Letter from Passhendaele

[DaveBrigg]

The artist Paul Nash wrote the following, on 18th November 1917.

I have just returned, last night, from a visit to Brigade Headquarters up the line, and I shall not forget it as long as I live. I have seen the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature, unspeakable, utterly undescribable. In the fifteen drawings I have made I may give you some vague idea of its horror, but only being in it and of it can ever make you sensible of its dreadful nature and of what our men in France have to face. We all have a vague notion of the terrors of a battle, and can conjure up with the aid of some of the more inspired war correspondents and the pictures in the Daily Mirror some vision of a battlefield; but no pen or drawing can convey this country – the normal setting of the battles taking place day and night, month after month. Evil and the incarnate fiend alone can be master of this war, and no glimmer of God’s hand is seen anywhere. Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. They alone plunge overhead, tearing away the rotting tree stumps, breaking the plank roads, striking down horses and mules, annihilating, maiming, maddening, they plunge into the grave which is this land; one huge grave, and cast upon it the poor dead. It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back the word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.

[eyes]

While some few may indeed have 'wanted it to go on forever', when I try (and try is the best we can do) to conjure up that grim reality, I think not of hate or maliciousness but of simple, plain, unvarnished courage. These were ordinary men, like us, who with no bands, no flags or cheering gallery, in spite of everything, stayed and did what they thought they should. Crouched in the mud, cold, wet, hungry, scared and in mortal danger. Stayed and did what they thought was right. Could I do that? I do not know. Truly, I do not know. If ever our species had a moral high point, it was there, in the midst of some of the worst that that same species could bring into existence.

[ianw]

A stunning desrciption of events 90 years ago. It brings a shiver to the spine.

We should count our many blessings.

[warbuff1]

A truly moving piece of first hand account. we can only vaguley imagine what it was like. May god and us pray that we are never witness to anything like that

Wayne

[Ozzie]

An artist with words as well.

A very graphic account. Thankyou for posting it.

Kim