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In a war filled with never-before-seen horrors, the Battle of Passchendaele would still manage to occupy a uniquely traumatic place in the minds of its survivors. The terrain was so shattered by flooding and shellfire that maintaining recognizable trenches became impossible, leaving whole armies of confused men to kill one another in a chaotic morass of mud and corpses. This photo also deftly captures the cruel, reciprocal mechanics of war. In the foreground, fresh soldiers carry duckboards to the fight. In the background, wounded men and German prisoners stream to the rear. Dead bodies were such a predictable product of the Western Front that work battalions would often start digging graves before a battle on the reasonable expectation that they would shortly be filled.

This was taken in September, 1917 while the Battle of Passchendaele was still underway. The static nature of the front lines during the First World War meant a surreal experience for any soldier being rotated out of the lines: One minute they would be clinging to life in the worst place on earth, a short train ride later and they would be carousing in a picturesque French village untouched by war. These are soldiers preparing for the Maple Leaf Concert Party, one of many comedic revues to entertain front line troops. As with military entertainment on both sides of the Great War, men in drag was a must.

This is a “dressing station”: A first aid post where wounded soldiers could be patched up before being evacuated to hospital or sent back into the fray. Physician John McCrae was famously posted at a Belgian dressing station when he wrote In Flanders Fields, but this particular one was set up for the Battle of Courcelette, in which thousands of Canadians were killed or wounded to capture the ruins of a tiny French farming village. What’s most haunting about this photo is the grinning man at bottom left, who is believed to have been suffering from severe shell shock.