On July 28th it will be 100 years since the first world war broke out. Its battlefields have long since turned into centres of remembrance, destinations for school trips. In this photo essay, Brian Harris captures their stillness and symbolism
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, July/August 2014
One evening last March, Brian Harris stopped his car at the side of the road near Douaumont in north-eastern France and walked into the forest. After about 50 yards he came to a trench winding its way through the trees (see photo four). He’d been there earlier in the day, but the light had been too sharp, the shadows cast by the trees too deep, and children from a school party had been running up and down the trench, their picnic laid out nearby. But now the light was softer, and the woods were gloomy and quiet. “I wanted to photograph the darkness where that trench went,” he says. “I knew that if you dug down into that ground you would find bits of body. In that forest there are the remains of men. Those roots are feeding off men.”
He was standing on the Verdun battlefield, one of the bloodiest of the first world war, which began 100 years ago this July. During ten months of fighting in 1916, up to 976,000 French and German soldiers were killed or wounded at Verdun. Many of the dead were never found. “To stand in a wood and listen to the quiet,” Harris says, “and realise that 100 years ago, where you’re standing, was carnage—that’s chilling.” The trench he photographed led from Belleville to the front line and the fort at Douaumont. “It was a pathway to death.” His image—haunted, sombre, terrifyingly tranquil—is his elegy.
AISNE-MARNE AMERICAN CEMETERY, BELLEAU, FRANCE
There are 2,289 graves here, at the foot of the hill where the battle of Belleau Wood was fought in June 1918. When Brian Harris was there, a new watering system was being installed, so the grass wouldn’t be parched for the centenary. He was struck by the effect. “It’s emotive. If you want the water to be rain, it’s rain. If you want it to be tears, it’s tears”