Ten Million Dead

THE FIRST WORLD WAR--A Photographic History Edited by Laurence Stallings--Simon & Schuster ($3.50).

The War devoured almost 10,000,000 soldiers. This picture book details the four-year repast in 513 photographs chronologically strung together on shrill newspaper headlines of the day. The result is not history as the historian writes it but war as every veteran remembers it. Here are the actual sights of battle which evoke its sounds as well--the off-stage hammering of long-snouted guns, the lazy pouf of shrapnel in a blue sky, the invisible stutter of machine guns, the pink of rifle fire, the scrunch of mud, the loud curses, the grunts of the living, the groans of the dying.

But for all its realism of mood and swirl of action The First World War cannot be compared in scope or variety with the great ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War issued in 1911 by Review of Reviews Co. That work still stands as an unchallenged monument to War Photographer Matthew Brady and his aides who also recorded the four-year struggle on some 7,000 wet plates that had to be developed five minutes after exposure. World War cameramen with their improved equipment remain nameless heroes. From the bottom of their portfolios were lifted such blood-curdling pictures as went into The Honor of It published last year by Brewer, Warren & Putnam as a frankly pacifist tract (TIME, March 21, 1932). Though The First World War contains half a dozen prints used in The Horror of It its totality of effect is not achieved by gore or rotting human flesh. Its awfulness results from reducing death and destruction to a commonplace.

Editor Laurence Stallings, one-legged Marine, novelist (Plumes), playwright (What Price Glory);, scenarioist (The Big Parade), spent three years mulling over thousands of War pictures from every available source to make his selections. Says he: "A militarist will be disappointed with them for there are not enough pictures of guns and tactical groups. A pacifist will not find enough horror. . . . Here is the camera record of chaos." There is no running text. Editor Stallings' captions are terse, provocative, sometimes sarcastic. He quotes freely from Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger and Kipling. One could wish for far more detail with each print.

The pictures sweep from Sarajevo to Sedan, from recruiting rallies to cemeteries, from ammunition factories to prison camps. Notable shots: Archduke Ferdinand's blood-flecked tunic; silk-hatted Etonians drilling with rifles; French troops deployed for the first battle of the Marne; Serbia's melancholy Peter watching his army break before Mackensen; a direct hit on Rheims Cathedral; the famed River Clyde under fire at Gallipoli; Russian infantry retreating on the run; the U. S. transport Antilles sinking; a No Man's Land capture; U. S. infantry blinded by gas; a dachshund following Kaiser Wilhelm into exile; French troops shooting traitors as late as 1920.

The civilian aspects of the War are, if anything, more pathetic than the military--war crowds in London, Berlin and Paris (all looking very much alike), whole villages of refugees, white-hooded orphans. Hunger is a primary theme behind the lines. One picture shows five old crones poking into a Berlin garbage dump. Another, the most cruel in the whole collection, exhibits a young Russian girl, her naked body shriveled and deformed by famine.

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