Wartime Christmas

Christmas at the front was about making do. Here, for instance, British soldiers have gathered in a shell hole around a makeshift table. Some are sitting on the ground, others on what appears to be rolled-up sheets of wire. As they enjoy their sparse meal at Beaumont-Hamel on 25 December 1916, the men seem indifferent to a fellow soldier’s grave just inches away. By this stage in the war, such as sight was commonplace. So too was the destruction that can be glimpsed on the horizon: the fields of northern France that had transformed into a man-made desert of rotting corpses, mangled equipment, and the occasional scorched tree stump. The macabre image is from a new book, Wartime Chr