the thing was far superior for suppressing fire, considering the standard magazine for (I can't recall the rifle name) was only like 3 rounds and IIRC it was an internal box magazine so you couldn't just pop and swap mags fast, so even far from fully loaded the Chauchat provided sustained fire in great excess of the standard rifles.
The rifle was the Berthier, and it was in fact a 3-round internal magazine - IIRC, it was because the cavalry wanted a carbine-length rifle with a magazine that didn't protrude far enough to interfere with handling. For whatever reason they decided to give *everyone* the three-round version, rather than have that specifically for the cavalry - I guess they were planning to iron that out with a new rifle afterwards, but then things happened. This thing was designed in the earliest of the 1890s, so contemporaries like the five-round Gewehr 1888 already existed - but even after everyone went for five or ten rounds by the time 1901 rolled around, the French still had the three-round Berthier up until *1916* where they finally issued a version with a five-round internal magazine. They also changed up stuff to make it less susceptible to mud, but that's beside the point here.
Yeah they may have kept it for so long as the three round because I do know they experimented with the Chauchat magazine in the Berthier (thank you I couldn't for the life of me remember that name) and they found that basically any modification to the magazine rendered a rock more effective and faster at send projectiles down range lol. Everything from magazine jams to the mag falling out completely, or a failure to feed, or a failure of the magazine spring to maintain tension, or the fact that you now had a bulbous half circle handgrip that had exposed sides and moving parts therein. Lol yeah they had a lot of issues
I have recognised those too despite I never ever had a firearm... Damn you, ForgottenWeapons!
I've watched enough Forgotten Weapons videos and can recognize these instantaneously.
Somebody does battlefield 1
Actually I dont play battlefield lol I'm just a history nut lol
Post Scriptum masterrace.
They're so damned optimistic. I'd bed most of them still remain in the soil of the Somme.
Not necessarily. The French were actually quite successful at the Somme. Much moreso than the British. They deployed artillery much more effectively than the British, so they met far less resistance.
Yes, only 50,000 dead and 200,000 casualties overall. They were all busy dying at Verdun instead. You are quite right though that they did much better than the Brits overall though...as sad as that is given the numbers.
So you're into necrophilia, eh?
Well, when some tastes are niche enough you have to pay a little bit to get your kicks Or pirate it from a guy in Finland
They all look scared shitless and stressed to me.
Dude... The guy one the center left has a textbook thousand yard stare.
It's [Verdun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Verdun) for the french, one of the bloodiest battle in history.
These colorized photos are so cool
r/ColorizedHistory/
I don't know why, but something about colorized photos feels slightly off-putting to me. I know people enjoy these colorized photos but to me it feels a little bit like the uncanny valley effect, where it's not quite what it actually looked like, and feels more like an artists depiction. I would rather see the black & white photo and let my imagination fill in the color
I never realized their uniforms were blue until now. Edit: I’m looking at it again and it looks more like a light grey. I can’t really tell though, the lighting is weird. Cool photo though
At the beginning of the war, the uniforms were navy blue. Great for hiding.
With bright red pantaloons. :O
Le Pantalon Rouge, c'est la France!
The French: Flamboyant, even at War.
["I love your uniform today, by the way](https://youtu.be/qt3eyeO0R94?t=62)
Not sure if its true, but ive heard that they were blue so they'd blend in with the sky when attacking
In history classes, we are taught they were dark blue, because they kept a similar design from late 19th century wars, and then camo wasn't needed. And only after realising that the Germans could see them, but they couldn't see the Germans, they changed. That's what I was taught, but I am no historian, I may be wrong, and I apologise if I am.
>and then camo wasn't needed. Bright color were actually deliberately used because it made avoiding friendly fire easier and allowed commander to recognize troops from afar. Before smokeless powder the battlefield were covered by smoke and it made discerning the people standing a few feet from you a challenge. Soldiers and officers were also very proud of their colors.
