Marching at night

Nash's long column of marching men, echoed by the converging rows of towering poplar trees, is directly influenced by Nevinson, although Nash's perspective is distinctly his own. Like Nevinson, Nash shows the weary soldiers caught up in the inescapable mechanism of war, far removed from Futurism's bright new age of speed and the machine. The bravura in this lithograph suggests that the composition was drawn directly onto the stone which can be seen in the lines he has scratched into the inked surface of the stone. It is the only one of Nash's seven war lithographs which does not repeat the composition of a watercolour or drawing. King noted that Nash befriended the poet Edward Thomas while he was a map-reading instructor at Romford, Essex, and that they 'enjoyed the exciting experience of night route marching' (James King, 'Interior landscapes: a life of Paul Nash', 1987, p. 78). It is likely that this subject was drawn from memory of this experience; and perhaps also in homage to Thomas, who died at the western front in 1917.