The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn

Episode 4: The Soldiers' Story

May 10, 2007 • 60 min

Between 1914 and 1918, Kahn dispatched several members of his team to the battlefields, where they recorded in remarkably intimate detail the everyday lives of the French troops fighting at the front. In The Soldiers' Story, viewers see them cooking their meals and even laundering their uniforms behind the front lines at The Battle of Verdun. But they also see harrowing images of death and destruction in which whole towns are razed to the ground leaving a desolate, almost lunar, landscape. Viewers witness crude medical procedures at a field hospital, and see some remarkable early shots of the aeroplanes and heavy artillery which were beginning to appear on the battlefields.