Military Sketching: Essays

Here are three essays by Paul Gough on Military Sketching:

Gough, P.J. ‘Calculating the future’ – panoramic sketching, reconnaissance drawing and the material trace of war, in Saunders, N and Cornish, P. (eds.) Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, Routledge, London, 2009, pp. 237-251, ISBN 978-0-415-45070-6 Download

‘Calculating the future’

panoramic sketching, reconnaissance drawing and the material trace of war

Paul Gough

Part One – the academies

Since the establishment of the training academies in the 18^th century, the military have taught drawing as a navigation and exploratory tool. At Woolwich, Dartmouth and Great Marlow, gentlemen cadets and sailors were trained to analyse and record landscape and coastline as a means of neutralizing and controlling enemy space. Perhaps surprisingly, the practice is maintained today; the quality of drawing made by field gunners and reconnaissance scouts may lack the artistry of their 18^th century forebears, but it has in common the desire to schematize the act of looking, and to reduce drawing and note-taking to the essentials, using basic but tested methods of measuring and calibration by eye and hand.

Military drawing was an element of the curriculum at the first military academy set up at Woolwich in 1741. The Rules and Orders required the Drawing Master to 'teach the method of Sketching Ground, the taking of Views, the drawing of Civil Architecture and the Practice of Perspective.' (Buchanan 1892:33) Probably the most eminent artist associated with Woolwich was the watercolourist Paul Sandby, who served as Drawing Master from 1768 until 1796. Sandby was then at the height of his fame, and his appointment at a military academy reflects the importance of drawing in the training of the artillery and engineer cadets. Under his guidance the quality of observation and draughtsmanship was consistently high, and a number of his pupils went on to prove themselves as expert front-line draughtsmen, often making crucially important reconnaissance drawings and finely illustrated reports (Hardie 1966: 216)

During the Napoleonic Wars it was recognized that a skill in drawing could be of immediate benefit in unmapped and unknown terrain. With the establishment of new Staff and Junior military colleges in 1801, drawing became firmly established as an essential element in the training of infantry and cavalry officers. At the height of the war period, the country was scoured for capable landscape draughtsmen to employ as drawing tutors. Even John Constable was interviewed in 1802 for the post of Drawing Master at the Junior Department in Great Marlow, but he later rejected the offer, arguing that had he accepted 'it would have been a death blow to all my prospects of perfection in the Art I love'[Endnote].

On mainland Europe, trained army officers were soon at work in the battlefield, exploring unfamiliar ground, making detailed sketches of its topographical features, and reporting back to their superior officers. The value of an accurate drawing, however hastily made, was often more useful than a verbal or written description, and the officer-draughtsman cadre played a significant part in Wellington's Peninsular campaign.

Constable's relief at turning down the military appointment is an important reminder of the disdain that many artists felt for topographic art. Whether for artillery or infantry use, military drawing puts a premium on producing an accurate report shorn of artistic and aesthetic trappings. For all its remunerative attraction, military sketching was regarded with some disdain, a process of 'tame delineation', of reducing the aesthetics of nature to something ordinary or (to borrow Thomas Gainsborough's dismissive phrase) something 'mappy'. For others, the task of 'breaking ground' and issuing a neutral report was [like the very term 'military intelligence'] a contradiction in terms. Gainsborough wrote of the opprobrium cast upon artists who regarded themselves as ‘topographers’, rather than ‘interpreters’ of the landscape. Naturally, however, the military requires a factual, accurate drawing, however clumsy, rather than an idealized landscape picture.

Drawing for such purposes can be separated into two distinct fields of vision. These correspond approximately to the different arms of the military: on the one hand are those drawings made during mobile reconnaissance - usually by light cavalry patrols or units of advanced infantry – that are used to record intelligence about enemy positions and key terrain. On the other hand, there are drawings known as panoramas that are made from a static position, usually an elevated vantage point that commands an uninterrupted view of the enemy front. These are normally drawn by specially trained artillery or engineer officers and are vital for indicating targets and determining range and arc of fire.

The principle of panoramic drawing, when used in an artillery sense, developed from the role of the Forward Observation Officer (FOO) who was directing the fire of guns located much further back from his post on the edge of known and secure ground. Through close observation the FOO was able to engage targets very rapidly across the whole arc of view. If a number of targets had already been pre-registered, and engaged to an exact point on the ground, that point could be marked on a drawn panorama. This drawing would also be copied to the gunners in the rear who would then be able to engage the same target number with greater speed and efficiency. In effect, the panorama became a surrogate view for the distant artillery blinded by dead ground or topographic barriers [Endnote].

Whereas the patrol sketch is often a collage of hasty impressions later re-arranged to form a tactical narrative, the panorama is primarily concerned with scopic control and spatial dominance. The artillery panorama works on the same premise as military mapping; surveillance and graphic survey will eventually neutralize a dangerous terrain and assure mastery over it (Alfrey and Daniels 1990) In similar spirit, Foucault wrote of the system of permanent registration that operated in the plague town in the 17th century (Foucault 1975). On the septic terrain of the First World War battlefield the panoramic drawing was an integral part in segmenting and immobilizing perceived space. The stasis of the battle line, however, meant that the panoptic ideal could never be attained: dead ground (space beyond or concealed from retinal view), camouflage, and concealment were constant frustrations to retinal surveillance. Foucault's concept of a transparent space was constantly frustrated by the fissured and volatile landscape of the battlefield. The military sketch, though, provided the nearest graphic equivalent of Bentham's paradigm: it provided systematic observation 'in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded' (Foucault 1975:197).

Part Two – ‘The Drawing Manuals’

The different skills required for each type of drawing can be traced in the many official and commercial manuals that were published in the nineteenth century. During this period, proficiency in drawing was widely acknowledged as offering an advantage to boys competing for places at the military academies. Yet the varying qualities in the teaching of drawing across the 'public' and middle-class schools constantly undermined the calibre of cadet applications to the military colleges. Both the Clarendon Commission of 1864 and the Taunton Commission four years later remarked on the erratic, often poor, quality of art teaching in schools, and the impact this might have on the quality of draughtsmanship in the professions and in the services (Sutton 1967: 88).

The unimaginative style of most military manuals of the late nineteenth century reflects the low status of drawing in the army's thinking. Invariably, freehand sketching was relegated to an item of 'special interest', and regarded as little more than an adjunct to map work. Manual writers leaned heavily on the conventional language and symbols of military cartography, transforming a single lesson in landscape drawing into little more than a matter of contours and geometric symbols.

Two manuals in 'Rapid Field Sketching and Reconnaissance' of 1889 and 1903, for example, laid heavy emphasis on map and compass work, with only a cursory description of the merits of freehand drawing. Commercial manuals such as Major R.F.Legge's Military Sketching and Map Reading ignored observational work completely, concentrating instead on map co-ordinates, measurement of slopes, magnetic bearings, and using the service compass (Legge 1906). One of the first manuals to actively encourage freehand drawing was The Active Service Pocket Book written by 2nd Lt. Bertrand Stewart and published in 1907. Stewart dedicated eight pages to freehand sketching, offering step-by-step advice on drawing in outline, using the pencil as a measuring instrument and mastering the challenging problem of perspective. The manual is clearly aimed at the novice. Stewart, for instance, recommends the construction of an oblong drawing frame attached to a stick with a pointed end. The frame is to be divided at regular six inch intervals by stretched wire, thus forming a drawing grid which will help simplify any landscape seen through it. Drawing on squared paper, the soldier is encouraged to make an exact outline copy of the view through the frame, though conveniently the author skips over the difficult matter of situating the frame, piercing hard ground, and avoiding enemy detection (Stewart 1907).

The hurried re-issue of a number of drawing manuals at the outbreak of war in 1914 was followed, over the next four years, by the publication of training booklets. At least nine commercial and War Office books on topographical and panoramic sketching were made available to soldiers of all ranks. Through such publishing ventures tuition in freehand drawing and map-reading spread from being the preserve of the officer in the Regular Army to a craft capable of being learned by all. The Great War accelerated this development. Not only was the army able to draw upon a better educated and more intelligent workforce, but the static nature of the fighting on the Western Front called for highly accurate intelligence on enemy positions. Observational drawing became an integral element in surveillance work, and was able to complement aerial photography as a method of scrutiny and surveillance.

Artistically talented soldiers of all ranks soon found themselves sought out to work in the Camouflage Corps or for the Field Survey. Not all went willingly. Harry Bateman, having volunteered for service with the Royal Field Artillery, ignored a sergeant's request at their first parade for any artist present to make himself known[Endnote]. He 'remained silent as he wanted to go and fight' (Brown 1978:185). Others found that their skills were deemed inappropriate: the painter and poet David Jones, serving with the 15th (London Welsh) Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, had five years art school training to his credit when he was recommended to the 2nd Field Survey Company based at Second Army Headquarters at Cassel. But Jones appears to have lacked the requisite technical skills needed for map drawing, and was instead sent to one of the Company's four observation groups as a Survey Post observer. Having already been promoted sideways from 'Maps', Jones did not last much longer as an observer - 'Got the sack from that job because of my inefficiency in getting the right degrees of enemy gunflashes' (Hague 1980:241; Chasseaud 1993:19). Another artist failed in the simple task of ‘breaking ground’:

From the OP (Observation Post) I saw a completely featureless landscape, save here and there a few broken sticks of trees. I made a pencil drawing of this barren piece of ground, but what use my superiors would be able to make of this sketch I could not imagine. (Roberts 1974:27-28)

Thus ended the Vorticist painter William Roberts’ first and only foray into reconnaissance drawing. In fact, surprisingly few of the other young 'moderns' serving in the armed forces during the Great War could subvert their artistic tendencies in the pursuit of technical objectivity.

