I’ve come across a few cool pages lately that show World War I in living color. The Prague Revue presents WWI in Color, including the impressive combat footage in the video below. From the looks of things, those are French-built trenches in the video. And Time recently posted over a dozen very cool images in Rare Color Photographs from the Trenches of World War I. (Several are graphic, fyi.) So many of these are great, particularly the non-combat images that kind of reveal the style-within-war that seems to be a major part of the era.

One that really caught my eye is featured here on the right, of the Messine Ridge in Flanders. For months British miners tunneled under trenches and No Man’s Land in order to dig mines under German trenches and pack them with explosives. Over 10,000 German soldiers were killed when the TNT was detonated–and you can see what a crater the explosion caused. According the the caption in the article, this was one of the largest “non-nuclear” blasts in history, and could be heard in London and Dublin. So, yeah. This is something that’s mentioned in my novel, so it was of particular interest to me. Amazing stuff.

Some cool stuff. I’m hopeful, that with the centenary of the war coming upon us very soon, a ton more of stuff like this will be coming out. It’s fascinating.

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