Between the Covers

Softcover. Oblong octavo. Cord-tied flexible cloth boards with "Photographs" stamped in blind on front board. A total of 292 gelatin silver images with 277 mounted between four and nine to a page, plus 15 loose prints, all measuring between 2.5" x 2" and 7" x 5". Most images are well-captioned in white album ink. First leaf is detached, modest wear, some fading to some images, very good or better. Newspaper clipping laid in about the experiences of Charles D. Hallman of Allentown, Pennsylvania in the Ambulance Service, that extensively quotes from his letters to his parents about his unit's journey by road in their ambulances across the Alps from Italy into France.

The album commences with a group photo of the unit at Fort Dix in New Jersey, with the names of the each man in the unit noted. After a few images of training camp (in gas masks, in tents, being inoculated, etc.), a parade, a shipboard boxing match, the Rock of Gibraltar, and the coast of Spain, the location swiftly shifts to Camp "Lido" in Genova, Italy with many well-captioned images of the beach, the city, ambulances, and the camp. There are many photos of various members of the unit posing and well-identified, of ships and submarines, of the English convalescent camp, and several of their journey over the Alps. Once they reach France, mostly near the Meuse River and Argonne Forest, the scenes become more military: posing in shell holes, by ambulances, and with planes destroyed by German fire, landscapes decimated by artillery, German bombs exploding, airplanes on patrol over the hospital, observations balloons, cemeteries, captured guns and pillboxes, barbed wire, and no-man's land.

A splendid album concentrated almost exclusively on the experiences of a soldier in the Ambulance Service.

Item #402136