Looking like a model or a piece by Yves Tanguy, a photograph of part of the destroyed city of Lens, France dated September 18, 1918.
LenzLensReverse:18 September 1918
"Time was unnoticed. Night shaded into day. There was no dawn, no quickening, no radiance. A sullen sky, a flattened vault of ashen grey, . . . a wide and bare winter landscape of grey-green stubble stippled here and there with chrome-grey shell-holes, and scarred with trenches. Desolation reigns undisputed now, whatever revolution Spring may bring."
Extract from the entry for October 23, 1916 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The Battalion was then serving in the Somme sector, and moved into 'Serpentine Trench, a part of the captured Flers Line, in a fold between Ginchy and Morval.' Dunn's battalion attacked at 2:30 on the afternoon of the 23rd. After early reports of progress, 'the attack, like earlier attacks on the same ground, had failed.'
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 266, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
1916-10-23, 1916, October, Somme, Battle of the Somme, destroyed Lens
