38 
LAND & WATER 
August 2, 1917 
for their country, regarded the war as a tiresome interruption. 
An interruption but an imperative call. Therefore, they 
joined up at the earliest possible momint : to lielp to get it 
over. But, and this seems ito be an important distinction, 
they recognised that the interruption was mechanical only. 
Their creative and critical activity thev carried with them 
By i'ric Kennin^ton 
Field Dressing Station 
into the fighting line. The truth is that nothing, not even a 
world war, can stop art. It can only check production. The 
artist is incurably an artist ; while he breathes he observes 
and creates. He will note the colour of the very explosion 
that cripples him, or turn a phrase in a bayonet charge. 
All this, which may seem like a digression, helps to explain 
why the only tolerable war pictures of the last three years are 
virtually landscapes or portraits. The only exception that 
I can think of was " Renaissance," by Mr. George Clausen, 
R.A., in the Academy of 1915, and which we are per- 
mitted to reproduce" here. Whether the artist intended 
it or not, that picture itself was an assertion of the 
proud and unique mdependence of art ; since art is the only 
human activity that shares with the vital processes of Nature, 
symbolised by the springing flowers and budding tree, com- 
plete immunity from the destruction of war. Like Old Mother 
Earth, as a soldier said, art " carries on " regardless. If all 
the flowers and trees in the world were blasted the earth would 
still punctually respond to the spring ; and if all the books 
and pictures in the world were burned the creative impulse 
would still survive, and without a scrap of paper or canvas 
it would somehow find expression. But, except " Renais- 
sance," I cannot remember any reasonably good war picture 
of the last three years that is not of the kind reproduced in 
these pages ; a more or less matter-of-fact representation 
of places or persons. All the " heroic '•' exercLses that have 
appeared in the Academy and elsewhere, when they are not 
frankly pot-boilers, give the uncomfortable impression of 
attempts to make art respectable in war-time by putting it 
into khaki. Art will not submit to apologies. You must 
take it or leave it ; and if art is a superfluity in war-time, it 
is never so superfluous as when it mimics on canvas what is 
taking place in the field. Exactly the same is true of litera- 
ture ; and I have read no descriptive writing about the war 
that did not weaken and obscure the impression made on 
my mind by the official reports in the London Gazette. If 
you cannot rise to an imaginative interpretation of the war, 
for which the time is hardly yet, you had better stick to the 
bare facts or paint or write about something else. Personally, 
1 do not think that art is a superfluity in war-time ; and" I 
believe that most fighting men would agree with me that, 
apart from careful reporting, from a strictly military point 
of view, you will help things on more with a pastoral landscape 
than with a battle scene. 
For one thing, when they go beyond the bare facts, which 
are seldom picturesque, war pictures almost always glorify 
war itself, a thing that the real fighting man never does. 
Wishing to conve\' the atmosphere of war, thej' confuse the 
spirit of man with the occasion of its exercise. War is the 
occasion of noble deeds. So is cholera ; but that does not 
make cholera itself anything but a beastly disease. Wai 
shocks men into a sense of reality. So will an earthquake, 
or even a railway accident. We did degenerate in peace, 
but that was not the fault of peace. It was because we did 
not know how to use peace properly. We thought that 
national prosperity was a matter of buying and selling. 
The great issues of the war could only be expressed in 
painting in a symbolical design ; there remain the facts, 
and it is well that they should be stated coldly. In war as in 
peace art is a criticism of life, and by sticking severely to the 
facts art places war in a proper perspective ; distinguishing 
clearly between the occasion and the human spirit that rises 
to meet it. Nothing could be more significant than that in 
this war the professional battle painter is nowhere. All the 
.Ljood work has been done by," plain " artists on active service. 
Equally significant is the fact that, on the whole, the best work 
has been done by men who are at least touched bj' the newer 
movements in painting ; that is to say men whose interest 
in art is acutely technical. This, by the way, is an amusing 
comment on a recent gibe against the " Futurists, Cubists 
and Vorticists" who want to hide behind their " creations." 
The generally accepted leaders of the " Futurists, Cubists 
and Vorticists " in this country are — or were— Gaudier- 
Brzeska, Mr. C. R. W. Nevinson and Mr. Wyndham Lewis. 
Well, on the outbreak of war Gaudier-Brzeska joined the 
French Army in circumstances that, in themselves, needed 
courage of the highest order, and after two promotions for 
gallantry was killed in a charge on June 5th, 1915 ; Mr. 
Nevinson served with the Red Cross in Belgium and France 
from the autumn of 1914 until he was invahded out of the 
Army ; and Mr. Wyndham Lewis is now with the artillery 
m France. Nobody, least of all these men themselves, would 
pretend that they did more than their colleagues of different 
schools ; but they have not hid behind their creations, and 
their creations and those of artists in sympathy with them 
instead of, as gracefully suggested, being used to frighten the 
enemy into thinking he had " an attack of ' D.T.' " have 
given us the firmest impressions of the war to date. Nor is 
Wytschaete Ridge 
By Paul Nash 
this surprising to anybody who has given to the newer ex- 
pedients in painting more than the glance of self-sufficiency. 
Rightly or wrongly applied they proceed from the wish for' a 
more intense reality than is to" be got by " realism," and^ 
as is common in art — their impulse anticipated the spiritual 
meaning of the war itself by several years. Reduced to 
