24 - Visual essay: Global war

Summary

This chapter points out the power of photographs in three sets of images to convey global war not as convention but as unusual, out of the ordinary, strange. The first shows photographs of dead bodies during the 1914-18 war. The second facet of the war which photographs highlight is the sheer variety of landscapes of battle that soldiers and sailors faced for fifty-months of combat. The freezing-terrain shows the white war on the Kosturino Ridge on the Macedonian front. The air war created new possibilities in which fighting took place. The third way in which photographs can introduce people to the radically new character of the First World War is by showing the extent to which the deployment of new weapons and new tactics challenged the laws of war. Flame-throwers were chemical-weapons, but much more radical weapons were introduced early in the war.