Sold: Mountain of Men

World War I five-foot long panoramic photograph capturing the Plymouth 12th Infantry Division — approximately 10,000 soldiers — dated December 3, 1918 and taken at Camp Devens in Massachusetts. The U.S. Army training facility was a locus of the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic, and though the Great War was over and these soldiers would never join their comrades on the killing fields of Europe, they still suffered casualties from the global conflict — despite never leaving their home state.

In December 1918, the influenza crisis at Camp Devens was coming to an end — in fact, they had likely just lifted the ban on mass gatherings in order to take this photo. But in the months preceding it, the soldiers there witnessed horrors: Sick men wrapped in blankets lined up outside in the rain waiting for entry into overwhelmed hospitals, cots with stricken patients overflowing into corridors and porches, shortages of coffins. In September one doctor wrote, “This epidemic started about four weeks ago, and has developed so rapidly that the camp is demoralized and all ordinary work is held up till it has passed. All assemblages of soldiers taboo.” Doctors could do little as the death toll rose to 100 a day at its peak.

Of the thousands of men captured here, at least a third likely contracted the disease. What’s more haunting is who’s not in the picture: Hundreds of men, perhaps as many as ten percent of the Division, died at Camp Devens in the fall of 1918. Count out ten young men here. The eleventh was buried.

This panoramic photo is extraordinary for its breathtaking scale, yet the print is so clear that a closer view reveals almost every face in recognizable detail. These individuals never saw the horrors of trench warfare, but they had been through hell just the same. They survived and would take off their uniforms soon and go back to normal civilian lives. With no ticker-tape parade for them though, they lined up elbow to elbow on that barren December hillside to mark their own bittersweet victory.