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Which is a part of a bigger photo in which a zoom is applied to this guy. Why is this photo so popular nowadays and why he is smiling while others are involved in their duties? Let's look at the entire photo:
Which is a part of a bigger photo in which a zoom is applied to this guy. Why is this photo so popular nowadays and why he is smiling while others are involved in their duties? Let's look at the entire photo:
That's a rather well-known photograph that purports to be a soldier suffering from 'shell-shock' (ie, PTSD). However, I cannot find any identification of the individual soldier, or any sort of diagnosis that goes beyond 'Well, he's smiling weirdly so it must be shell-shock/PTSD.'
In all likelihood, the definitive reason for the look at that anonymous man's face is forever lost to the ages.
He is holding his right arm. I think he has just been told he is being evacuated because of a relatively minor injury. Under those circumstances, I think you’d smile too. He seems to be looking at the medic standing near him, as if he has been listening to him.
It is worth noting that this is not a posed photo, as evidenced by the other soldier in the foreground and partly obscuring the one who appears to be smiling. Thus, the 'smile' could in fact just be part of a grimace, or maybe the soldier has something stuck in his teeth that he's working out, or myriad possibilities other than a smile. Alternately, perhaps it is a smile for some mundane reason - perhaps the other soldier just recited a dirty limerick, or revealed that the unit had just been order pulled back, or that he'd just salvaged part of a case of French wine from a nearby shelled-out farmhouse.
Logically speaking, the guy has been wounded but is not dead.
The look on his face is incredibly emotional and isn't the look of someone having a normal laugh.
Considering what we know of WW1 and the conditions around him I agree with everyone about how we will never know.
My estimation:
Combination of shock and euphoria of having both survived and getting reprieve from the closest thing to heck on earth via that wound. He looks somewhat unhinged.
If you've never listened to Dan Carlin's podcasts (Hardcore History), the section on WW1 was tough to listen to but was absolutely raw. The 1914 movie hinted at some of the horrors but just like most people have no idea about the REAL Roman games being so much more awful than throwing Christians to lions...WW1 stuff was just crazy.
The ones that stuck in my mind were the horrors of men getting stuck in mud and being unable to free them. Officers were trained on how to humanely dispatch them. Or during one early war german assault a machine gun crew (dutch?) killed so many germans that it was obstructing their field of fire like a wall so they'd shoot firing lanes through the pile of bodies.
Probably because he got the million dollar wound and gets to go home standing on his own 2 feet. Those trenches were hell on earth.
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