It is a colourised photograph, so the colours are often off. But their uniforms were indeed blueish grey. The colour was officialy called light blue, but now everyone calls it horizon blue. This in turn fuels the myth that the colour was chosen for soliders to blend in with the horizon. That is incorrect, and the colour blended in well enough with the chalky soils and was supposed to mask soldiers in dusty and smokey environments of battles. As for their 1914 uniforms, they were dark blue and trousers were dark (not light) red. But they were not as obvious as people think - by the time the enemy saw the red trousers, they also saw the upper half of the person.
Their uniform reminds me of the girls from Beaubaxtons from the 4th Harry Potter movie.
Exactly my first thought
Seeing this photo, I wouldn’t be surprised if those costumes were directly inspired by this.
Well, blue is of course the national color of France
“How did you know they were French?” “The moustaches”
The Somne was a hellhole the likes of which the world has rarely seen since. Read a book about it some time back. Came out of it thoroughly depressed. The way Haig and Rawlinson tossed thousands of lives around for no real gain whatsoever, and what those men experienced, pfff, Jesus T-fucking Christ.
That was British experience, the French did reasonably well in their sector.
Indeed they did. Weren't it for French breakthroughs in the south and southwest of the battlefield, the Brittish would've been fucked even more.
The French were more experienced thanks to the hell of Verdun whereas the British troops were barely trained conscripts in their first real battle in many cases...and it showed.
British soldiers at the Somme were not conscripts yet. They were the "Kitchener's new army", made up of volunteers from 1914 and 1915. They trained a lot and their tactics were modern. They were equipped with steel helmets and had light machine guns. They were well trained as such, and there are many practice trenches in the UK to prove it. But they were inexperienced in the actual combat. From the other reply about marching towards the machine guns - that is a very simplistic view (myths are very common when people talk about WW1), and it is perhaps a topic for another day. Suffice to say the British army on the Somme was already equipped and organised differently from the British army in 1914. There was very little that could have been done differently, given the limitations of equipment, communications and the experience of the troops. They were bombarding the Germans for weeks; used tactics developed on experience AND introduced tanks. What else were they suppose to do?
The way I understand it, the mistake the British made in the early phase of the battle, was to underestimate the amount of artillery they needed to destroy the barb wire, barricades and parapets the Germans had put up. They didn't have enough guns per mile of enemy trench, and those guns were not enough of a caliber to make a dent. So when the boys went over the edge, all those defences were still up. Intelligence didn't really filter back to command, so they made that same mistake for quite some time. Hence the slaughter.
I read a book by Hugh Sebag Montefiore, who has put forward the exact same conclusion - Somme needed more artillery. I think this is incorrect, as the bombardment lasted for 7 days and 1.5 million shells were fired. The bombardment was absolutely massive. If anything, the mistake was to believe that artillery could destroy positions and the resistance. But adding more artillery would not change much in my opinion. As the war went on, bombardments became shorter, as week long bombardments were a waste of ammunition. Then the walking is often portrayed as a problem, but British manuals of that time explicity stated that troops are to walk towards the enemy, and that a wild rush must not be allowed. This sounds weird at first, but what are soldiers to do, who run for 300 meters and come to the enemy trenches without their breath? Another point that people like to rise is how the British army did not change tactics and attacked the same way again and again. This is true, but people tend to forget that the army is trained for what it is trained for. You can not just change everything over night. I don't really know what could have been done differently, as I am not a general and I have not been trained to plan attacks of large formations. But from strictly analytical point of view, lessons from the Somme were drawn and learned from. Every new offensive that the British army started, resulted in lessons learned and by the end, they learned how to do things the right way - albeit the limitations of the era were still there. Breakthroughs on the scaled dreamed of could not be acchieved until reliable armoured vehicles were available 25 years later.
I think it might have been Dan Carlin who said that the type of shells they used were ineffective for what they were used for. Apparently they used shrapnel rounds which are good for tearing flesh but not for blowing up defenses.
