The Great War in color

[Louis VI the Fat]

Great site!

I love this picture. To think this is just a few hundred metres away from the front, from the airplanes and machine guns...

It reminds me of what the great historian Fernand Braudel once said. He was born in 1902, so he grew up in a surrounding like this. He said that the world he was born in, the rural surroundings from his youth, were for the most part the same as it had been for centuries, for a millenium. Most people lived the same way their ancestors had since time immemorial. More was going to change in the twentieth century for them than in the nineteen centuries preceding it.

Civilization and the twentieth century hit upon these people like a tempest. Welcome electricity, medicine, sewers, telephones. Welcome too tanks, airplanes, poison gas, modernism, totalitarianism.

Too quote Shakespeare's the Tempest,
"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in't!"

[CountArach]

Wow! That site is really interesting. It really brings it to life.

[xemitg]

I shudder to think what actual combat color photographs would look like from that era. Pictures of the rear areas are bad enough. Has anybody else found old color photographs like these?
The other one I found when I searched was http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/ which was of the old pre-WWI Russian Empire.

[Avicenna]

The blue-red uniform is quite the distinctive one

The first colour war footage (ie video), I think, was during the Russo-Japanese war in 1904.