'Street Life, 1916' by Hans Larwin, a native of Vienna and painter of the war on multiple fronts, including the home front. A bread line, chiefly of women, waits along the shopfronts to buy bread. To the left, a policeman stands guard.
Hans LarwinStraßenbild 1916Street Life, 1916Reverse:Galerie Wiener Künstler Nr. 681.Gallery of Viennese Artists, No. 681.W.R.B. & Co, W. III.
"— Either vanity or shame prevents certain aspects of life from being reflected in our illustrated papers. So posterity will find the pictorial documentation of the war very defective. For instance: they do not show us the insides of houses almost completely dark, owing to the lighting restrictions; the fruit stalls lit by candles in the deep gloom of the streets; the dustbins lying about on the the pavement, owing to the shortage of staff, until three in the afternoon; the queues of three thousand people waiting for their ration of sugar outside the large grocery stores. And, conversely, they do not record the enormous crowd thronging restaurants, tea-rooms, theatres, music-halls, and cinemas."
Entry for January 16, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant. Corday often comments on the 'enormous crowd thronging restaurants' not more than 50 miles from the front.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 225, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1917-01-16, 1917, January, queue, food line
