Similarly to the last shot, we've seen this one before. It is the Wellington arch, also known as the Constitution Arch, but this time we're seeing it side on.

In the foreground we're also seeing the Machine-Gun Corps Memorial. It is also known as "The Boy David". That's because it is in fact a 2.7 m tall statue of a nude David. Yes, the Goliath guy. The base is inscribed with a quote from the Bible that "Saul has slain his thousands/ but David his tens of thousands". Yes, that rather annoyed Saul at the time because Saul had been fighting in battle after battle, and David had in fact killed just one guy at that time. I can guess where the sculptor was coming from with that quotation, but I'm not sure that I would have included it myself.

This monument actually bemused me somewhat. Why on earth would there be a separate machine-gun corps? Why wouldn't machine guns simply be embedded with regular units at platoon or at least company level? Then of course it struck me; World War I. We're not talking about M 60s (which are themselves obsolete in terms of US military doctrine now anyway, but that's neither here nor there) which weighed "only" about 11 kg and could be carried by 3 guys in the field. (Well, one really, with two in support.) These were Vickers machine guns which weighed anything up to 23 kg. They sure as hell were not going to be deployable alongside riflemen in a fire and movement scenario. Integrated assaults using combinations of infantry, armour and airpower would not come until late in the war and then be largely forgotten until the Wehrmacht was resurrected.

While I'm no expert on early World War I infantry strategy because I have an aversion to stupidity, I imagine that machine guns, rather than being an essential and integral part of infantry units were regarded at the time as being a separate support unit. I don't think that this was necessarily a good idea, but I can at least see why it may have been done that way.

The Corps was disbanded in 1922.

Why the extreme desaturation? First I was experimenting with different styles, second I didn't have a clean shot of the machine gun memorial and wanted to pull it out more.