Looking west from those other trenches …… postcards from the Great War ….. no. 1 the uniforms

Now, I say looking west, but these young men may have been destined for the Eastern Front.

But the passage of a century and a bit has made it pretty unlikely I will ever know.

One of the cards bears a Munich postmark and another comes from Warsaw, and both are dated 1916.

There may be someone out there that can recognise details from the uniforms which may offer up a clue to a regiment and hence a destination, but until then I am stumped.

Which just leaves me staring at the men, and in a very unhistorical way wondering about who they were and what happened to them.

Over the years I have studied and used many picture postcards from the Great War, and tried to fit the five men of our family into similar British uniforms.  We do have a picture of my great grandfather who in 1916 was in the West Kents, and one of my uncle George in the uniform of the Black Watch.

But I don’t have any of the German side. Our maternal grandmother was from Cologne and married granddad who was in the British army of occupation in 1920.

Her brothers may have served in the Imperial armed forces of Germany, and she will certainly have had cousins who also fought for “Kaiser and Empire”.

If there were any pictures taken of them they have not survived, so these four are all I have.

And one of these postcards has the name, and address of the photographer on the reverse along with the name Bergez, which I take to be the young man in uniform.

The photographer was a Bernard Koch of the “Art Enlargement Agency, and the address was Tumblingerstrasse, München.

The street is still there just a stones throw from the River Isar.  It is one of those pretty unremarkable side roads you can find in any town or city across Europe, and while some of the building look like that might have been known by Herr. Koch, other look to be very modern.

But there is a building at the end of Tumblingerstrasse, just as it goes underneath the main railway line and marshalling yard which looks like it might have been a military barracks.

And that would have made sense for Herr. Koch to have set up business close.

Certainly, the young man is standing in front of a standard studio background, almost exactly liker the one his British counterparts might have chosen for a backdrop.

Interestingly two of the other images show the soldiers out in the open.  In both cases they are standing in front of a building which bears a resemblance to the one on Tumblingerstrasse, but that may just be me wishing it to be the barracks.

So, there you have it four picture postcards of six men in German army uniforms sometime during the Great War, doing pretty much what soldiers do everywhere before being sent to the Front.

Location; somewhere in Germany

Pictures; German soldiers, circa 1916, from the collection of David Harrop