Haunting colourised picture shows 11 WW1 Tommies off to the front – and only two returned unharmed
The historian who identified the soldiers now wants to find out about the remaining nine in time for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice in November
THIS haunting colourised photo of Brit Tommies on the eve of the First World War reveals the devastating toll of the trenches.
Of the eleven known men in the picture only two returned unharmed from the Western Front.
Dan Hill who identified the men now wants to find out the identities of the remaining nine soldiers in the poignant picture in time for the 100th anniversary of the Armistice in November.
But he grimly suspects the majority of those didn't make it home either.
He knows for certain that one of those was Private Bill Johnson who was buried alive along with Private Walter Flanders on November 19, 1914 after a German shell blast caused their trench to collapse.
Flanders who was just 19 when the photo was taken is stood third from the left while Johnson, also 19 at the time has yet to be identified.
The photo was taken at Letchworth train station in Hertfordshire on August 5, 1914, and is of 12 platoon, E Company, Hertfordshire Regiment.
From Letchworth the men caught a train to Norfolk where they trained for three months before catching a boat to France on November 5.
Corporal Arthur Boardman, 21, is seen stood next to his wife Mary who was on the platform to wave her husband off.
Three months later on November 18 he became the platoon's first casualty of the war, killed by a nervous British machine gunner who mistook him for an enemy soldier.
Jack Satterthwaite was the platoon sergeant and is stood alongside his father James on the far left of the photo.
He was shot in the chest during fighting at Festubert in north west France on April 17, 1916 and died of his wounds in hospital five days later aged 25.
On July 31, 1917 - the first day of Passchendaele - the Hertfordshire Regiment suffered its worst day of the entire war.
About 620 men and officers attacked German positions at the village of St Julian in Belgium. Within two hours 10 officers and 130 soldiers had been killed.
Two of those who were killed at Passchendaele were Private George Sherwood, 21, (stood front centre in the photo) and Private William Smith, 22, (second in on right.)
At 16, George Drury lied about his age to join the army. He was wounded on three occasions but survived the war only to be killed fighting in the Russian Civil War in 1919.
The youngest man pictured and one of the few survivors Raymond Quinn was just 14 when war was declared and was a boy bugler in the company.
Overall more than 700,000 British soldiers were killed during the conflict.
Dan Hill said: "We have searched through thousands of wartime documents and images but every now and then there is one that just stops you in your tracks.
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"Ever since discovering the photo it has been the hope of the project to identify each of those faces looking back at us and to find out what became of them in the Great War.
"We have managed to identify eleven of the men in the photograph.
"Unusually, seven of those identified were killed in action, a much higher proportion than you would expect based on national casualty rates for the war as a whole."