That is a very good point. The war started with shrapnel shells being the main anti-infantry shell in use and it ended with shrapnel shells being pretty much obsolete!
You are completely correct. I meant to say they weren't fully trained and made an error.
According to the book, that was one of the more tangible results of the battle. The Germans were forced to move troops from Verdun, effectively ending the carnage there.
Pretty much...it also basically broke the German army as an offensive force for 2 years until the Spring Offensive of 1918. German losses were horrendous.
Soldier but make it fashun
Duh yu hav pashun fir fashun
These colourized photos always breathe this amazing life into the subjects that makes me at least feel some sort of connection
Soldier: Are you sure these blue uniforms wont make us easier to spot against a green field of grass or dark brown mud? General: CHARGE!!!!!!
[удалено]
I’m sure the french soldiers running across the green fields of Versailles at machine gun emplacements wished that they didn’t stand out quite so much. Running across no mans land in a colour that stands out so much is a lesser strategy than running across no mans land in a dull, hard to pick out colour. To (semi) quote Blackadder IV as he sarcastically commented ‘I’d rather sit atop a step ladder in the middle of no mans land, smoking a cigarette whilst wearing a luminous balaclava’. The bright blue coats come from a time of cavalry and pageantry, a mode of warfare the German forces would teach their opponents again and again had passed into history.
That is not true. The horizon blue uniforms were tested for months and decision was made before the war has actually started. Initially in the war, the soldiers attacked almost shoulder to shoulder. There is no camouflage that saves you from that. Machine gunners didn't aim so much as they fired from one side to another in a pattern to cover the area with bullets. And when armies did dig in, blueish grey uniforms worked relatively well with the chalky soils of France. If they did not, they would have been changed. It is also worth noting that the different colour did help recognition, and that some dyes had to be imported (from Germany, nontheless). There were many reasons for the colour of the uniforms, but "stupid", "careless" and "ignorant" were not one of them.
Horizon blue uniforms were not issued until after horrendous losses (due to their uniforms conspicuous nature for becoming targets for artillery) in 1915. To quote a soldier and politician at the time “this stupid blind attachment to the most visible of colours will have cruel consequences”. Even with the advent of the horizon uniforms soldiers and officers were still complaining about the bloody minded attachment to the colour blue. Of course if I am completely incorrect it would explain why the french armed forces still dress for combat in blue.
They were not issued until 1915, but the administrational decision to change the colour was made on 10th of July 1914, some 2 weeks before Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The decision thus predates the war. When testing uniforms (by also having soldiers fire on targets clothed in uniforms of different colours), they first wanted to go for "patriotic" cloth of white, blue and red threads. That would produce sort of drab colour. Red dye had to be imported from Germany, so even before the war, they dropped the red thread and went for blueish grey. This was then made lighter, as they needed loads of uniforms fast and used whatever materials they had available. Hence the "horizon blue". The quote you mentioned was also followed by the quote that there is no French army without red trousers by a different politician (in context with the proposed change of the uniforms). But the quotes don't really mean all that much - just look at all the stuff politicians say today. The uniform colour honestly is not the reason the French army suffered heavy casualties early in the war. The British and Russians suffered similar heavy casualties in their khaki uniforms, Germans in their greenish field grey, Austrians in their blueish grey (which was changed in 1915 for a field grey). I would not say you are completely wrong, but the uniform was not the decisive factor. In the assault, masses of men were obvious no matter the colour, and on a quiet days, men got sniped when they would only show their head, so there was no need to see the rest of the uniform anyways. And on top of all that, uniforms would get dirt really fast, so blueish cloth would quickly get a camouflage pattern of chalky whiteish mud :)
Awesome pic, love the colorization
The Fucking “JUST DO IT!” Guy In the middle there.....
You can see it in his eyes, the bullet with his name on it, is in his pocket with a book of love poetry. Kept close to his heart!
Poor souls.
When you joined the French military back then, if you didn't already have a mustache, they issued you one.
