Curtained Loop-Holes by Frederic Villiers. c. 1914. Source: Villiers 25. Villiers' last experience of war was when he went out to the First World War as a freelance war artist. Things had changed a great deal since he first travelled to Serbia for the Graphic, but he had not lost his eye for the realities of war, and his sketches in the trenches again showed how far from "glorious" were the experiences of the soldiers. Here he is at or near the front line, just behind some soldiers "standing to arms and manning the loop-holes preparing to meet a raid from the enemy," as he explains in the text preceding this sketch (23). Philip Gibbs, introducing a book of his sketches in this war, explains that he finds them "very valuable as historical documents, and strangely interesting as records by an eye-witness of the early phases of the war" (viii).
Gibbs mentions the subject of the sketch among others depicting the military practices:
he gives a vivid picture of the way in which rifles were linked together and fired together in trench warfare to act as machine guns at a time when we were grievously weak in that weapon. He gives another sketch of the little trench mortars called "crapauds" or "crapillots" (toads, as we should say) improvised by the French, as I saw them being touched off by the burning end of a cigarette held by a French officer in the spring of 1915. He shows the old "curtain" loopholes in the trenches, afterwards abandoned because the enemy snipers used to plug them too easily, and the bottle trails used to guide men through woods in darkness until the woods themselves disappeared under tempests of fire....[viii-ix]
So the idea of firing through these loosely-covered gaps in the trench wall proved impractical, and was "abandoned." Thus Villiers' sketch soon acquired historic value, as well as rousing interest in his audience at home by depicting the experiences of infantrymen within perilously close range of the enemy.
Scanned image and text by Jacqueline Banerjee. [You may use the image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned it, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Gibbs, Philip. "A Salute to Frederic Villiers." In Frederic Villiers' Days of Glory: The Sketchbook of a Veteran Correspondent at the Front (see below). v-x.
Villiers, Frederic. Days of Glory: the sketch book of a veteran correspondent at the front. New York: George H. Doran, 1920. Internet Archive, from a copy in the State Library of Pennsylvania. Web. 13 April 2025.
Created 13 April 2025