View across No Man's Land between Ypres and Messines in 1917 by Lance Corporal Hugh F. Ward, 97th Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps. Ward painted this while he was in the sector before, during, and after the June, 1917 Battle of Messines Ridge. Initialed 'H.W.'.
Initialed 'H.W.'.
"The landscape here is of the deadly-conventional Armageddon type—low green-grey ridges fringed with the usual decorations of a few isolated trees, half-smashed, with a broken wall or two, straggling trench-grey silhouettes that once were villages. Then there are open spaces broken only by ruined wire-tangles, old trenches, and the dismal remains of an occasional rest-camp of huts. The June grass waves, poppies flame, shrapnel bursts with black puffs, an aeroplane drones, larks sing; someone comes along the trench, clinking a petrol-tin. And this is about all one sees, as one stumps along the communication-trenches, dry and crumbling, with a dead mole lying about here and there."
Excerpt from the diary of Siegfried Sassoon, British poet, author, Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers (R.W.F.), and recipient of the Military Cross for gallantry in action. Sassoon was deployed to Palestine in early 1918, then returned to France after the successful Germany's spring offensives Michael and Georgette, when British losses required every available soldier on the Western Front. As he wrote he was near Mercatel, 7 or 8 km south of Arras.
Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918 by Siegfried Sassoon, page 264, copyright © George Sassoon, 1983; Introduction and Notes Rupert Hart-Davis, 1983, publisher: Faber and Faber, publication date: 1983
1918-06-08, 1918, June, Armageddon, battlefield, ruins
