Watercolor self-portrait by Lance Corporal Hugh F. Ward showing himself bathing, washing, and delousing his uniform. Ward served in the 97th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), 30th Division, B.E.F.
Reverse:An every day occurrenceJust an unfinished study.Done at Braudhoek(?)
"Things look pretty hopeful now, don't they? The Italians seem to have remembered Caesar and his far wars and glory. What the Austrians remember I cannot say (Austerlitz?) And the French dont seem exhausted, and as for the English . . . . Our guns would frighten imps in the lowest concrete dugout of Hell, so they shake me up pretty considerably."
Ivor Gurney, English poet, composer, and private in the Gloucestershire Regiment, writing to the composer Marion Margaret Scott, on August 29 or 30, 1917. In the Battle of Austerlitz, fought on December 3, 1805, Napoleon triumphed over an allied Austrian and Russian army. As Gurney wrote, the Italians were making progress against the Austro-Hungarian forces in the Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo. Days earlier, French forces had retaken ground lost to the Germans in 1916's siege of Verdun.
War Letters, Ivor Gurney, a selection edited by R.K.R. Thornton by Ivor Gurney, page 192, copyright © J. R. Haines, the Trustee of the Ivor Gurney Estate 1983, publisher: The Hogarth Press, publication date: 1984
1917-08-30, August, 1917, Eleventh Battle of the Isonzo, Eleventh Isonzo, Isonzo, Hugh F. Ward
