Black and white is a lie. Well, maybe not a lie, but it’s definitely a filter that keeps us at a distance from the absolute chaos of 1914. When you look at those old, jerky films of soldiers marching toward the Somme, they feel like characters in a silent movie. They don’t feel like us. But they were. They wore itchy, mustard-brown wool. They dealt with bright red blood pooling in slate-grey mud. They looked up at a sky that was just as blue as the one you saw this morning. Seeing World War One in colour isn't just a technical trick; it’s a total psychological shift that forces us to realize these weren't "ancestors" in some distant myth—they were young guys who liked beer and complained about their boots.
Honestly, the way we consume history is changing. For decades, we accepted the grainy, monochromatic version of the Great War as the "authentic" one. But the world wasn't grey.
The Chemistry of Early Colour
People think colour photography started with Kodachrome in the 1930s. That’s wrong. It actually goes back much further. During the war, French photographers like Leon Gimpel and Paul Castelnau were using something called the Autochrome Lumière process. It’s wild how it worked. They basically used dyed potato starch grains to filter light onto glass plates. Because the exposure times were so long—sometimes several seconds—you don't see much action in these original photos. Instead, you get these eerie, painterly still-lifes of soldiers sitting in bombed-out churches or posing next to their Nieuport biplanes.
The colours in Autochromes are soft. They’re dreamlike. The French "Horizon Blue" uniforms look vibrant against the scorched earth of the Western Front. It’s a stark contrast to the mud-caked reality we usually see.
Then there’s the modern side of things. Most people know the name Peter Jackson now, not just for hobbits, but for his 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. That project changed everything for how we perceive World War One in colour. His team at Park Road Post Production didn't just "slap some paint" on the frames. They hand-restored 100-year-old film, adjusted the frame rates so people didn't look like they were scurrying around at double speed, and used forensic lip-readers to figure out what the soldiers were actually saying.
Why the "Grey" Myth Persists
Why does it matter if we see the red of a poppy or the brass of a shell casing? Because black and white creates a "safe" distance. It makes the war feel settled. Finished.
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When you see a high-definition, colour-corrected image of a teenager in a trench, you notice the dirt under his fingernails. You see the various shades of "trench foot" on a soldier's skin—it’s a sickly, bruised purple and yellow. That level of detail is uncomfortable. It makes the horror immediate. It’s no longer a "vintage" event; it’s a news report from yesterday.
The archival footage held by the Imperial War Museum is vast, but much of it was shot on orthochromatic film. This type of film was weirdly sensitive to blue light but almost blind to red. It’s why blue skies often look white and red blood looks black in original footage. This technical limitation literally reshaped our visual memory of the 20th century.
The Technical Struggle of Colorization
Restoring World War One in colour is a nightmare for historians. You can't just guess. If you’re colorizing a shot of a British Mark IV tank, you need to know the exact shade of "khaki brown" or "service grey" used by that specific unit in 1917.
- Historians look at surviving museum pieces.
- They cross-reference diaries that mention the weather (a "leaden sky" vs. "piercing blue").
- They analyze the chemical makeup of the film stock to see how certain pigments reacted to the light.
It's a mix of art and hard science. If you get the shade of a German "Pickelhaube" helmet wrong, the whole image feels "off" to an expert eye. There’s a certain weight to the uniforms of that era—heavy wool that soaked up water until it weighed forty pounds. In black and white, it just looks like dark fabric. In colour, you can see the dampness, the stains, and the wear.
Beyond the Western Front
We usually focus on the mud of France and Belgium. But the war was everywhere. Seeing World War One in colour in the Middle East is a different experience entirely. The Australian Light Horse in Palestine, the Ottoman defenders at Gallipoli—these scenes involve searing yellows, deep oranges, and the blinding white of salt pans.
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The archives in Russia and the Balkans offer even more variety. We see the colorful, almost Napoleonic-looking uniforms of the early war period before everyone realized that bright colours make you a very easy target for a machine gun. By 1916, most armies had transitioned to some form of drab camouflage, but the early days were a riot of red trousers and plumed hats.
The Human Element
I think the most striking thing about these colour restorations isn't the explosions. It’s the faces. When you see the pinkish hue of a nervous 19-year-old’s cheeks as he tries to smile for a camera in 1916, it hits different. You see the blue of his eyes. You see the yellowing of his teeth from a diet of "bully beef" and hard biscuits.
That’s the "human-quality" that's often missing from history books. We talk about "the 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Somme" as a statistic. But colour makes us see 60,000 individuals. It turns a number into a person.
The Debate Over "Authenticity"
Not everyone loves this. Some historians argue that colorizing old footage is a form of "vandalism." They believe that if the cameraman shot it in black and white, that’s how it should stay. They worry that AI-driven colorization creates a "fake" reality that never existed.
It's a fair point. But honestly, the soldiers didn't see the world in black and white. Their reality was in 4K, 3D, and full colour. If our goal is to understand their experience, then using every tool we have—from AI upscaling to deep-learning colour algorithms—is probably the right move.
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We’re not changing history; we’re just cleaning the window we use to look at it.
How to Experience the War in Colour Today
If you want to dive into this, you shouldn't just look at random YouTube clips. A lot of that stuff is low-effort AI "upscaling" that looks like a smeared oil painting. You want the real deal.
- Seek out the Autochrome archives. The Albert Kahn Museum in France holds a massive collection of original colour plates from the era. These aren't colorized; they are the actual colours of 1914.
- Watch "They Shall Not Grow Old." It’s the gold standard. Peter Jackson’s team spent years on just a few hours of footage.
- Visit the Imperial War Museum (IWM) online. They have been digitizing their collection at high resolutions, and their experts often provide context that explains the "why" behind the colours you're seeing.
- Look for the "World War One in Colour" documentary series. The 2003 series narrated by Kenneth Branagh was one of the first to bring this to a mainstream audience, and while the tech has improved since then, the storytelling is still top-notch.
When you look at these images, pay attention to the small things. The rust on a barbed wire fence. The way the light hits a puddle in a shell crater. The different shades of green in a forest that’s been shredded by artillery.
Seeing the Great War this way makes it impossible to ignore. It’s no longer a story from a dusty book. It’s a vivid, terrifying, and deeply human reality. It reminds us that history isn't just something that happened to people "back then." It’s something that happens to people like us, in a world just as colourful as our own.
To truly understand the era, start by comparing original monochrome photos with their modern colorized counterparts. Notice how your emotional reaction changes when the "mask" of black and white is removed. Then, look into the specific history of the "Archives de la Planète"—Albert Kahn’s massive project to document the world in colour just as it was about to be torn apart by the first industrial war in human history.