Others advertised their skills quite freely. Adrian Hill – one of the youngest soldier-artists to eventually work for the official government war art schemes - combined his drawing abilities with his work in a Scouting and Sniping Section of the Honorable Artillery Company. After the war, he recalled a typical patrol into No Man's Land:

I advanced in short rushes, mostly on my hands and knees with my sketching kit dangling round my neck. As I slowly approached, the wood gradually took a more definite shape, and as I crept nearer I saw that what was hidden from our own line, now revealed itself as a cunningly contrived observation post in one of the battered trees. (Hill 1930:p. 16)

Part three – malign space

As ‘a palimpsest of overlapping, multi-vocal landscapes’ (Saunders 2001:37), the Western Front battlefield was a malign industrialized space where visibility was often a 'trap'. The military sketch was the spring in that mechanism. Concealment was the only antidote to the omni-directional gaze of the trained eye.

Jay Appleton, developing Konrad Lorenz's thesis on the atavistic landscape, has proposed a habitat theory that categorizes any landscape into hierarchies of 'prospect, refuge and hazard' (Appleton 1975). The panoramic viewpoint is the paradigm of Appleton's system; military drawing systematized the graphic language so that trees became datum points, and fixed features of the land became the immutable co-ordinates of a functional terrain, a strategic field. Or, as Henry Reed phrases it in this poetic fragment 'Judging Distances' from Lessons of the War, it is a domain where the temporal overlaps with the spatial:

Not only how far away; but the way that you say it is very important. / Perhaps you may never get/ The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know/ How to report on a landscape: the central sector / The right of the arc and that, which we had last Tuesday / And at least you know / That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army / Happens to be concerned - the reason being / Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know / There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar, And those which have bushy tops to; and lastly / That things only seem to be things. (Reed, 1943)

As a piece of spatial interpretation, the drawn artillery panorama has clear areas of jurisdiction. The foreground is considered irrelevant. To the gunner, the near is already controlled. The middle distance and the horizon are the focal points. These, to borrow Appleton's phrase, are the prospect-rich domains and the most coveted. Panorama drawings are predicated on trajectories and barrage lines. The horizon is the ultimate goal because it holds the promise of further territory for martial exploitation. During the First World War, the horizon took on special value when seen from the noisome mess of the front-line trench. Secreted in their observation posts, gunners described the green and unspoilt distance as 'The Promised Land' - perfect, but forever locked in an unattainable future.

These concerns, as W.J.T. Mitchell has observed, are the essential discourses of imperialism. Empires, according to him, move outward in space 'as a way of moving outward in time, the “prospect” that opens up is not just a spatial scene, but a projected future of "development" and exploitation.' (Mitchell 1994:16-17). The promise of control permeates every level of military drawing. In contemporary drawing manuals, the unmodulated pencil line is given the authority of military language:

A line should be as sharp and precise as a word of command. A wavering line which dies away carries no conviction or information because it is the product of a wavering mind. Every line should be put in to express something. Start sharply and finish sharply. Press on the paper. (Newton 1915:27)

Similarly, by ridding the page of ambiguity or doubt, the drawings aim to pre-ordain the future. This is also true of the written word, which uses the active and instructive tense of military command. It is a language where the passive or conditional tense does not function: 'Brigade will commence at ..., Objectives shall be taken by ..., reinforcements will be moved to ... etc'. (Keegan 1976:266). Maps and charts drawn up before offensives bear a similar code; barrage lines are clearly marked in minutes of advance; in June 1944, the objectives beyond the Normandy beachhead were marked out in time - D Day plus one, plus two, etc - as well as in actual space.

Instruction manuals in military sketching equate clarity of line with clarity of purpose. Ambiguity and doubt are (quite literally) ruled out. The margins of failure (like the estimated casualty rate) are clearly prescribed and then codified. Any blank areas of the paper are not intended to be read as negative space, but the area set aside for instructive wording. The panorama, though, could only make sense in a war where both sides were predominantly static, where a battlescape was shared but where the zones of control were clearly demarcated. The view from the opposing emplacements might be radically different, but the contested ground was rationalized and systematized using a shared vocabulary of grid and line. In his analysis of the ‘tourism’ of war, Jean Louis Deotte has argued that the beachline of Normandy in 1944 constituted a common world, a shared objectivity for both defender (cooped in a concrete pillbox) and attacker (exposed in a metal landing craft). Both sets of adversaries experienced a 'reversibility of the points of view' because 'enemies share in common the same definition of space, the same geometric plane ... they belong to the same world of techno-scientific confrontation, the substratum of which, here, is sight'. (Diller and Scofidio 1994 :116-177).

From a strictly operational point of view, the artillery panorama differed from a front-line or reconnaissance drawing in three respects. The artillery drawing reported a single view from a fixed Observation Post; it need only show a few prominent reference points drawn in a clear and unambiguous manner so as to indicate targets for observed fire; and it was drawn to maintain a record of artillery data on a particular battery front. The artillery panorama works on the same basis as military mapping – that is, the act of surveying and transcribing a landscape helps neutralize the dangers of uncertain terrain and eventually assure mastery over it. The discipline of panoramic drawing reduced any landscape, however picturesque, into a series of immutable co-ordinates and fixed datum points.

Drawings made from reconnaissance patrols or from the lip of a trench are often less formalized than the artillery panorama. Seen through a trench periscope or pieced together from night patrols their descriptive language is less codified, they may combine a number of viewpoints and usually serve as visual elaboration for a longer written report. But, they share with the panoramic drawing the same material fate: few images have survived, as they were intended for immediate, tactical use and were soon discarded.

Part four – Maze and Newton

One of the few front-line artists whose work did survive is the painter Paul Maze (IWM n.d.a). A French-speaking, self-confessed adventurer, Maze worked first as an interpreter to the Royal Scots Greys in 1914, and later as a liaison officer for General Sir Hubert Gough, Fifth Army commander. Gough would regularly send Maze on sketching sorties to the front line where the young painter would fearlessly record his impressions of the battlefield. One of his first missions, in May 1915, was to sketch the 7th Division's objectives around Festubert on the Somme, a task which required him to draw from the front line where he 'had to use a periscope and crane (his) neck over the sandbags quickly and peep'. This was Maze’s preferred – if somewhat risky - method of drawing. In March 1916, ignoring all regard for his own safety, he drew in the line every day:

My work was interesting. Bit by bit I dissected the ground with our field glasses, and I made drawings from every possible angle marking every obstacle which could hinder our advance. (Maze 1934: 130)

William Rothenstein, an official war artist working south of the Somme in March 1918, recalled seeing at Fifth Army headquarters ‘drawings pieced together, showing a considerable view of the German front', made by Maze 'creeping, day after day, beyond our front lines ... an act of rare courage and devotion' (Rothenstein 1932 :334).

Maze supplemented his trench drawings with information gleaned from aerial photographs, and he also incorporated imaginary views taken as though from the enemy lines. Few of them have survived. Five held by the Department of Art at the Imperial War Museum must be considered typical of his style. A large sketch of the Somme battleground, dating from mid-1916, has obviously been drawn from the lip of a trench. The parapet is broadly rendered in charcoal, a copse of trees in the middle distance is established with slabs of yellow paint, and its perimeter edge is clearly defined with a single pencil line. The names of two villages have been hastily scrawled in the sky. For all his abilities as an artist, the drawing is, in fact, heavily dressed in the idiom of map- making - the copse is given a clear perimeter line, the conifers are rendered in the conventional language of cartography, and houses are drawn as uniform blocks rather than as individual buildings. Maze adopts further map conventions in an even larger drawing of the battlefield around the village of Hamel on the Somme, in which the British front line is drawn in blue and the German line in red. However, on this occasion, Maze was unable to finish this particular drawing: inscribed in the painter's hand at the bottom is the telling message 'could not go on through heavy shelling'. Maze was clearly excited by the dangers of drawing near the fighting line, and he relished his role as an explorer and recorder of the battlefield. His work earned him both injuries and decorations, and it gave him an unusual apprenticeship as a painter. Even at the front he occasionally forgot his military duty and became 'engrossed in form and colour' (Maze 1934:138) but he was quite happy to be remembered as an artist who worked 'in shorthand'.

One artist who felt that it was not enough to entrust military drawing to adventurers or bemused avant garde artists was subaltern William Newton of the Artist’s Rifles. A trainee architect, Newton contended that it was possible to teach a novice how to draw a battle landscape after just one lecture and two days drawing in the field. This was an ambitious programme. By comparison, front-line infantry scouts took up to six weeks to train (Cameron 1916). Newton laid out his ideas in Military Landscape Sketching and Target Indication - a manual published commercially in 1916. In the introduction, Lieutenant Colonel H.A.R. May, commanding officer of the Artist’s Rifles, applauded Newton's system.

In his opening definition, Newton clarified the function of a military sketch. It 'is a form of report, without the ambiguity of language. It is graphic information. For information clearness is essential, and clearness is attained by two avenues: a) thought, b) draughtsmanship'. (Newton 1916:8). In making this point, Newton distances himself from previous manual writers who opted for heavily annotated sketches, and for a pictorial language rooted in the conventions of maps. However, the real challenge, continues Newton, is how to simplify the visual chaos of a landscape, especially a landscape damaged by battle.

