In observing Veterans Day this year, RealClearLife decided to highlight the work of a photographer who captured the grueling experience of life on the Western Front during World War I. Australian photographer Frank Hurley covered the Passchendaele campaign in 1917, and was embedded with Allied Forces as they advanced on German troops in the Belgian city of Ypres.
One of the war’s bloodiest, the brutality of the Battle of Passchendaele deeply affected the photographer. His images show the expansive destruction in “No Man’s Land” as well as the quiet moments among soldiers during the lull in fighting. Hurley was simultaneously enthralled and horrified by the war. Both his photographs and diary—from the National Library of Australia—express the emotional duality that he and many soldiers still feel to this day.
On Aug. 21, still relatively early in the campaign, the photographer was in awe of the destruction he came across. “As we winded our way towards Hazebrouck, the sky gradually grew brighter with the flickering quiver of hundreds of guns in action,” wrote Hurley. “It was the most awesome sight I have ever seen.”
Yet just two days later, Hurley was appalled by the very things he’d marveled at a few nights earlier. “It’s the most awful and appalling sight I have ever seen,” he noted on Aug. 23. He continued:
“The exaggerated machinations of hell are here typified. Everywhere the ground is littered with bits of guns, bayonets, shells and men….Oh, the frightfulness of it all. To think that these fragments were once sweethearts, maybe, husbands or loved sons, and this was the end.”
But the photographer was equipped to handle the mission. No stranger to risk, Hurley had returned from spending two years on a stalled expedition to Antarctica just before departing for the front lines. Part of the famed Shackleton Expedition, the photographer was also responsible for documenting one of history’s most miraculous tales of survival. Even among the soldiers on the Western Front, he commanded respect and earned the nickname “The Mad Photographer” for the risks he took to capture the shots he wanted. Indeed, if “The Most Interesting Man in the World” had been a real person (sorry, Augustin LeGrand), it could have very well been Hurley. Below, take a look at more of his gripping WWI photos to appreciate the sacrifices our veterans made then and now.
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