Every day a batch of prisoners of this size, taken on the British Sector of the Western Front, pass through one of the Clearing Depots

Panning upwards from the individual faces of identifiable people to a seething mass of anonymous humanity, the huge number of soldiers captured in this image helps to give an idea of the epic scale of the conflict on the Western Front. It is likely that this photograph would have been deployed for propaganda purposes, as images of captured enemy soldiers was always popular copy with patriotic news…