Joe Sacco’s view of the Somme
If you are a student of war, you are aware of the Great War, also known as the War to End All Wars. Fought between 1914-1918 (or 1911-1922 if you include the Italic-Turkish/Balkan Wars and the Greco-Turkish and Russian Civil Wars), it was later eclipsed by another war fought just a generation later by most of the same cast of characters.
Today we just call it World War One, to put that later war into perspective.
And talking about perspective, Joe Sacco, a Malta-born cartoonist who came after both of these wars, did an amazing 25-foot long mural of the Battle of the Somme.
The Somme, in 1916, was where the flower of British manhood died and a lost generation sprouted. In a front where gains and losses were measured in inches and feet, not miles, all or Europe bled white.
The first world war wasnt so much as won as it was lost.
And Saccos illustraions show a very deep and varied eye for the battlefield.
