Old Bills made like New! If you help the Surrey Red Cross

While serving with a Machine Gun Unit during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, Bairnsfather was hospitalised with shell shock and hearing damage. He was subsequently posted to the 34th Division headquarters on Salisbury Plain when he developed the character "Old Bill", as featured in this Red Cross poster, for his humorous series about life in the trenches. Published in the Bystander, they illustrated the reality of life - and death - in the trenches, where men cohabitated with rats and lice, and trench foot was commonplace because of the endless mud. '"Old Bill" was a curmudgeonly soldier with trademark walrus moustache and balaclava' [Wikipedia biography], who contributed to raising moral among the soldiers and "the popularity and circulation" of the Bystander. [Gosling, L., 'Brushes and Bayonets: cartoons, sketches and paintings of World War I', Osprey Publishing, Great Britain, 2008, p.10]. The success of Bairnsfather's cartoons saw him receive an official commission to document other Allied forces in the same way. Bairnsfather drew on his experience of the trenches to bring humour to what was unimaginably atrocious. He found life in the trenches so shocking he regularly declined leave "for fear he would be unable to return." [Gosling, 2008, p.114].