Revealing the impact of war on the landscape, this dramatic scene was created by Paul Nash while undertaking active service in the First World War. Nash joined the Artists’ Rifles in September 1914 and, in 1917, was appointed an Official War Artist to record action in Flanders. That autumn he visited Ypres Salient, the area around the Belgian city of Ypres on the Western Front, the site of some of the largest confrontations. Here Nash witnessed the aftermath of German shelling, particularly on the infamous Hill 60, an area that had been extensively mined by Britain since 1915. Seeing the brutalised landscape, Nash described it as ‘... pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds’. His resulting lithographs, made with the help of fellow war artist C.R.W. Nevinson, were first shown at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1918. At the time, writer Arnold Bennett commented: Lieutenant Nash has seen the Front simply and largely. The convention he uses is ruthlessly selective; the wave-live formation of shell-holes, the curves of shell-bursts, the straight lines and sharply-defined angles of wooden causeways, decapitated trees, the fangs of obdurate masonry, the weight of heavy skies.