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Description: | Paul Nash
image: Three British soldiers waiting in a trench. One stands leaning against the wall of the trench, another sits on a
step resting one arm behind his head. The third stands up looking out over the broken landscape beyond. There are the remains of a grove of
trees, some of which are beginning to show new buds, and rolling hills in the distance.
This work was a commission from the Ministry of Information listed as complete on 15 July 1918. Nash appears to have
disliked the picture as he asked the Imperial War Museum not to lend it to his 1943 Leeds Retrospective.
In a letter to his wife on 7 March 1917, Nash describes a wood on the way to the frontline trenches: '...in a wood passed through on our
way up, a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas - a most desolate
ruinous place two months back, today it was a vivid green; the most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere in the midst, from the depth
of the wood's bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous, mad incongruity!'
Spring in the Trenches is almost as ironic, if not as bitter, as Nash’s masterpiece 'We are making a new world'. As a
soldier in the trenches, before he was invalided out just prior to an attack in which most of his regiment perished, Nash was well aware of
the irony of thousands of men preparing to kill each other while all around them birds were singing, the landscape was bursting into new
life and the sun shone in a blue sky.
Ministry of Information commission, Scheme 3.
Optimised | Publisher: | http://www.iwm.org.uk | Subjects: | Bomb Damage 01/3(4-15) Western Front 1914-1918 British Army 1914-1918 Military Personnel British Army Landscape Western Front trench / defences First World War | Source: | Imperial War Museum | Creator: | Nash, Paul | Identifier: | http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/o... | Go to resource |
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