Remembrance Sunday,

is this weekend,

 where we remember the fallen in the Great War,

 but it was not only humans and animals that suffered,

 so did the land,

 as an estimated 1.5 billion shells rained down on it,

 the devastation was unprecedented and, thanks to advances in photography, so was its documentation, in addition to the amateur snaps captured by soldiers (despite most militaries forbidding it), and photographs taken for journalistic purposes, photography played a vital military role, specifically in the areas of reconnaissance both aerial and terrestrial,

these were found in a collection housed at the Imperial War Museum titled “British Official Panoramas Of The Western Front 1914–1918” which contains thousands of battlefield panoramas, some of which are stitched together,

 to capture these photographs army photographers would have to have spent long periods with their head above the parapet,

 a view so dangerous it was only normally witnessed via the medium of a trench periscope or mirror,

 today, a century after their strategic function has passed, the photographs offer an unusual and haunting portrait of the front,

 no harrowing pictures of the dead,

 or hollow eyed Tommies looking vacantly into the lens, these are the land as it was then, 

 if the subject interest you, have a look at The Battlefields of the First World War: The Unseen Panoramas of the Western Front (2005) by Peter Barton and a foreword by Richard Holmes. It includes many of the panoramas in the Imperial War Museum’s collection along with “poignant personal photographs and the recollections of the soldiers caught in action in the battles shown”,

 also related is Simon Armitage’s book Still (2016), a sequence of sixteen poems written in response to twenty-six panoramic photographs of Somme battlefields picked from the Imperial War Museum archives, I wish I was in London to wear my poppy with pride, and if you are British and do not wear a poppy? you lack the humility to be called a human being.