Over the Front in an Aeroplane, and Scenes Inside the French and Flemish Trenches

In the early months of the Great War, one civilian dared to climb into a military aeroplane and fly over what no ordinary eye could see. Ralph Pulitzer ascended from Paris toward the French front, and from his fragile wooden seat witnessed modern warfare in its terrifying totality, the labyrinth of trenches below, stretching across French and Flemish fields like wounds that would not heal. From above, the battlefield revealed its awful geometry: the spiderweb of roads, the shattered countryside, the uncanny silence between artillery barrages. But Pulitzer did not simply fly and depart. He descended into the trenches themselves, walking among soldiers who waited in mud and darkness for orders that might send them over the top into machine gun fire. His account captures something vanishingly rare: the view from above the killing fields, and the intimate horror of those who could not leave them. This is war as seen by a man who could escape it, a perspective that renders the familiar horrors of WWI strange and new again.