It is therefore necessary to analyse, to bring order out of chaos. For this purpose there are three main methods of analysis - separation of planes, encircling or framing in, division of a whole into parts. (Newton 1916: 9)

Possibly the most interesting of these three methods is the first - the separation of planes. Newton suggests that the draughtsman should try to imagine a landscape as a series of horizontal (but not straight) bands that stretch from one side of the paper to the other. It might help, he suggested, to imagine the country as something like the scenery of an outdoor exhibition with each ridge, hill, wood cut out of sheets of wood and laid one behind the other. Having done this, a point can successfully be marked on the drawing, its approximate distance from the viewer clearly indicated by the number and density of horizontal lines representing fields, meadows, tree lines in between the draughtsman and the point.

Newton's manual is full of such pragmatic advice. He emphasized the draughtsman's duty in guiding the eye to salient points in the landscape by using key devices in the terrain - an isolated chimney, a single red roof amongst black roofs, three silhouetted bushes on a crest line - as so many ‘labels’ that indicate particular targets or tactically vital features. He avoids the tendency of other instructors to construct complex drawing frames, or string and protractor gizmos[Endnote]. (Green 1908: 25) Instead, he argues for clarity of purpose at all times, for always using a sharp pencil and throwing the India rubber away - 'the aim should rather be to do a clear sketch from the first, because in the field opportunities of subsequent polish are limited'. He continues in fine style:

Such instruction may sound a little severe but it was born from a belief in the superiority of careful observational drawing as a method of study and analysis. Without the rigorous discipline advocated by Newton, military drawing can easily descend into a parody of itself - dull, repetitive diagrams in which trees have been reduced to a formula, producing a rather contrived landscape image that resembles 'nursery wall paper'. This was due in part to the consequence of drawing trees in outline which tends to make them resemble their cartographic equivalent - either bushy topped deciduous or 'Christmas tree' firs. It is also the consequence of drawing in outline alone and so accentuating the top line of trees and buildings with a minimum of shading and colour. The end results, however, had a curious aesthetic appeal and many military drawings began to resemble the arts and crafts style woodcut illustrations that were popular in the first decades of the century. The Studio magazine was quick to note the similarity. In February 1916 an illustrated article applauded the army's work in broadening the education of the common soldier, noting with pleasure that 'instruction has been extended to the rank and file because the authorities recognize the immense value on active service of men who can use a pencil in making topographical sketches' (R.F.C. 1916:44-45). The writer marveled at the short period of instruction, proof that 'one can just as easily be taught to draw the formation of objects in nature as to trace the design of the letters of the alphabet' but is most impressed by the unsophisticated aesthetic appeal of the drawings:

These sketches are, of course, not intended to be artistic in their handling, but at the same time there is a certain charm in their simplicity, and the conventional method does not detract from their interest. (R.F.C. 1916:45)

The accompanying line drawings show a verdant landscape of rolling pastures and tidy villages - in truth, not dissimilar from the images on offer in the magazine each month. Similar pastoral scenery was uniformly used for target practice. One subaltern wryly noted the popularity of the rural idyll.

Two fingers right, four o'clock from the haystack, at five hundred yards at the bushy-topped tree - fire!'I don't think that a tree that was not bushy-topped existed in the picture, which at least saved any strain on the School of Musketry's vocabulary or inventiveness. (Mellersh 1978:52)

To the military mind, though, such aestheticism was anathema. Though Major Pearson's manual of 1906 offered a wider range of tree types - pine, poplar, scots fir, the banana - to wean his students from the tyranny of the 'bushy topped' formula, every drawing instructor warned the draughtsman to guard against 'artistic effect'. 'Indeed', argued the author of the 1912 manual, 'it is almost better that the artistic sense should be absent, and that instead of idealising a landscape it should be looked at with a cold matter-of-fact military eye'. (War Office 1912: 75). A soldier-sketcher had to concentrate on the potential of the countryside for military purposes and not be distracted by 'its beauties of colouring or the artistic effects of light and shade.'

To certain military artists, though, the call of landscape art would always overwhelm purely tactical considerations. Perhaps the least exacting type of military sketch is the conventional landscape painting that has been simply ruled off with vertical pencil lines to mark out the degrees of artillery fire. Wilfred de Glehn chose this method (IWM n.d.a.). A professional artist, de Glehn served with the Royal Garrison Artillery on the Italian theatre of operations in 1917. From observation posts on the hills above the Isonzo Valley he painted a number of striking watercolour landscapes of the battlefield and the distant Austrian lines. Exquisitely painted and beautifully luminous, they are, however, rather limited as images of tactical information - important contour lines are lost in the refined brushwork, keypoints in the enemy line are sacrificed to the principles of aerial perspective, vaporous watercolour technique obscures hard military fact. Only the unwavering vertical lines remind us that this is a dangerous killing zone. Similarly, the sculptor Gilbert Ledward, who was stationed with the Royal Garrison Artillery on the Italian Front during 1917-1918, made a panorama from a high vantage point above the village of Camporovere. His elegant watercolour captures something of the charm of the wide valley, but it relies almost entirely on dotted lines and numerical code to indicate the ‘approximate location of hostile batteries’.

Part five - legacy

Few of the innovations in battlefield drawing advocated by Newton seem to have survived the Great War. A sample panorama provided with the 1921 manual of Map Reading shows a wide tract of country either side of the Etaples-Verton railway in Northern France. It was drawn on 3 July 1918 at 0900 hours by a Lieut. J Smith Royal Artillery from an observation post some 15 metres high. It is a classic panorama - an endless vista of land described in a neutral outline. But as a piece of graphic information it relies almost entirely on annotations and graphic directions – arrows, icons, symbols, etc. It premises literal description at the expense of pictorial invention.

In artillery and infantry training manuals between the wars, freehand sketching took a poor second place to the technical demands of map work. Panoramic work was regarded as an adjunct to map drawing and was afforded modest coverage in training texts. This trend continued after the Second World War. It seemed that the panoramic sketch as the material trace of war was now defunct.

In our era of photographic surveillance and computerized simulation, it would appear that we have achieved a perfection and totalisation of surveillance technologies. Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and digital technology can triangulate geographical location to within one metre, allowing a degree of precise digital time and space co-ordination that would have been unthinkable to the armed forces of even thirty years ago (Graham 1999:133). However, it may come as some surprise that freehand drawing is still practiced in the British armed forces today. Light forward units of the British Royal Artillery rely on powerful binoculars, night sights and thermal imaging devices, but the skill of field sketching is still a part of their work, requiring little more than a pencil, paper and a keen eye. In concealed positions far ahead of their guns, operating from a known grid, Forward Observation Officers, normally captains, observe the ground to the front of their battery, determine targets and order fire.

One such officer explained the value of drawing in this role:

Drawing is very important to the artillery, and to the observers particularly. We produce a panorama on a flat piece of paper, so that if we have to hand the position onto another party they have to be able to instantly pick up and identify features to the front. When we're drawing we look for key reference points - a prominent contour line, lone trees, buildings and so on[Endnote].

Carefully avoiding ‘artistic effect’, one of the observation party uses a felt-tipped pen to make a diagrammatic picture of the enemy terrain. But, unlike his predecessors' work, few of these images will be committed to history. As the Observation Post prepared to move position, the soldier took a damp cloth and, in one movement, wiped the drawing clean off the sheet of acetate. Material trace rendered immaterial.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Nicholas Saunders and Paul Cornish for their support during the development of this paper. Colleagues at the University of the West of England, Bristol, Patricia Passes, Amanda Wood and Deanna Petherbridge offered valuable insights into the discipline of drawing, and to Abigail Davies I still owe a debt of gratitude for leading the team that produced many dozens of arts programmes for television in which I played such an enjoyable part.

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War Office (1912) Manual of Map Reading and Sketching. London: HMSO.

War Office (1914) Manual of Map Reading and Sketching. London: HMSO.

ESSAY Number 2

Gough, P.J. ‘'Tales from the bushy-topped tree' A Brief Survey of Military Sketching, Imperial War Museum Review, London, 1995 ISBN 1-870432-19-4 Download

'Tales from the bushy-topped tree'

A Brief Survey of Military Sketching

Paul Gough

This paper looks at an aspect of war art that has rarely been examined : reconnaissance and panorama sketches made by soldiers specially trained in freehand observational drawing. For over 200 years the discipline of field sketching has been an important element in fieldcraft, attracting professional artists (who were forced to learn a range of new technical skills) while giving artistically talented soldiers the opportunity to practice their hands in unusually demanding circumstances. Many of the principles of field sketching were published in training manuals and taught in the lecture hall and in the field. Even after the introduction of aerial photography, freehand sketching was considered a crucial part of field intelligence and, even more surprising, line drawing is still used today as an element in observation and target indication. This article draws upon panoramas, sketches and instruction manuals held in the Departments of Art, Photography and Printed Books; it also draws upon six weeks' work with the Royal Artillery and Royal Navy during the making of a television documentary which traced this untold story of war art.

Not only how far away; but the way that you say it

Is very important.

Perhaps you may never get

The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know

How to report on a landscape : the central sector

The right of the arc and that, which we had last

Tuesday

And at least you know

That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army

Happens to be concerned - the reason being ,

Is one which need not delay us.

Again, you know

There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar,

And those which have bushy tops to ; and lastly

That things only seem to be things.

