A Photographic Politician

On the 6th March, the 4th Battalion were in the front line trenches between Richebourg and Neuve Chapelle.
The trenches were in a sorry condition. The inclement weather in the New Year had not given the men a chance to improve their positions. These simple fortifications in the ground were now falling-in and were almost continually filled with cold, icy water. 
One Suffolk officer, Lieutenant Francis John Childs Ganzoni, who was at that time, the Conservative member of Parliament for Ipswich (having won the Ipswich by-election in May 1914), took with him to France, a pocket camera, with which he recorded the day-to-day life of the Battalion in early 1915. 
In the photograph above, he captured a soldier of 4th Suffolk armed with an entrenching tool, trying desperately to make his scrape in the side of the trench a little more comfortable. Almost knee-high in mud, he wears no cap. He has a scarf wrapped around his head as protection against the cold and the butt of his rifle can be seen resting on the parapet above his head. 
In these conditions when feet, equipment and clothing soon became caked in mud, any form of movement to keep warm, was impossible.

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