Saturday, October 11, 2008

Strange view of France

I was looking on the internet for a map of France and this came up. You may remember the website "Strangemaps" where we found the map of the kissing habits of various French regions. I found it there, and if you are at all interested in maps, you should go to the site. http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/



The painting on a helmet has a nice globe-like quality, however, its not a globe but is instead the map of the Western Front of WWI.



From the commentary on the Strangemaps website: "This helmet is a nice example of trench art, showing a map of the Western Front. The brim of the helmet is marked ‘H.G. Booth, 110th TMB AEF France 1918-’19’. Henry G. Booth was a cook for the 110th Trench Mortar Battery. AEF stands for ‘American Expeditionary Force’.
The helmet map shows
England (with London, Winchester, Dover, Southampton, Hull and Liverpool indicated)
Holland (‘Amstradam’ marked)
Belgium (one city highlighted, name not legible)
Luxemburg (a bit too large)
the Alsace (shown separate from Germany and France; the city of Metz indicated)
the north of France (with Calais, Lille, Le Havre, St Malo, Brest, Paris and three other cities shown) and
part of Germany (Cologne, Coblenz, Mayence – i.e. Mainz).




You can get a slightly better view by clicking on the photo to enlarge.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The hat is utterly fascinating on both an art and an historical level.

Luke is always grateful to have her store of knowledge expanded! Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

I checked out the Strange Maps blog and really found it interesting. Thanks for the link.