Paul Nash joined the Artists Rifles in September 1914, and in 1917 was appointed as an official war artist recording the war in Flanders. These lithographs were fist shown at the Leicester Galleries in London the following year. Arnold Bennett wrote in the exhibition catalogue ‘Lieutenant Nash has seen the Front simply and largely. The convention he uses is ruthlessly selective; the wave-live formation of shell-holes, the curves of shell-bursts, the straight lines and sharply-defined angles of wooden causeways, decapitated trees, the fangs of obdurate masonry, the weight of heavy skies …’