This was not a man who needed to be lectured on the health hazards of smoking. “A wounded German getting a light for his cigarette from a British soldier,” the caption in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial. “The German was left behind when his comrades were forced to retire.” The setting was Flanders, Belgium.
The cover of the magazine a century ago showed one of the “Floats of the Allies” in the National Army Celebration held in Washington on Sept. 4 to honor the men who had been drafted for military service. President Woodrow Wilson led the march in the capital, with a crowd of 260,000 behind him. Former President Theodore Roosevelt was among the spectators for the march held that day in New York.
Wilson wrote a letter in which he asked to be remembered to the conscripts in New York. “Please say to the men on Sept. 4 how entirely my heart is with them and how my thoughts will follow them across the sea, with confidence and also with genuine envy, for I should like to be with them on the fields and in the trenches.”
Maybe the president hadn’t seen the photo of the troop train of Canadian soldiers that was raked by machine-gun fire and shrapnel as it rolled through Arras, France.
Times Insider is offering glimpses of some of the most memorable wartime illustrations that appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, on the 100th anniversary of each issue:
• Czar Nicholas II, arrested and doomed to die (Sep. 6)• Flanders fields, flooded to stop the Germans (Aug. 30)• Russia’s all-woman “Battalion of Death” (Aug. 23)• French artists on the battle lines (Aug. 16)• A graphic look inside a German bomber (Aug. 9)• Raw recruits gather at Gettysburg (Aug. 2)
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