(from Part II. Judging Distances, from Lessons of the War, by Henry Reed)

Military drawing was an element of the curriculum at the first military academy set up at Woolwich in 1741. The Rules and Orders required the Drawing Master to 'teach the method of Sketching Ground, the taking of Views, the drawing of Civil Architecture and the Practice of Perspective.' (1)

Possibly the most eminent artist associated with Woolwich was the watercolourist Paul Sandby who served as Drawing Master from 1768 until 1796. Sandby was then at the height of his fame and his appointment at Woolwich reflects the importance of drawing in the training of the artillery and engineer cadets. Under his guidance the quality of drawing was consistently high and a number of his pupils went on to prove themselves as expert draughtsmen, often making crucially important reconnaissance drawings and finely illustrated reports.(2)

During the Napoleonic Wars it was recognised that a skill in drawing could be of immense benefit in unmapped and unknown terrain. With the establishment of new Staff and junior military colleges in 1801 drawing became firmly established as an essential element in the training of infantry and cavalry officers. At the height of the war period the country was scoured for capable landscape draughtsmen to employ as drawing tutors. John Constable was interviewed in 1802 for the post of Drawing Master at the Junior Department in Marlow, but later rejected the offer arguing, that had he accepted 'it would have been a death blow to all my prospects of perfection in the Art I love'. (3)

On mainland Europe the trained officers were soon at work in the battlefield, reconnoitring unfamiliar ground, making detailed sketches of its topographical features and reporting back to superior officers. The value of an accurate drawing, however hastily made, was far superior to a verbal or written description and this highly trained team of officer-draughtsmen played a significant part in Wellington's peninsular campaign.

Drawing for military purposes can be separated into two distinct fields that roughly correspond to the different arms of the military : on the one hand are those drawings made during mobile reconnaissance - usually by light cavalry or units of advanced infantry - and used to record intelligence about enemy positions and key terrain; on the other hand are drawings known as panoramas which have been made from a static position, usually an elevated vantage point that commands an uninterrupted view of the enemy front. These are normally drawn by specially trained artillery or engineer officers and are vital for indicating targets and determining range and arc of fire. The different skills required for each type of drawing can be traced in the many official and commercial manuals that were published in the nineteenth century. During this period proficiency in drawing was widely acknowledged as offering an advantage to boys competing for places at the military academies. Yet the varying qualities in the teaching of drawing across the 'public' and middle-class schools constantly undermined the calibre of cadet applications to the military colleges. Both the Clarendon Commission of 1864 and the Taunton Commission four years later remarked on the erratic quality of art teaching in schools.(4)

The unimaginative style of most military manuals of the late nineteenth century reflect the low status of drawing in the army's thinking. Invariably, freehand sketching was relegated to an item of 'special interest' and regarded as little more than an adjunct to map work. Manual writers leaned heavily on the conventional language and symbols of military cartography, transforming a lesson in landscape drawing into little more than a matter of contours and geometric symbols.

Two manuals in 'Rapid Field Sketching and Reconnaissance' of 1889 and 1903, for example, laid heavy emphasis on map and compass work, with only a cursory description of the merits of freehand drawing. Commercial manuals such as Major R.F.Legge's Military Sketching and Map Reading (1906) ignored observational work completely, concentrating instead on mapwork, measurement of slopes, magnetic bearings and using the service compass.(5) One of the first manuals to actively encourage freehand drawing is The Active Service Pocket Book written by 2nd Lt.Bertrand Stewart and published in1907.(6) In it Stewart dedicated eight pages to freehand sketching, offering step-by-step advice on drawing in outline, using the pencil as a measuring instrument and mastering the vexing problem of perspective. The manual is clearly aimed at the complete novice. Stewart, for instance, recommends the construction of an oblong drawing frame attached to a stick with a pointed end. The frame is to be divided at regular six inch intervals by stretched wire, thus forming a drawing grid which will help simplify any landscape seen through it. Drawing on gridded paper the soldier can make an exact outline copy of the view through the frame, though any problem over siting the frame, piercing hard ground and avoiding enemy detection are skipped over by the author.(7)

The hurried re-issue of a number of drawing manuals at the outbreak of war in 1914 was followed, over the next four years, with a flurry of training manuals - at least nine commercial and War Office books on topographical and panoramic sketching were available to soldiers of all ranks. Significantly, tuition in freehand drawing and map- reading had spread from being the preserve of the officer in the Regular Army to a craft capable of being learned by all. The Great War accelerated this development. Not only was the army able to draw upon an educated and intelligent workforce but the static nature of the fighting on the Western Front called for highly accurate intelligence on enemy dispositions. Observational drawing became an integral element in surveillance work.

Artistically talented soldiers of all rank soon found themselves sought out to work in the Camouflage Corps or for the Field Survey. Not all went willingly. Harry Bateman, having volunteered for service with the Royal Field Artillery, ignored a sergeant's request at their first parade for any artist present to make himself known. Bateman 'remained silent as he wanted to go and fight.' (8) Others found that their skills were deemed inappropriate: the painter and poet David Jones, serving with the 15th (London Welsh) Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, had five years art school training to his credit when he was recommended to the 2nd Field Survey Company based at Second Army Headquarters at Cassel. But Jones appears to have lacked the requisite technical skills needed for map drawing and was instead sent to one of the Company's four observation groups as a Survey Post observer. Of no use in 'Maps' Jones did not last long as an observer - 'Got the sack from that job because of my inefficiency in getting the right degrees of enemy gunflashes'. (9) Others advertised their skills quite freely. Young artists Paul Maze and Adrian Hill were soon exercising their artistic talents in exposed forward positions. Maze worked for fifth Army intelligence, Hill combined his drawing abilities with his work in a Scouting and Sniping Section of the Honorable Artillery Company. After the war, he recalled a typical patrol into No Man's Land:

Most of the military drawings made on the Western Front fall within the two categories of Reconnaissance Drawings and Panoramas. The former being intensive analyses of the micro-terrain of No Man's Land as seen through a trench periscope or pieced together from night patrols; the latter drawn from any elevation, however slight, which would afford a vantage over the entrenched enemy. It is also possible to divide these drawings and watercolours into two further groups: those made by professional or art-school trained soldiers and those made by soldiers specifically trained in military drawing.

From an art historical point of view the two types of military drawing have quite different origins. The great era of panoramic art was seventeenth century Holland. Masterly landscape painters such as Hobbema and de Koninck produced views of vast, seemingly endless plains in which the wide lateral extension and the raised vantage point reward the viewer with an unchallenged view of the entire landscape. Topographical painting, as we have seen, has a much less celebrated provenance being considered inferior to the idealised or poetic landscape. Topographical art was expected to supply information accurately and graphically without embellishment or unnecessary artistic effect. The true topographical artist was likened by one historian to an explorer who makes a visual account of his discoveries (11) - an apt description of such soldier- artists as Paul Maze and Leon Underwood who had to crawl out into No Man's Land to make many of their military drawings.

Like the Dutch painters, soldiers who drew panoramas for military use seem to be fascinated by the vast space open before them. The artillery panorama is designed to satisfy the gunner's thirst for information about the distance. Unlike drawings of the ruined terrain immediately in front of the trench lines, panoramas caught in a single sweep the prospect of 'the Promised Land' - that distant, unspoilt territory beyond the shambles of the battle zone. As the poet Henry Reed observed, these were as much landscapes about time as they were about space. In contrast, drawings made from the parapet or periscope are concerned with the minutiae of the landscape. The aim of the trench sketch was to analyse and itemise the key elements of No Man's Land so that trench raids and patrols could be planned within a highly controlled framework.

From a strictly operational point of view the artillery panorama differed from a front-line or reconnaissance drawing in three respects. The artillery drawing reported a single view from a particular Observation Post; it need only show a few prominent reference points drawn in a clear and unambiguous manner so as to indicate targets for observed fire; and it was drawn to maintain a record of artillery data on a particular battery front. The artillery panorama works on the same assumption as military mapping - to survey and transcribe a landscape will help neutralise the dangers of that terrain and eventually assure mastery over it. The discipline of panoramic drawing would reduce any landscape, however picturesque, into a series of immutable co-ordinates and fixed datum points.

Drawings made from reconnaissance patrols or from the lip of a trench are often less formalised than the artillery panorama. the descriptive language is less codified, they may combine a number of viewpoints and usually serve as visual elaboration for a longer written report .

