Several vertical aerial photos in Greg’s collection show the devastated wastes of no-man’s land, and systems of interconnected trenches. The photos are all undated, in fact completely unmarked, so the locations aren’t specified on any of them either. The photos might well have been taken during joyrides in these post-armistice days, when it was (a) safer than it used to be and (b) something to do.
No-Man’s Land
Trenches
Locations
No-Man’s Land
I haven’t been able to work out the locations for any of these photographs. The no-man’s land images in particular offer very little to go on: just a few fragments of road, and the odd ribbon of trenches. Wherever they were must have been between the opposing lines for quite some time, given the density of shell holes.
The first photograph is used as the header image for the Western Front page.
Trenches
The photos showing the trench systems ought in principle to be easier to identify since the trenches were regularly mapped. But there were a lot of them, and pinning them down hasn’t (yet) proved possible.
I had wondered whether at least one of them might have been taken on the Estaires-Lys Line, a few miles east of Merville on the River Lys. This was one of Greg’s regular haunts when he was based at Rely. And there was another reason that he might have paid some attention to the trenches in that area. British forces had (and still have) a habit of giving familiar names to unfamiliar places. On the Estaires-Lys Line, various strongholds and emplacements had names of Welsh towns. Among them was Holyhead, where Greg was from. So you could imagine him taking an aerial shot of “Holyhead” to take back to the family in Holyhead.
Here are the “Welsh towns” mapped in 1918, on this extract from square G of 1:40,000 map sheet 36. The 50 x 50 yd reference for “Holyhead” is 36 G 27 a 1 4, below the Balloon Bed in the centre.
And here is the location today:
But, attractive though this theory is, I have been unable to match up the trench photographs with the trench maps! So the locations must remain unidentified, for now at least.