Outside Colonel B...'s dressing station, Menin Road

Depicts a group of Australian 1st and 2nd Australian Division unidentified, wounded soldiers sitting outside a dressing station on Menin Road, with a stretcher lying on the roof of the dressing station. The soldiers appear distressed and to be suffering from shock. This work was reproduced in 'Australia at War: Drawings at the Front' (London, 1918) as 'Lightly wounded at a Menin Road Dressing Station' with the following caption;' ...A brush had been passed over all the faces of these wounded, wiping out differences of expression, of character and intelligence; leaving them with something of the facial sameness that we see in different races of a different colour. I suppose it is the suffering and strain, common to them all, which gives them this one-ness of look, the same strain, the same relief, the same apathy, the same unquestioning collapse into the hands of the medicine men'. Will Dyson was the first Australian official war artist to visit the front during the First World War, travelling to France in December 1916, remaining there until May 1917, making records of the Australian involvement in the war. He was formally appointed as an official war artist, attached to the AIF, in May 1917, working in France and London throughout the war. His commission was terminated in March 1920.