Remembrance

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

― Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems.

The photograph is of a British 'Hypo Helmet' from the First World War. It consisted of a wool flannel hood entirely soaked in sodium hypo-sulphite to neutralize chlorine. The hood, fitted with a mica window and a simple rubber valve through which the soldier exhaled, fitted over the head to the shoulders. By May 1915, it was being distributed to the British Expeditionary Force at a rate of 1,000 per Division.