I like this photo of the German army in 1914. It shows the type of formation employed by them during the early phase with British troops of the time comparing their dense mass to being like a crowd on cup final day. On one attack by Germans Guards the British shot all of them bar a drummer which nobody had the heart to shoot - he carried on marching about and beating his drum among the lines of dead comrades.Image from the excellent blog Pierre's Photo Impressions of the Western Front.
We were not aware of your wonderful blog until Peter told us about it! So much to explore. This picture in particular, is discussed at some length in the introduction to the book “Handbook of Imperial Germany”.
ReplyDeleteThere is also a short article on it on our website:
www.pickelhauben.net
What a great blog! I assume you know about the “handbook of Imperial Germany”. It was written from the military a collector's perspective and is often touted as the only book on the market that explains how Imperial Germany and the Army worked.–Thanks for posting all this!
VR
Joe
http://www.authorhouse.com/BookStore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=60521