One of the most remarkable examples of a front-line military draughtsman was the young painter Paul Maze. A French speaking, self-confessed adventurer, Maze worked first as an interpreter to the Royal Scots Greys in 1914, and later as a liaison officer for General Sir Hubert Gough, Fifth Army commander. He would regularly send Maze on sketching sorties to the front line where the young painter would fearlessly record his impressions of the battlefield. One of his first missions, in May 1915 was to sketch the 7th Division's objectives around Festubert, a task which required him to draw from the front line where he 'had to use a periscope and crane (his) neck over the sandbags quickly and peep'. Maze rarely departed from this hazardous technique. In March 1916, ignoring all regard for his own safety, he drew in the line every day:

'My work was interesting. Bit by bit I dissected the ground with our field glasses, and I made drawings from every possible angle marking every obstacle which could hinder our advance'.(12) What then were the results of this extraordinary committment? William Rothenstein, an official war artist working south of the Somme in March 1918, recalled seeing at Fifth Army headquarters 'a long photograph, made from drawings pieced together, showing a considerable view of the German front', made by Maze 'creeping, day after day, beyond our front lines ... an act of rare courage and devotion'.(13)

Maze supplemented his trench drawings with information gleaned from aerial photographs, he also incorporated imaginary views taken as though from the enemy lines.(14) Unfortunately few of the drawings have survived. The five held by the Department of Art must be considered typical of his style. A large sketch of the Somme, dating from 1916, (15) has obviously been drawn from the lip of a trench. The parapet is broadly rendered in charcoal, a copse of trees in the middle distance is established with slabs of yellow paint and its perimeter edge is clearly defined with a single pencil line. The names of two villages have been hastily scrawled in the sky. For all his abilities as an artist, the drawing is, in fact, heavily dressed in the idiom of map- making - the copse is given a clear perimeter line, the conifers are rendered in the conventional language of cartography, houses are drawn as uniform blocks rather than as individual buildings. Maze adopts further map conventions in an even larger drawing of the battlefield around Hamel on the Somme in which the British front line is drawn in blue and the German line in red. Maze, however, was not able to finish the drawing : inscribed in the painter's hand at the bottom is the telling message 'could not go on through heavy shelling'. (16) Maze was clearly excited by the dangers of drawing near the fighting line and he relished his role as an explorer and recorder of the battlefield. His work earned him both injuries and decorations, and it gave him an unusual apprenticeship as a painter. Even at the front he occasionally forgot his military duty and became 'engrossed in form and colour'(17) but he was quite happy to be remembered as an artist who worked 'in shorthand'.(18)

Whereas Maze learned to adapt his drawing style for military purposes, other artists struggled to make the transition. William Roberts, the young Vorticist painter who was serving with the Royal Artillery in France, was told to accompany an officer to an observation post (OP) and draw the terrain beyond.

From the OP I saw a completely featureless landscape, save here and there a few broken sticks of trees. I made a pencil drawing of this barren piece of ground, but what use my superiors would be able to make of this sketch I could not imagine.(19)

One artist who felt that it was not enough to entrust military drawing to bemused avant garde artists was the Artists Rifles' subaltern William Newton. A trainee architect, Newton contended that it was possible to teach a novice how to draw a battle landscape after just one lecture and two days drawing in the field. He laid out his ideas in a remarkable manual - Military Landscape Sketching and Target Indication - published commercially in 1916. (20) In the introduction, Lieut.Colonel H.A.R. May, commanding officer of the Artists Rifles, applauded Newton's system.

The test of each solution is whether a stranger can with ease and rapidity identify the exact place intended; and tested in this manner the results of his teaching have been most successful and many officers in the trenches have benefitted by the care and devotion he has given to his work.(21) In his opening definition Newton clarified the function of a military sketch. It 'is a form of report, without the ambiguity of language. It is graphic information. For information clearness is essential, and clearness is attained by two avenues: a) thought, b) draughtsmanship'. (22) In making this point, Newton noticeably distances himself from previous manual writers who invariably opted for heavily annotated sketches and for a pictorial language rooted in the conventions of maps. The real problem, continues Newton, is how to simplify the visual chaos of a landscape, especially a landscape damaged by battle.

Possibly the most interesting of these three methods is the first - the separation of planes. Newton suggests that the draughtsman should try to imagine a landscape as a series of horizontal (but not straight) bands that stretch from one side of the paper to the other. It might help to imagine the country as something like the scenery of an outdoor exhibition with each ridge, hill, wood cut out of sheets of wood and laid one behind the other. Having done this, a point can successfully be marked on the drawing, its approximate distance from the viewer clearly indicated by the number and density of horizontal lines representing fields, meadows, tree lines in between the draughtsman and the point.

Newton's manual teems with such pragmatic advice. He emphasises the draughtsman's duty in guiding the eye to salient points in the landscape by using key devices in the terrain - an isolated chimney, a single red roof amongst black roofs, three silhouetted bushes on a crest line - as so many labels that indicate particular targets or tactically vital features. He avoids the tendency of other instructors to construct complex drawing frames, or string and protractor gizmos (24). Instead, he argues for clarity of purpose at all times, for always using a sharp pencil and throwing the india rubber away - 'the aim should rather be to do a clear sketch from the first, because in the field opportunities of subsequent polish are limited'. He continues in fine style:

Such instruction may sound a little severe but it was born from a belief in the superiority of careful observational drawing as a method of study and analysis. Without the rigorous discipline advocated by Newton, military drawing can easily descend into a parody of itself - dull, repetitive diagrams in which trees have been reduced to a formula, producing a landscape image that resembles 'nursery wall paper'. This was due in part to the consequences of drawing trees in outline which tends to make them resemble their cartographic equivalent - either bushy topped deciduous or 'Christmas tree' firs. It is also the consequence of drawing in outline alone and so accentuating the top line of trees and buildings with a minimum of shading and colour. The end results, however, had a curious aesthetic appeal and many military drawings began to resemble the arts and crafts style woodcut illustrations that were popular in the first decades of the century. The Studio magazine was quick to note the similarity. In February 1916 an illustrated article applauded the army's work in broadening the education of the common soldier, noting with pleasure that 'instruction has been extended to the rank and file because the authorities recognise the immense value on active service of men who can use a pencil in making topographical sketches'. (26) The writer marvelled at the short period of instruction, proof that 'one can just as easily be taught to draw the formation of objects in nature as to trace the design of the letters of the alphabet' but is most impressed by the unsophisticated aesthetic appeal of the drawings:

The accompanying line drawings show a verdant landscape of rolling pastures and tidy villages - in truth, not dissimilar from the images on offer in the magazine each month. Similar pastoral scenery was uniformly used for target practice. H.E.L. Mellersh noted with wry humour the popularity of this rural image.

'Two fingers right, four o'clock from the haystack, at five hundred yards at the bushy-topped tree - fire!' I don't think that a tree that was not bushy-topped existed in the picture, which at least saved any strain on the School of Musketry's vocabulary or inventiveness.(28)

To the military mind, though, such aestheticism was anathema. Though Major Pearson's manual of 1906 offered a wider than normal range of tree types - pine, poplar, scots fir, the banana - to wean his students from the tyranny of the 'bushy topped' formula every drawing teacher warned the draughtsman to guard against 'artistic effect'. 'Indeed', argued the author of the 1912 manual, 'it is almost better that the artistic sense should be absent, and that instead of idealising a landscape it should be looked at with a cold matter-of-fact military eye'. (29) A soldier-sketcher had to concentrate on the potential of the countryside for military purposes and not be distracted by 'its beauties of colouring or the artistic effects of light and shade.' (30)

Few of the innovations in battlefield drawing advocated by Newton seem to have survived the Great War. A sample panorama provided with the 1921 manual of Map Reading shows a wide tract of country either side of the Etaples-Verton railway in Northern France. Drawn on 3 July 1918 at 0900 hours by a Lieut. J Smith Royal Artillery from an observation post some 15 metres high, it is a classic panorama - an endless vista of land described in a neutral outline. But as a piece of graphic information it relies too much on annotations and arrows, a return to literal description at the expense of pictorial invention.

During the 1930s gentlemen cadets at Woolwich were still taught map-reading, map-making, field sketching and the drawing of military panoramas by officers of the Royal Engineers. Charles MacFetridge was one cadet who trained at Woolwich. He recalls how drawing was one of his weakest subjects - 'I was appalled at the number of marks allotted' (32) - and he remembered the particular regime of drawing days.

We used to parade with bicycles on the Front Parade, march off in sub-sections ie two abreast, and cycle about two miles to the areas of Foots Bray and Sidcup. These areas had not been built over, as they are to-day. I recall that we carried strapped on our backs and to our sides a plane table, tripod, alidade, Army map case, army compass, large sheets of thick gridded paper on which we worked, a set of lead pencils varying from very hard to very soft, and rubbers. We wore uniforms with well-cut breeches and brown gaiters above strong thick brown boots known as 'sketchers'. These boots did not have to be highly polished like our other two pairs of boots and were suitable on soft, muddy ground. We must have presented a curious sight and I can recall difficulties when it rained. We spent three or four days under instruction in this way.(33)

MacFetridge recalls being taken further afield, in 3 ton trucks towards Wrotham in Kent, to be taught how to draw a military panorama. 'Having no artistic ability and having never been taught free hand drawing,' he adds, 'I was very bad at this.' (34) He dreaded the high number of marks allotted to this exercise all of which counted towards the Passing Out.

Seven years later, while commanding a battery of mountain artillery on the North West Frontier, MacFetridge had cause to be particularly thankful for a fellow gunner's drawing skills. During a skirmish in December 1940 the 5/8 Punjab Regiment came under severe sniper fire and suffered very heavy casualties. From his forward observation post MacFetridge established telephone communications with his guns. As the battle developed he was greatly relieved to be handed a freshly drawn panorama bought to his command position by a mounted Indian signaller. The panorama was drawn on the back of an Army signal form, a copy of which was held at the guns; significantly the drawing contained the gun data for at least three geographical features, including one peak at the unusual Angle of Sight of 18 degrees. As forward observation officer, 1000 yards in front of the guns, Macfetridge had access to over 20 different panoramas all drawn on cartridge paper. They had been made from both sides of the main road through the hostile territory and showed at least 15 key features, each clearly numbered with data for the guns. Mountain artillery on this theatre of war relied heavily on drawn panoramas. The drawings became treasured possessions, and were even considered as works of art, handed down from battery to battery and embellished by successive gunners.(35)

In Europe during the Second World War military drawing seems to have survived, as one might have anticipated, in the Survey Regiments attached to the Royal Artillery. The constitution of the Field Survey had not changed radically from the Great War; a typical Survey Regiment by the end of the war comprised three batteries: two Observation Batteries each covering a divisional front and one Survey Battery. Each Observation Battery contained two troops - one engaged in flash spotting, the other in sound ranging, each troop had four Observation Posts, which comprised a self- contained unit of 12 men.

