On a battlefield on the Western Front of World War I, the body of a German scout who had been shot dead hung from a bullet-riddled tree. The corpse was propped up by tree branches, its limbs hanging down.

　　On a battlefield on the Western Front of World War I, the body of a German scout who had been shot dead was hanging from a tree that had been riddled with bullets. The corpse was propped up by tree branches, its limbs hanging down. No one was willing to put down the corpse of a German soldier, a tragic beacon of the violence of war, as the invasion of northern France began, and it appeared on the front page of Le Miroir, a photographic weekly dated December 6, 1914. It was published with particularly interesting photographic material on the war.

 

　　Le Miroir was a periodical French photographic weekly with extensive use of photography, first published in 1910. It was a supplement to Le Petit Parisien, a daily newspaper. Le Petit Parisien was a French daily newspaper published from October 15, 1876 to August 17, 1944, and was one of the four major French dailies on the eve of World War I, along with Le Petit Journal, Le Matin, and Le Journal.

　　Le Miroir switched to war reporting on August 8, 1914, with its front page dated December 6, 1914, featuring a dead German soldier hanging from a tree. To the French public, who were behind most European fronts during World War I, Le Miroir served as a truly realistic organ of the violence breaking out on the battlefields. To tell the story of the war, the violence of the war had to be recreated, so it used photographs, a visual shock, as a substitute for the actual events. The acquisition of the most shocking photographs of World War I, which had never been published, made it possible to publish them in Le Miroir. During World War I, due to a lack of paper, the magazine published a small number of pages, mostly of photographs, at a price of 25 cents. After World War I broke out on July 28, 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918, Le Miroir was transformed into a photo-only sports magazine from July 8, 1920, and ceased publication with issue 1084, published August 29, 1939.