Budleigh
Salterton photographer and Friend of Fairlynch Museum Mo Sandford hopes that
her recently completed project in the Great War centenary year will help to
focus attention on the need to conserve the Western Front’s historic battle
sites. Theatre of War is an arresting and sometimes disturbing study
in pictures of some WW1 battlefields as they appear today
Two centuries ago the Belgian village
of Waterloo just outside Brussels was about to
become a major tourist attraction. The
clash of nations on a field that would become famous for deciding the world’s
future fired the imagination of people all over Europe.
In the years following the battle on 15 June 1815, a huge mound 43 metres high
was created using earth carried in baskets from the surrounding area. The Duke
of Wellington on revisiting the site is
said to have complained that his battlefield had been altered.
Just one hundred years pass and history repeats
itself. Germany rather than France is now seen
as the trouble-maker, and the slaughter is even more terrifying, carried out
now on an industrial scale. And the visitors today come in their thousands.
Battlefields like Ypres, the Somme
and Passchendaele were, it seems, besieged by war widows in the 1920s,
searching for explanations. They found only ruins, and left without answers,
writes Mo Sandford in the introduction to her project on World War One
battlefields of the Western Front.
Better known by her married name of Bowman as the
Otter Valley Association’s photographer, Mo has found that her 35-year-long
project has deep personal origins. Perhaps not as tragic as the war widows’
bitter journeys, her experience of these cruel places of pilgrimage is movingly
described in the words and photos which she has entitled Theatre of War.
World War One left its mark on Mo as indelibly as any
of its victims. As a child she recalled
her father weeping while he watched on a flickering television screen ‘The
Great War’ narrated by Laurence Olivier. Her mother recalled her own father’s
“smouldering moods” and the brutal scenes of domestic violence as Mo’s
grandmother was beaten by her husband, “bounced around the kitchen, wall by
wall.” Yet he never spoke of The War, she says. “I wondered if other old
soldiers were the same, never speaking, just re-enacting with a punch-bag.”
Theatre of War has three sections: the first consists of 171 colour
photos followed by 114 monochrome images. A final section is made up of 13
conclusions in photomontage, some of them serving to voice the artist’s own
message. ‘Ypres Cloth Hall revisited’
shows the magnificently rebuilt medieval Flemish landmark in colour as it
stands today contrasted with the monochrome scenes of bandaged soldiers among
the ruins. But some of the soldiers are laughing, as though all the devastation
and the suffering inflicted on them by the Great War had been an absurd joke.
Many of the colour photos are of massive structures
such as the Thiepval Memorial, erected to commemorate fallen victims of the Somme with no known grave.
Others, like the clever shot of screw pickets
in a field of wildflowers, hint at the horror of the barbed wire which formerly
scarred the landscape, trapping many wounded soldiers.
The monochrome images seem to convey
deliberately wintry scenes, as though presenting monuments frozen in time.
This image of Fricourt in the Somme département is one of twenty showing German cemeteries. 17,000 are buried here.
One of the Fricourt images, showing a Jewish headstone
amongst the Christian crosses, seems to stand as a lone voice in protest
against the Holocaust. For Mo, the
1914-18 conflict, like any other, was a human tragedy from which all nations
should learn lessons.
Above: The Kroonart Kemmel Trench Museum in the Ypres Salient
Her photos reflect her view of the Flanders
landscapes as killing-fields capable of maiming and destroying a century later:
they yield harvests of shells and bombs, still live in some cases, and
occasionally unburied bones.
But she has a deep affection for the area and its
people. “My pictures portray the Western Front in a time before tourists
trampled the trenches smooth, and the impromptu field museums were still
dusty,” she explains. Like Wellington, she is
concerned about the way in which the fields that she views as sacred are being altered.
Above: The Tyne Cot Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery
“Modern life is swamping the remains of the Western
Front,” she believes. She reads with dismay of land-hungry developers: her
photo of Hill 60 on the Messines Ridge is described as “a fiercely fought over
vantage point [...] still fighting today, with encroaching housing.” Yet, as
she points out, there are local families with nowhere to live. “Only the
tranquil cemeteries seem unspoilt.”
Soldiers of the Great War
Ironically, Mo’s pictures may inspire yet more
visitors to follow in the footsteps of others, curious to experience the ‘dark
tourism’ associated with places that reek of tragedy. But the images in Theatre of War are powerful
enough to tell their own story and let us wonder at humanity’s folly.
Dancing with Death
Images ©
Mo Sandford FRPS 2014