John 'Ted' Baker and Ray Evans served in the 8th Survey Regiment and both saw action in the North African and Italian campaigns. In civilian life they worked respectively as a junior draughtsmen and trainee architect and were thus ideal recruits for survey work. They also proved to be adept at drawing military panoramas, though according to Ted Baker this was an unusual skill, rare in either the Survey Regiment or the Artillery. Neither soldier was taught the skills specific to making a useful military panorama. Evans received only minimal instruction in freehand drawing during his six month initial training at Larkhill, achieving little more than the briefest description of a landscape. In fact, perhaps the most effective, certainly the most widely available, drawing course taken by many soldiers was the famous correspondence course run by Percy V Bradshawe's Press Art School, operating from Forest Hill in South London. The course had also been popular in the Great War. 'I have over 1000 pupils in the Army', Bradshawe claimed in The Studio in May 1918, 'Drawing is a Military Utility, a happy hobby, or a lucrative career according to your ability and viewpoint.' (36) Twenty years on, Ray Evans was one soldier who had been assiduously following the postal course; another was the watercolourist Colin Newman who was serving as a cartographic draughtsman with the Royal Engineers. Like Evans, he too went on to become a successful professional artist after the war.

Both Ted Baker and Ray Evans worked in observation posts as flash spotters as part of counter-battery intelligence. In practical terms, they were the eye of the artillery, manning OPs in well concealed positions occasionally ahead of the infantry but, on the Italian front, usually high on the mountain sides which afforded excellent views into valleys and across to slopes controlled by the Germans. Ted Baker was first required to make an actual panorama some days after coming ashore on the Salerno beach-head.

In order that our people at the rear, our counter-battery officers as they were called, knew what the terrain looked like somebody had to do a panorama. It had to be done by somebody who could draw. We had to creep up to the front at night, and draw what you could see, any salient points, and that went back to HQ and they could get an idea of what you could see from your OP and all that was done by hand, no cameras, no gadgets. It was all very rough and ready. (37)

Like his Great War counterparts Baker had to crawl to his drawing position on all fours, peeping occasionally above the grass, 'drawing by feel' rather than from prolonged observation. Both draughtsmen recalled how unpopular they were with their own infantrymen who feared enemy reprisal if the observer was himself spotted. Baker tried where possible to avoid using white paper, preferring grey or yellow paper which was less reflective under strong light or at night time.

Striving to find his own drawing style as a fledgling artist Ray Evans recalled his work with the 8th Survey Regiment.

Most of my particular work in action was on Observation Posts, drawing panorama of the enemy front. Two identical drawings had to be made with a grid imposed showing compass bearings and this became excellent practice in drawing landscapes.(38)

The duplicate drawing was used at Regimental Headquarters to co-ordinate counter- battery fire. Evans also used his drawings as a means of calibrating the artillery, adjusting the range and fall of fire by observing air bursts. Indeed so detailed were his squared up drawings that he could direct fire by naming a specific square on the drawing. With his constant practice, his postal course and a genuine delight in sketching for its own sake Evans' drawings in the summers of 1943 and 1944 were in danger, perhaps, of becoming more artistic than was strictly necessary. One memorable ink drawing made from Monte Rosa recorded both the qualities of his observational work and his ability to record the moment of war. The drawing came about after Evans was approached by an army-naval liaison officer who asked him to use his observational skills to direct the monitor that would fire the 16-inch guns of a cruiser in Salerno Bay. With Vesuvius and Pompeii to the edge of his vision Evans bought devastating fire down on a German command post, watching with little emotion the destruction of an enemy battery and the hasty departure of the German commander. In the best of his work Evans combined the visual breadth of the panoramic tradition with the obsession for detail inherited from topographic art. His pencil and ink drawings made from 5000 feet up the exposed flanks of Monte Rosa and Monte Morroni are in the great tradition of military sketching - calm, detached, analytical studies made under precarious, often hazardous conditions.

Like Newton before him Evans was able to fuse the landscape artist's eye with the strict code of military drawing. This synthesis is best achieved in an image of the Gothic Line seen from Ciuitella D'Arno which shows the magnificent vista across the Arno Valley from Evans' Don Post. In his choice of pictorial language Evans adopts the conventions of cartography: roads are highlighted in red, crops in cross- hatching of yellow, trees coloured in green throughout. The result is a terrain seen simultaneously in plan and elevation; a landscape that teeters on the edge of becoming a map. Few of these drawings should have survived. As the fighting moved slowly north Evans and Baker hid their drawings in the foot of their kit bags and forgot about them.

In the decades after the war the army chose to forget about freehand drawing. A War Office manual of 1956, Map Reading, Air Photo Reading and Field Sketching, carried a short end chapter on Panorama Sketching. The manual reiterates the theme that artistic skill does not matter, while asserting that practice is essential. The most noticeable deviation from the innovative style of Newton's manual of 1915 is the ready adoption of conventional representation of features, for example:

Roads - roads should be shown by a double continuous line, diminishing in width as it recedes ... Cuttings and Embankments These may be shown by the usual map convention, ticks diminishing in thickness from top to bottom, and with a firm line running along the top of the slope in the case if cuttings Moorland or Heath - These may also be shown by the usual map conventional sign, groups of short upright ticks. (39)

Accompanying illustrations are clear and concise, rendered in a neutral outline with an emphasis on tactical detail and an eye for military significance. They lack, however, the true painter's feel for terrain and the skill in rendering the essentials of landscape.

Laser-guided weapon systems and satellite-borne reconnaissance would suggest that there is no need for observational drawing in the late twentieth century. One of the resonating images of the Gulf War was the sight of so-called 'smart' bombs falling with mute precision on grey cityscapes. Yet the art of freehand observational drawing survives in certain branches of the army, notably the mobile light units of the Royal Artillery. In concealed positions far ahead of their guns, operating from a known grid, Forward Observation Officers, normally captains, observe the ground to the front of their battery, determine targets and order fire. An observation party can today call upon a dazzling array of technological gadgetry to reconnoitre a battlefield - powerful binoculars, night sights and thermal imaging devices - but the skill of field sketching is still a valued part of their work, requiring little more than a pencil, paper and a keen eye. Captain Tim Henry, Forward Observation Officer with 266 (GVA) battery, 7 Royal Horse Artillery, a recently converted parachute light gun battery, explains:

Captain Henry describes his attempts at freehand drawing as little more than 'fag packet gunnery', but in a highly mobile light gun outfit the ability to swiftly record the salient points of a hostile landscape is a highly valued skill. Indeed, the battery commander considers it such an important element in the training of his observation parties that he recruited me to teach the rudiments of freehand sketching. In the lecture room and in the field I guided soldiers through the principles of looking, measuring and analysing terrain; using a gridded drawing frame (built to specifications prescribed in a 1907 drawing manual) the gunners learn how to analyse and draw the landscape, just as generations of survey soldiers and artillery officers have done.

Some time later, lying face down in a camouflaged observation post on the barren slopes of Salisbury Plain we filmed the same soldiers directing the fire of the battery's 105 mm light guns onto a fictitious enemy some 500 metres ahead. Carefully avoiding artistic effect, one of the party used a felt-tipped pen to make a diagrammatic picture of the terrain. But, unlike his predecessors' work, few of these images will be committed to history. As the OP prepared to move position the soldier took a damp cloth and, in one movement, wiped the drawing clean off the sheet of acetate.

Notes

1 Rules and Orders 1792 cited in Lt..Col.H.D.Buchanan R.A., Records of the Royal Military Academy, 1741 - 1892, Cattermole, Woolwich, 1892, p 33.

2 For a full account of Sandby's influence see Martin Hardie, Watercolour Painting in Britain, Vol. 1, The Eighteenth Century, Batsford, London, 1966, p 216 - 222.

3 John Constable to John Dunthorne, 29 May 1802.

4 For a full account of the teaching of art in the nineteenth century see Gordon Sutton, Artist or Artisan ?, Permagon Press, London, 1967.

5 Major F Legge, Military Sketching and Map Reading, Gale and Polden, Aldershot, 1906.

6 Bertrand Stewart, Active Service Pocket Book, William Clowes, London, 1907.

7 In summer 1994 a replica of this drawing frame was built according to the specifications laid out in the 1907 drawing manual. It was used during the making of the HTV documentary Drawing Fire to help train artillery officers in the rudiments of freehand sketching. Although useful as a drawing device it proved a large, rather unwieldy piece of equipment, difficult to camouflage and even more difficult to stick in the ground.

8 Harry Bateman quoted in Malcolm Brown, Tommy Goes to War, JM Dent, 1978, p 185 - 187. Bateman's drawings are held in the Department of Art nos. 6319 - 6338.

9 David Jones, Dai Greatcoat, (ed.Rene Hague) Faber, London, 1980, p 241 - 243. An account of Jones' short service with 'The Survey' is told in "David Jones and The Survey", Peter Chasseaud, Stand To ! The Journal of the Western Front Association, no.39, Winter 1993, p 18 - 22.

10 Adrian Hill interviewed in The Graphic, 15 November 1930.

11 Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 1947, Paladin edition, St Albans, 1972, p 67.

