Short break from lesson planning and writing on the crusades (not in that order) to share this story:
Portraits of Soldiers Before, During, and After War – My Modern Metropolis.
This came across my inbox a week or two ago, and it’s worth seeing. The hackneyed old expression “the facts speak for themselves” isn’t true, of course, but in some cases, like this one, you suspect that they do. You might not be sure of what you’re seeing in these photos, but there’s no doubt that these soldiers’ visages all seem to exhibit the same type of transformation over the same period of time. I’m reminded of what Beatrice Patton told her daughters when they asked her what their aunt ever saw in old Black Jack Pershing: that the man they saw in the ’20s wasn’t the same person who had gone to war in 1917. Because that’s what war does.
Happy food for thought on a Sunday night.
