A puzzling photo of 2 aircraft that collided

Radu...i accepted the ideea that you were right about the plane.

Indeed, the crushed plane from the Denes' picture is not a S.E.5a. It could be a russian or american plane if the color of the roundel (cocarde) is red-blue-white.

I wonder what kind of soldiers are near by the plane?

Yes, but that skid look very unusual. Could be an airfield imprivization. anyway the wings looks like a Strutter

Horia,
You are right. The wings "look like" the wings of the Strutter, but those are not the wings of a Strutter. That tyoe of "rounded swept-back" wingtip was very popular with many British aircraft, so if we limit ourselves to the shape of the wingtip alone, it can also be a Camel, BE2, DH5, Dolphin, Pup, DH9.
Fortunately, there is a lot more detail in that picture that can help.
Look again at the roundel. No, I mean look again and look carefully. :-) On it you will see two items: the control cable+control horn for the aileron and a wingtip skid that is bent down. The shape of the skid is unique to the DH4. All of these details and their location are consistent with a DH4.
That wing looks a whole lot more like a DH4 than a Strutter.

I can only hope that Denes will scan and enlarge the engine area of this aircraft and all this speculation will end right away. We will know if the DH4 is an Airco (which would make it American) or a DeHavilland (which would make it Russian).

Until we have more to go by, I will no longer contribute in this thread in the interest of historical accuracy. Speculation is only muddying the waters here.

Radu

Just curious if we know this is an actual WWI photo? The chances of an observer catching this collision with a third plane in the photo seems very unlikely. It seems to look more like a still from one of the postwar movies like William Wellman's Wings or Howard Hughes' Hells Angels. I know they bought up a variety of original planes for these movies, along with modifying others as they were needed. This might account for the problems in identification.