Mine crater, Hill 60, 1917

A landscape with bomb craters and burnt trees. Nash used this blasted landscape to convey the horror of war. The lithograph is based on a watercolour, 'Caterpillar crater' (reproduced in John Sales and C E Montague, 'British artists at the front: Paul Nash', Country Life, London, 1918, plate 11). It is similar to the watercolour in the foreground pool, the craters and denuded trees. But in the lithograph there is a pool behind; the crater hills on the left are silhouetted at the horizon and the tree stumps are less like rigid poles. The scene is near Hill 60, on the old German front line. In 1915-17, the tension caused by the underground warfare in the Hill 60 system of mines exceeded that elsewhere on the British Front. Just before the attack on Hill 60 of 7 June 1917, in which many of his company were killed, Nash fell into a trench and was invalided back to London with a broken rib. This lithograph may have been Nash's tribute to comrades killed in the fighting, a fate Nash escaped because of his accident. This is the first of Nash's seven war lithographs. He must have drawn the lithograph immediately after his return from the front in December 1917 as it was reproduced in 'Land and water' in January 1918. Witnessing at firsthand the devastation caused by the battle of Passchendaele, Nash's surrealist landscapes reflect the desolation and chaos of war, with natural features replaced by bombed buildings and water-filled shell-holes.