Sir, we cannot dig in. There are too many corpses in the mud.
Message to H.Q. from Captain Charles Austin, Passchendaele, August, 1917

There is irony in the fact that the bloodiest war in history spawned the whitest of souvenirs. Inspired by Adolphus Goss and his heraldic china, several competitors produced slip-cast models of virtually every tool of the conflict, from the buses that carried troops to the front to the ambulances that carried them back (2 & 3).

English potters also made model artillery as well as replicas of the shells they shot (5, 7, 8, 13 & 14). They copied hand-grenades from the battlefields and even reproduced the metal pins that were used to fire them (9 & 10). When tanks were introduced, the potters tried to keep pace with the latest developments as the armored monsters evolved from rear wheels to single-tracked successors (15 & 16).

Later the French produced a smaller, faster and more maneuverable Renault tank (17). The war in the air was turned into porcelain planes (20), as were the bombs the British and Germans dropped on each other (18 & 19).

The porcelain war souvenirs made the carnage appear antiseptically unreal. In retrospect, however, we can see a definite change in attitude from 1914’s “Brave Defender” (1) to 1917’s grim survivor known to millions as “Old Bill,” (21) who hunkered down in his sand-bagged dug-out hoping that the bombardments would miss him (22). The arrival of General Pershing and his American dough-boys (23) helped bring the war to its exhausted end. For the British though the world would never be the same again.