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Quaint and Unusual Housing and Accomodations
During the war years, soldiers of both sides were billeted in every imaginable kind of building or shelter conceivable. Ideally they would be housed in barracks or garrison buildings when not on duty in the front lines or else in some kind of military cantonnement, often not much more than temporary but large and sprawling camps made of tents or preferably wooden huts or small buildings. Later in the war Nissen Huts were used to house troops, a simple and easily constructed dwelling.
But however well intentioned military authorities were in regards to housing troops, quite often the men were left to their own devices. When not billeted with civilians or in farm or industrial buildings, soldiers showed amazing creativity and resourcefulness when it came to constructing temporary housing. In the following collection of war-time photographs taken from newsmagazines, we will show a number of comical, ingenious, appaling, attractive, clever, cosy or even dreadful buildings and structures that were used as housing, however temporary, by Great War soldiers. In quiet sectors of the Front such housing could be made relatively comfortable considering the circumstances, even if the overall appearance of such quarters resembled run-down shacks in a shantytown more than anything else.
Judging from the large number of photographs published in magazines at the time, newseditors found such subject-matter welcome human-interest pieces and consequently played up to the angle of praising their own side's troops resourcefulness and ingenuity in the face of hardship. When commenting upon the enemy's improvised accomodations, captions and sentiments were far less charitable.
For instance French colonial troops were sometimes permitted to build huts in much the same manner as they had lived in in Equatorial Africa. A number of photographs of such a 'colonial village' built by Senegalese troops at Verdun can be seen in the following collection (see page 13 - page 14). To French authorities and the general Allied public this showed a broad-minded tolerance for quaint foreign customs and manners that was only to be lauded. German commentary on the same huts was far less positive indeed, if not derisive and condescendingly insulting, while a modern day commentator could truthfully wonder if maybe the Senegalese troops weren't the better lodged after all.
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