An American in the wartime Germany of 1915
Little-known documentary restored, digitized
The young German soldier has his rifle slung over his shoulder, a half-eaten sandwich in his left hand and a drinking cup in his right.
As he steps to the refreshment window, a woman in a white apron leans over the counter and puts a sprig of flowers in a buttonhole of his uniform. He looks dashing in his spiked helmet and trim moustache, and she glances at him as he moves on.
Then she looks up at the camera.
It is June 1915, 10 months into the First World War. The place is Thorn — modern-day Torun, in northern Poland. And the soldier, whose name and fate are unknown, is headed for the front lines and the killing machine of the Great War.
The moment was captured by a brash, cigar-smoking American filmmaker, Wilbur H. Durborough, and his camera operator, Irving G. Ries, who had motored to the action in a Stutz Bearcat flying an American flag, the word “press” emblazoned on the car.
The scene is part of a littleknown documentary about the German army — filmed by Americans — that will be part of an extended exhibit on the First World War being assembled by the Library of Congress this year.
April 6 marks the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into the First World War in 1917.
The library recently restored and digitized the silent film, which is believed to be the only existing, essentially complete American the First World War feature-length documentary.
It is an hour and 48 minutes long.
Forgotten for decades, Durborough’s film, called “On the Firing Line With the Germans,” was discovered in a wine cellar of the estate of a Chicago businessman in 1985 and was eventually turned over to the library.
It has striking scenes of youthful German soldiers before they became the enemy.
Durborough captured them in camp, peeling potatoes, marching through Berlin, recuperating in hospitals, and fighting in apparent and simulated battle scenes. Many of the images are extremely clear, and the faces of the men and women extraordinary.
He also captured scenes of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto and vivid shots of Allied prisoners of war — British, Russian and French, some still wearing 1860s-style caps and uniforms.
There are shots of the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
And there are scenes of Durborough — in the Stutz with cigar and driving goggles, shaking hands with German officers, chatting with German soldiers and standing in the trenches.
Indeed, Durborough, like the famous Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, appears in many of the shots he set up. “He just inserts himself everywhere,” said Lynanne Schweighofer, a Library of Congress preservation specialist who helped reassemble the film.
In mid-1915, the war, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, already had claimed tens of thousands of soldiers as Britain, France and Russia were locked in horrific conflict with Germany and its allies.
America was still neutral. And although the Germans held some advantage in the fighting, they felt they were losing the public relations contest.
Meanwhile, in 1914, Durborough, a seasoned newspaper photographer from just outside Dover, Del., had been assigned by Chicago’s Newspaper Enterprise Association, a news service, to photograph the war.
Then 32, Durborough was ambitious. He had covered strikes and conventions and had met Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.
He took the job but asked whether he could shoot moving pictures, too, even though he had little movie experience.
The association declined to pay for filming but said he was free to make a documentary as long as it didn’t interfere with his photo assignment.
Durborough got a group of Chicago business executives to invest. They hired Ries, an experienced camera operator who spoke German, and bought the Bearcat, then one of the fastest cars on the road.
And with a green light from German authorities, who were hungry for good publicity, Durborough, Ries and the Stutz sailed for Europe in early 1915.
In late 2014, Schweighofer and colleague Valerie Cervantes began poring over the film.
“It had been a dream for many people to get this thing back together,” Geo. Willeman, the film centre’s nitrate vault manager said. “Because there’s nothing else like it — an American film about the German army in the First World War.”
The task was done using a hand-cranked frame viewer at a spartan “rewind bench” in a special nitrate-film workroom.
“The thing to me was looking at the faces of the individual soldiers,” Schweighofer said. “You saw the same ones over again. You find yourself wondering what happened to them. And, if they survived this war, did they survive the next war?”
Willeman noted one scene in which German soldiers are obviously singing and enjoying themselves as they gather in front of a railroad car around a man playing an accordion.
“These guys aren’t monsters,” he said. “They’re just guys. They’re like any other army ... A majority of these guys, a couple years after the film, were no more. They’re gone.”
Before it was over, the First World War killed more than 2 million German soldiers.
But in June 1915, everybody looks happy at the refreshment stand in Thorn, run by the Vaterländischer Frauenverein, a patriotic women’s group.
In the scene, about 20 minutes into the film, the women at the stand walk among the soldiers, who are heading for the Russian front, handing out flowers and snacks from baskets.
As the young soldier with the moustache moves along, a woman pours a drink into his cup, and another gives him a kiss on the cheek.
He looks about 20, and, after the kiss, disappears from the frames.
He was one of thousands of soldiers Durborough and Ries filmed — most of them young, well-groomed and in clean uniforms, untarnished by combat they had probably not yet experienced.
It is only near the end of the film that the soldiers look grimy, tired and unshaven, in the wake of a battle, and where Durborough has extensive footage of ruined towns and refugees packed into rickety wagons on muddy roads.
And it is there that Durborough stops appearing in the film.
“Suddenly he vanishes,” Willeman said. “But you could see how important this has become to him, because he just goes on and on and on and on to show what’s happened.”
The film was first shown in Milwaukee on Nov. 28, 1915. It began a long run in Chicago that December. Newspaper ads described it as “The Motion Picture Scoop of the War!” Durborough often appeared at the showings and gave lectures. One promotional poster featured a portrait of the kaiser.
From Chicago, it began runs in theatres across the country. In Philadelphia in early 1916, Durborough arrived in the Stutz, driving it up and down in front of the theatre where the film was showing, firing a gun to get attention.
Interest in the film evaporated in 1916 and 1917 as tensions with Germany rose. The United States declared war in April 1917.
During the war, Durborough served as an Army public relations officer.
Afterward, he gave up filmmaking and pursued various jobs in newspapers and public relations. He died suddenly in San Bernardino in 1946 at age 63.
Ries, for his part, stayed in the film business as a cinematographer and a special-effects expert. He was nominated, with two others, for an Academy Award for special effects in the 1956 science fiction movie “Forbidden Planet.” He died in 1963.