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(?)
". . . Thirst; Gas; Shrapnel; Very H.E.; Our liquid fire; A first sight of an aeroplane map . . . Does it sound interesting? May God forgive me if I ever come to cheat myself into thinking that it was, and lie later to younger men of the Great Days. It was damnable; and what in relation to what might have happened? Nothing at all! We have been lucky, but it is not fit for men to be here — in this tormented dry-fevered marsh, where men die and are left to rot because of snipers and the callousness that War breeds. 'It might be me tomorrow. Who cares? Yet still, hang on for a Blighty.'"
Ivor Gurney, English poet and composer, writing to the composer Marion Margaret Scott, former President of the Society of Women Musicians, in June or July, 1917 between the 1917 British offensives of Arras and Ypres. Gurney was a private in the Gloucestershire Regiment. 'H.E.' is high explosive shells; a 'Blighty' a wound that would send him back to Blighty, to England.
War Letters, Ivor Gurney, a selection edited by R.K.R. Thornton by Ivor Gurney, pp. 170–171, copyright © J. R. Haines, the Trustee of the Ivor Gurney Estate 1983, publisher: The Hogarth Press, publication date: 1984
1917-07-19, 1917, July, Gurney, Blighty