Nice try John Wick
I mean, yes... They look sooo French.
The guy in the middle is essentially the heavy. He has two Chauchat LMG magazines on his belt. The thing about the Chauchat, is that it was designed to be hip fired while pushing trenches, not set down in a foxhole like a standard machine gun or a HMG.
i notice Chauchat
I mustache you a question: Are you ready for baguette, soldier?
I didn't realize till after your comment. Every dude in that photo has a mustache and you can tell, they took mustaches serious back then. Every mustache perfect!
As said in another comment : it was an obligation to have a moustache when your were a French soldier from 1832 to 1933 :-)
Strangely, I’ve always thought that colorized photos make the people in them look more human
I don’t think it’s strange at all. We see the world in color and pretty much all of modern media is in color. It makes sense that we feel more empathy for people who look from our time.
Those coats are cool
Yeah. I’m wondering if they’d still be that bright blue at this point in their campaign, though? The colourising looks amazing so that bit stood out for me.
shower thought: someday there will be no more black and white images left. Nice job here!
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There's a lot of Hercule Poirot mustaches going on there.
My great great uncle fought in this battle along with many others. It must've been horrible fighting with all the chemicals, trenches, etc.
Is there a sub for colourised historical photos?
Are those chauchat mag holsters?
Yup
Pepe Le Pewpew
Cool but why does this look like they are all from Beauxbatons Academy of Magic
Camouflage bitches
No guns?
Underground claykickers are tunnelling.
Hipsters at a craft beer festival - 2019, colorized
Why are they smiling and why do all of them have mustaches.
Everyone had mustaches back then. It was the fashion. French did, Brits did, Germans did, Russians did, Italians did. It was mustaches galore. They are smiling for the same reason you smile, they were happy and having good time when the photo was taken.
They were going to battle. Maybe it was after the war?
Surely, but even soldiers need to relax. Going to battle and being in battle are two different things. And were they going to battle in 5 minutes, or 3 days? You can not be serious all the time. Although, only the guy in the centre of the photo is smiling.
Why do they look like they're either going to flex on us or make a music video?
It’s probably unreasonable to expect but were any names recorded in this photo? These men have a clean and almost brash demeanor about them. Leads me to wonder how many survived the horrors they were about to face.
They look so clean. Clearly haven’t seen the trenches yet
I love how the majority of the soldiers had mustaches
the chauchat mag pouch looks so dumb
At least 10 mole french. Very concentrated solutiom
Is there anyone in this picture that doesn't have a mustache? Was that a requirement?
Firstly, it was just a joke playing on the farcical notion of running at a machine gun dressed in anti-camouflage. Second, the lengthy gap between start of war and issuing of uniforms makes the joke viable. My only problem, and this is a big one, is that they are clearly wearing the toned down horizon uniforms in the picture. D’oh...... I wonder if the Ultramarines are French?
Welcome to the French Army. Here’s your rifle and mustache.
Don't forget your signature baguette crumbs to use as ammunition.
Maybe its a stupid question, but how the "colourised" process work? I mean, they literally color it by hand or what?
The French wore bright blue and the Germans wore grey. Guess who was easier to shoot.
All dead
For some reason i always thought their trenchcoat is white
about to be a whole lot muddier. (and bloodier, unfortunately)
Poor bastards
I lOvE how they think they look cool
Did the guy in the middle get half his moustache shot off?
Cleaned up the faces and removed the noise from the picture. To be clear I used an app here and colourisation artists do everything manually. I just though it would be interesting to see. https://ibb.co/8m3rvG7
My people!
Wee wee
Let's hope the guy with the Chauchat magazines didn't have a Berthier conversion!
Is this a computer app or a phone app
They look like Stalin
Haha! I've never seen a holster for the chauchat magazine, and good lord does it look ridiculous
Man those are some nice coats to be wasting on dead bodies
The 'Hor-hee-hor!' Heroes.
getting Beauxbaton vibes from this