World War One images

World War I.… who would have thought there were original color photos of WWI? This site contains hundreds of photos taken by the French in the last two years of World War One.

Sometime in late 2004, while looking at the blog, VodkaPundit – a great blog, btw – I came across an external link he had to some interesting photos of World War I. What made them of interest was that they were in color! I saved them to my hard drive, and I’m glad I did… the site that had them up ended up removing them.

So I decided to go looking for others on the web. I came across the site, Gallica, bibliothèque numérique de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, There I found all of the images you see here, but, alas, the text was all in French, and the last time I spoke French with any frequency or fluency was 55 years ago! So, initially, I had to use an online translator to get the English text.

Later, Gert in Canada, Didier in Belgium and David in France helped with translating the original French wording which appears below each photo. Any translations errors which remain I must lay sole claim to.