Northern France & Belgium Map 1916 Western Front Print - Lille, Calais, Dunkirk, Ghent, Bruges

The London Geographical Institute, the imprint of the London map house George Philip & Son, produced this map of the Western Front for the Daily Mail, which issued it as page 3 of War Panorama, a set of twenty bird's-eye views and maps of the world-wide war. The catalog dates the sheet to about 1916 and credits Philip with the printing, and the clean color work, with railways picked out in red against green land and blue water, shows a commercial house turning a newspaper feature into a proper piece of cartography. It covers the strip of northern France and Belgium from the North Sea coast inland to Arras, it is classed as a military atlas map, and it was drawn when the trench line across this ground had barely moved for more than a year.

Ypres, which the map emphasizes among its principal railway centers, had stood at the tip of a salient since the first battle of 1914, and it was there in April 1915 that gas was first used on a large scale. Lille, held by German forces since October 1914, lay well behind their lines, while Arras marks the southern end of the sheet. The Channel ports of Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne are labeled on the coast, and each served as a gateway for the British soldiers and supplies crossing from England. Ghent, Bruges and Tournai lie farther east inside occupied Belgium. Railways are the organizing idea of the whole sheet, which suits a front that depended on rail to move troops and shells.

A descendant of a soldier who served in Flanders or Picardy, a student of the First World War, or anyone who has walked the battlefields around Ypres and Arras will find a meaningful gift here, perhaps for a commemoration or a family reunion. TheMapVault's Teesdale map of 1831 and Pinkerton's of 1809 show the whole of France in peacetime, whereas this Daily Mail sheet concentrates on one narrow corridor and treats it as a theater of war. It was made for a newspaper reader at home, so it explains the front through simple colors and railway lines rather than a surveyor's detail. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.