12 Paul Maze, A Frenchman in Khaki, Heinemann, London, 1934, p 130.

13 William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1900 - 1922, Faber and Faber, 1932, Vol.2, p 334.

14 Maze, op.cit., p 140.

15 IWM Department of Art no. 6070.

16 IWM Department of Art no. 6072.

17 Maze, op.cit., p 138.

18 Maze, op.cit., p 275.

19 William Roberts, Memories of the War to End all Wars: 4.5 Howitzer Gunner R.F.A. 1916 - 1918, Canada Press, London, 1974, p 27 - 28.

20 William G. Newton, Military Landscape Sketching and Target Indication, Hugh Rees, London, 1916.

21 Newton, ibid., p 6.

22 Newton, ibid., p 8.

23 Newton, ibid., p 9.

24 See for example the string and ruler contraptions suggested in the War Office Manual of Map Reading and Sketching, 1912, p 51 and in Landscape Sketching for Military Purposes by Capt. A.F.U. Green, Hugh Rees, London, 1908, fig. 12, p.25.

25 Newton, op.cit., p 27.

26 R.F.C., "Topographical Sketching in the Army ", The Studio, February 1916, p 44 - 45.

27 ibid., p 45.

28 H.E.L.Mellersh, Schoolboy into War, William Kimber, London, 1978, p 52.

29 War Office, Manual of Map Reading and Sketching, HMSO, 1912/1914, p 75.

30 ibid., p 75.

31 IWM Department of Art nos. 270 - 277.

32 Letter to author, 25 June 1991.

33 ibid.

34 ibid.

35 For a fuller description of this, MacFetridge's first day with 15 (Jhelum) Mountain Battery, see Tales of the Mountain Gunners, by CHT MacFetridge and JP Warren, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1973, p 121 - 126.

36 Advert in The Studio, May 1918.

37 John 'Ted' Baker, interview for 'Drawing Fire', HTV June 1994.

38 Ray Evans, Sketching with Ray Evans, William Collins, London, 1989, p 5.

39 War Office, Manual of Map Reading and Air Photo Reading and Field Sketching, Part III Field Sketching, HMSO, 1957, p 65 - 66.

40 Captain Tim Henry, interview for 'Drawing Fire', HTV June 1994.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank John Baker and Ray Evans RI (formerly 8th Survey Regiment), Lt. Col. Charles H.T. MacFetridge RA (Retd), WO ii BSM Douglas Gough RA (Retd), Major J.D. Braisby RA (Retd), Major A.S.Hill RA (Retd), Lt.Col.P.N.Mason RE (Retd), Col.G.S.Hatch CBE RA (Retd), Brigadier K.A.Timbers RA (Retd) Historical Secretary The Royal Artillery Historical Trust.

The field research would not have been possible without the enthusiastic support of Brigadier Bruce Jackman OBE MC, Major Mark Walton MC 7 RHA, Capt. Tim Henry 7 266 (GVA) Battery 7 RHA and Bombardier Steve McNally 266 Battery.

Thanks are due also to Suzanne Bardgett and Janet Mihell, to David Cohen, military art dealer, Ken Atherton curator at the Hydrographic Office, Taunton, the late Bob Headley-Lewis, drawing master at Britannia Royal Naval College and to the support team at HTV Bristol: Abigail Davies, director, Stephen Matthews and Jeremy Payne, executive producers, and Mike Hastie, camera.

Essay Number 3

Dead Lines:
Codified Drawing and Scopic Vision in a Hostile Space

A version of this paper first appeared in POINT, Journal of CHEAD, winter 1998 ISSN 1360-3477, pp 34-41.
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Abstract
The military have long used drawing as a navigational and exploratory tool. From the early 18th century, British military academies trained gentlemen cadets and sailors to analyse and record landscape and coastline with the aim of neutralising and controlling enemy space. This paper explores the tenets of scopic control and its manifestation in the first global war of this century. Between 1915 and 1918 military sketching required avant-garde British painters to adopt the systematic coding of surveillance with varying results. The second half of the paper examines the antithesis of the analytic drawn line, the silhouette or shadow which has become one the of the familiar tropes of martial iconography.

Thus ended the Vorticist artist William Roberts first and only foray into reconnaissance drawing. Few of the other young 'moderns' serving in the armed forces during the Great War could subvert their artistic tendencies in the pursuit of technical objectivity. The poet David Jones, for example, having already been promoted sideways from 'Maps' to 'Observers' was soon moved on 'because of my inefficiency in getting the right degree of gun flashes'. (2) Reconnaissance drawing (also known as Panorama or Field sketching) required technical control, a common graphic language and a healthy disregard for what the manuals termed 'artistic effect':

It may be premised that, from a military point of view, it is not necessary to be an artist to produce a useful panorama. Indeed, it is better almost that the artistic sense should be absent, and that instead of idealising a landscape, it should be looked at with a cold, matter-of-fact eye. Thus the sketcher would note rather the capabilities of the country for military purposes than its beauties of colouring or the artistic effects of light and shade. (3)

i Neutral outline
The Field Sketch was the graphic trace of scopic control. In the trenches of the Western Front the trained military draughtsman shared something of the solitary fixation of the sniper: ceaselessly scrutinising a fixed front, homing in on a hidden enemy and picking out (or off) the target. Like sniping, the military sketch could be taught. Within years of the establishment of the first military academy at Woolwich in 1741, a drawing master had been appointed and the Gentlemen Cadets set lessons in 'Sketching Ground, the taking of Views, the drawing of Civil Architecture and the Practice of Perspective'. 4) During the 18th and 19th centuries the military academies at Woolwich, Dartmouth, and later Sandhurst and Marlowe attracted such high calibre artists as Paul Sandby, David Cox and Alexander Cozens. John Constable, though, rejected the offer of a post in 1802 remarking that had he accepted 'it would have been a death blow to all my prospects of perfection in the Art I love.' (5) For all its remunerative attraction military sketching was regarded with some disdain, a process of 'tame delineation', of reducing the aesthetics of nature to something ordinary or (to borrow Gainsborough's dismissive phrase) something 'mappy'. For others, the task of 'breaking ground' and issuing a neutral report was, like the very term 'military intelligence', a contradiction in terms.

Drawing for military purposes has two distinct fields of vision: information-drawings gathered during mobile reconnaissance (by peripatetic patrol) and drawings made from static, elevated positions - customarily the preserve of the artillery spotter. Where the patrol sketch is often a collage of hasty impressions later re-arranged to form a spatial narrative, the panorama is primarily concerned with scopic control and spatial dominance. The artillery panorama works on the same premise as military mapping; surveillance and graphic survey will eventually neutralise a dangerous terrain and assure mastery over it. (6)> Foucault wrote of the system of permanent registration that operated in the plague town in the 17th century. (7) On the septic terrain of the First World War battlefield the panoramic drawing was an integral part in segmenting and immobilising perceived space. The stasis of the battle line, however, meant that the panoptic ideal could never be attained: dead ground (space beyond or concealed from retinal view) camouflage and concealment were constant frustrations to retinal surveillance. Foucault's concept of a transparent space was constantly frustrated by the fissured and volatile landscape of the battlefield. The military sketch, though, provided the nearest graphic proof of Bentham's paradigm: systematic observation 'in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded' (8)

The battlefield was a malign industrialised space where visibility was a 'trap'. The military sketch was the spring in that mechanism. Jay Appleton, developing Konrad Lorenz's thesis on the atavistic landscape, proposed a habitat theory which categorises any landscape into hierarchies of 'prospect, refuge and hazard'. (9) The panoramic viewpoint is the paradigm of Appleton's system; military drawing systematised the graphic language so that trees became datum points and ridge lines became the immutable co-ordinates of a functional terrain, a strategic field. Or as Henry Reed phrases it in this poetic fragment 'Judging Distances' from Lessons of the War, it is a domain where the temporal elides with the spatial:

Not only how far away; but the way that you say it Is very important. Perhaps you may never get The knack of judging a distance, but at least you know How to report on a landscape : the central sector The right of the arc and that, which we had last Tuesday And at least you know That maps are of time, not place, so far as the army Happens to be concerned - the reason being , Is one which need not delay us. Again, you know There are three kinds of tree, three only, the fir and the poplar, And those which have bushy tops to ; and lastly That things only seem to be things. (10)

Spatially, the artillery panorama has clear areas of jurisdiction. The foreground is considered irrelevant. To the gunner, the near is already controlled. The middle distance and the horizon are the focal points. These, to borrow Appleton's phrase, are the prospect-rich domains and the most coveted. Panorama drawings are predicated on trajectories and barrage lines. The horizon is the ultimate goal in that it holds the promise of further territory for martial exploitation. During the First World War the horizon took on special value when seen from the noisome mess of the front-line trench. Secreted in their observation posts, gunners described the green and unspoilt distance as 'The Promised Land' - perfect, but forever locked in an unattainable future.

These concerns, as W.J.T. Mitchell has observed, are the essential discourses of imperialism. Empires, according to him, move outward in space 'as a way of moving outward in time, the "prospect" that opens up is not just a spatial scene but a projected future of "development" and exploitation.'(11)

The promise of control permeates every level of military drawing. In contemporary drawing manuals the unmodulated pencil line is given the authority of military language:

Similarly, by ridding the page of ambiguity or doubt the drawings aim to pre-ordain the future. This is also true of the written word which uses the active and instructive tense of military command - a language where the passive or conditional does not function: 'Brigade will commence at ..., Objectives shall be taken by ..., reinforcements will be moved to ... etc'. (13) Maps and charts drawn up before offensives bear a similar code; barrage lines are clearly marked in minutes of advance, in June 1944 the objectives beyond the Normandy beachhead were marked out in time - D Day plus one, plus two, etc - as well as in actual space.

