A treasure trove of pictures showing the unknown soldiers of the Somme caused a sensation when it was published here last May. But that was only the beginning of the story...
A year ago this month, the haunting faces of unknown British and Commonwealth soldiers of the Somme emerged from the mists of time and battle to gaze from the pages of The Independent Magazine. The lost Somme photographs – 400 glass negatives of Tommies, Aussies and Canadians of the period 1915-16 rescued from a rubbish heap in northern France – generated extraordinary interest all over the world. The images were by far the most visited item on The Independent website in 2009 – and over the past 12 months, these "unknown soldiers" have been viewed online more than 1,700,000 times.
France's First World War graveyards, and the many "memorials to the missing", contain a legion of names without faces. By contrast, the Somme photographs presented us with scores of faces without names.
The Independent article was followed up by local newspapers and television channels in France. As a result, people in the Somme département have now come forward with more old photographic plates, this time mostly of Scottish and English Tommies. A selection of these new images is published here for the first time: a second "lost platoon" of nameless British soldiers snapped as individuals, or in groups, by an unknown French photographer. Hundreds of other images have been located and are awaiting collection, scanning and processing.