Instruction manuals in military sketching equate clarity of line with clarity of purpose. Ambiguity and doubt is (quite literally) ruled out. The margins of failure (like the estimated casualties rate) are clearly prescribed and then codified. Any blank, undrawn areas of the paper is not intended to be read as negative space but the area set aside for instructive wording. (14)

The panorama, though, could only make sense in a war where both sides were predominantly static, where a battlescape was shared but where the zones of control were clearly demarcated. The view from the opposing emplacements might be radically different but the contested ground was rationalised and systematised using to a shared vocabulary of grid and line. In his analysis of the tourism of war, Jean Louis Deotte, has argued that the beachline of Normandy in 1944 constituted a common world, a shared objectivity for both defender (cooped in a concrete pillbox) and attacker (exposed in a tin landing craft). Both sets of adversaries experienced a 'reversibility of the points of view' because 'enemies share in common the same definition of space, the same geometric plane ... they belong to the same world of techno-scientific confrontation, the substratum of which, here, is sight'.(15)

ii Shadow and Silhouette

Circa 1916, the fixed linearity of the trench war fractured into a myriad of fragments. War in the air, under the sea, on every front, (including the Home Front) the onset of globalised conflict, all bought about an omnidirectional and multivalent trauma that, argues Stephen Kern, was echoed in the canvases of the Cubists and in the relativism of scientific theory. The 'proliferation of perspectives and the break-up of a homogeneous three-dimensional space'(16) also fractured the hegemony of the elevated eye and the supremacy of scopic control that had lasted unchallenged since the extensive panoramas of Ruisdael and de Koninck.

Poetic thought (as exemplified by Owen, Hulme, Read and other young 'Moderns') contended that the schism wrought by the war had to be expressed in the language of apocalypse. One of the more familiar tropes in this understanding was the sense of front-line as an edge, a chasm beyond which lay madness and the void. The desolated landscape was no more a vacant or negative space inhabited by solid, positive forms, it was rather an 'emptiness crowded ... more full of emptiness, an emptiness that is not really empty at all'.(17) In a letters from the front, T.E. Hulme wrote how 'certain roads lead as it were, up to an abyss.' (18) and Wilfred Owen described in 'Spring Offensive' the sensation of topping a crest until suddenly exposed 'chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space' (19)

Faced with the negative sublime, the dispassionate and neutral outline was largely redundant. The tenets of panoramic drawing could not encode the absurd ruination of the battleground. Front-line drawings by Paul Nash and David Jones are dense with overlapping and confused marks; in Jones' drawings the pictorial space is saturated with a web of intermingling strokes, as if some graphic mist is engulfing everything. In the war etchings of Otto Dix the very surface becomes scabrous and infected, the ink bleeds uncontrolled from the drawn and engraved line.

By contrast, the systematised and hygienic line of the military sketch imposed a rural idyll onto the strategic field, in what is essentially a re- presentation of the home landscape, or as Mitchell describes it 'the "nature" of the imperial centre'. (20) Thus, Foucault's transparent space becomes semi-opaque. The graphic line cannot completely eradicate the irrational, mythical domain of No-Man's-Land. What we find in its place is the shadow, a solid facade of tone that became one of the leitmotifs in the iconography of the First World War. It found a key part in the popular visual culture becoming a staple element in the visual diction of poster designers, front-line artists, official photographers and film- makers.

As an art-form it owes its name to one Etienne de Silhouette, financier to the profligate regime of Louis XIV, who had an unusual talent for cutting small back profile portraits. His skill with scissors, however, has outlasted his prowess with the public purse: he was removed from office after advocating a punitive regime aimed at saving France from bankruptcy. For some time after, the term a la silhouette was used as a byword for meanness. The art form, though, thrived in the 18th century providing a mass portraiture that was cheap and elegant, which did not require hours of sittings and hid unflattering features. During the Romantic period the silhouette became a familiar pictorial device suggesting drama, heroism and visual charge.

These characteristics were to influence its diverse use in the militarised visual language of the Great War. It was first used in the great recruitment campaign of 1914 and 1915. Posters of soldiers in unmodulated black printed against a white background were bold, direct images which did not have to specify badges of rank or regiment. The silhouette was the Everyman. It also edited out demoralising or detracting detail - a criticism that was often levelled at official war art by such artists as Nevinson who refused to paint ordinary soldiers as though they were 'castrated Lancelots'(21). Furthermore, it needed no expensive colour printing or expensive artwork, and the silhouette reproduced easily on the poorer quality newsprint that was used for the mass poster campaigns and became the norm for the newspapers of the later war years.

Although the silhouetted image was rooted in actualities - in that it reproduced the 'worm's eye view' of the trench world - its widespread use had a carefully contrived political message. The choice of the drawing of a vigilant sentry, for example, was not accidental. The image occurs regularly in the iconography of the Western Front for obvious reasons : a soldier would only reveal himself over the crest of a slope or above the parapet of a trench when he was convinced that he had absolute control of the surrounding territory. To reveal oneself in silhouette at any other time was to invite enemy fire. The poster image is thus a carefully contrived declaration of the authority of that soldier: he stands unchallenged and omnipotent, in full control of the surrounding terrain, owning, as Foucault would argue, the 'imperial gaze'.

Although graphically different, the silhouette drawing and the 'unwavering line' of the military panorama are two manifestations of scopic control. They both eschew ambiguity, they promise control and authority, mastery is vested in the boldness of the graphic (out)line and the tonal mass. As drawings, they were also readily achieved by the amateur hand or semi-skilled hand, an important aspect of their widespread dissemination in this period.

The impact of the silhouette has been reduced by its endless reproduction in the popular imagery of militaria and its unthinking use by film and art directors. (22) It most truly belongs to the static conditions of the Western Front because it is essentially a one- dimensional form. In so being, it belongs (almost exclusively) to that fixed world of the coveted horizon. As so many artists and writers observed, the sclerotic conditions of the trench world led to the belief that beyond the close horizon of the enemy trench lay nothing. At that edge all three-dimensional forms - soldiers, trees, buildings, guns - were abruptly flattened not into two-dimensions but to form stripped of all texture and feature, that might only be expressed in a single dimension. The silhouette becomes the icon of that edge, and today some of the most imposing and powerful silhouette-facades are formed by the giant archways, obelisks and towers that litter the commemorative landscape in Flanders.

As a drawn, circumscribed form, the silhouette might be better regarded as negative space, a shadow rather than solid. This is the dark space, explored by Anthony Vidler in his consideration of the architecture of death and burial: 'Th(e])prone figure was then raised up, so to speak, in order to mark the facade of [the] temple, now become an image of a specter: a monument to death that represented an ambiguous moment, somewhere between life and death, or, rather, a shadow of the living dead.' (23)

Notes
1 William Roberts (1974) 4.5 Howitzer Gunner RFA:The War to end all wars, Canada Press, pp. 27 -28.

2 David Jones, in Rene Hague (ed) 1980, Dai Greatcoat, London, Faber.

3 General Staff, War Office (1914) Manual of Map Reading and Field, H.M.S.O., London.

4 Lt.Col. H.D.Buchanan RA (1892) 'Rules and Orders 1792' cited in Records of the Royal Military Academy 1741-1892, Cattermole, Woolwich, p.33.

5 John Constable to John Dunthorne, 29th May 1802. For a full account of Paul Sandby's tenure at Woolwich see Martin Hardie, (1966) Watercolour Painting in Britain, Vol.1, The Eighteenth Century, Batsford, London, pp 216 - 222. For an analysis of marine cartography and coastline drawing see Lucian de Lima Martins (1999) 'Navigating in Tropical Waters' in Dennis Cosgrove (1999) Mappings, London, Reaktion.

6 See Mapping the Landscape:Essays on Art and Cartography (1990) eds. Nicholas Alfrey and Stephen Daniels, Nottingham, Nottingham Castle Museum.

7 Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Paris, Editions Gallimard, English translation, Allen Lane 1977

8 ibid, p. 197.

9 Jay Appleton (1975) The Experience of Landscape, Wiley, London.

10 Henry Reed, Part II.' Judging Distances' from 'Lessons of the War'.

11 W.J.T.Mitchell (1994) 'Imperial Landscape' in Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, p16-17.

12 William G Newton (1916) Military Landscape and Target Indication, London, Hugh Rees, p. 27.

13 John Keegan (1976) The Face of Battle, London, Penguin, p.266.

14 For a full account of the history and current uses of field sketching see P. Gough (1995) 'Tales from the Bushy-topped Tree: a brief survey of military sketching' in Imperial War Museum Review, No.10, pp 62-74.

15 Diller and Scofidio (1994) Tourism of War, FRAC Basse Normandie/Univ.of Princeton Press, pp.116-177.

16 Stephern Kern (1983) On the Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, p.147.

17 Reginald Farrer (1918) Void of War, London, Constable, p.55.

18 T.E.Hulme in Sam Hynes (1955) Further Speculations University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p.164

19 Wilfred Owen, Spring Offensive.

20 Mitchell (1994) op.cit., p.17.

21 C.W.R. Nevinson to C.F. Masterman, 25 Nov. 1917, Imperial War Museum, Dept of Art, Nevinson file.

22 For a fuller account see Paul Gough (1995) "The Silhouette as Icon of the Western Front", Journal of the Western Front Association No.43, April 1995, pp 28 - 31.

23 Anthony Vidler (1991) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, MIT Press.

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