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LAINU & WATER September 27, 1917 
The British Firing Line 
By Charles Marriott 
CONSISTENCY is a great virtue, in art as well as in 
life and Lieutenant E. Handlcy-Read, a selection ot 
whose water-colours of " The British Eirnig Line 
has just been published bv the Leicester (,allcrics, 
is consistent both in his outlook and in his artistic methods. 
His outlook is best described in his own words. 
. The mournful landscape of the Somme battlefields, scored and 
intersected bv miles of trenches, covered, ni addition, with the 
results of other human endeavour in the alternating processes 
of' construction and destruction fills the mind to overflowing 
with thoughts too deep and too varied to set down in a 
Foreword to a few pictures. 
To say that some of these deep and varied thoughts have 
overflowed into the pictures themselves is to indicate tlie per- 
sonal character of this record of what the artist himself aptly 
calls " a landscape painter's war." Not that the personal 
character prejudices the truth of the record. On the con- 
trary ; for it is one of the apparent paradoxes of art that a man 
is never so likely to give a truthful impression of anything seen 
as when he allows full play to mood and temperament. The 
untrustworthy witness is the man who sets out to be a detached 
observer. He is so keen on keeping himself out of it that tlie 
effort affects tlie impression. The subjects of Lieutenant 
Handler- Read's drawings arc- varied enough, but they arc all 
seen and set down in the same full-hearted conception of a 
martyred countryside ; and in looking at them one makes the 
same unconscious allowance as one makes for.the emotions of a 
sincere speaker. 
As to the method, the astonishing thing is that the artist 
was not better known before the war. Obviously he came to it 
fully equipped with something that might be compared to a 
clear, simple and fluent style in writing. The method is varied 
to suit the individual scene or subject, but it is the same style 
all through ; broad and free in statement, descriptive rather 
than expressive in character, and sympathetic to the actual 
materials employed. No doubt the war, and the e.xacting 
conditions of work, had a clarifying and confirming effect upon 
the St vie of the artist ; but nothing could look less like an un- 
suspected ability called out by the interest of the occasion. 
Consequently there is no eflect of time lost and accuracy «om- 
promised by technical difficulties. Everything is set down 
with unworried ease and fluency, with detail enough but no 
dwelling on unessentials, and a quite remarkable tact in 
arrangement— from both the pictorial and the topographical 
points of view. 
It is this double consistency, of outlook and style, that 
distinguishes the work of Mr. Handley-Read from other good 
drawings of the war. Nobody else has done anything that 
gives quite the same impression of a connected series. 
Generally the interest of the moment, actual or technical, has 
arrested the attention of the artist from time to time, so that 
you get a collection of individual drawings good in themselves 
but without any background of mood or similarity of treat- 
ment to relate them. But here you have a series that seems 
to have been designed and carried out with a single motive, 
and publication in the present form was almost im.perative. 
Apart from that, the drawings illustrate the war from a 
particular angle, or on a particular plane. There never was a 
war or any other sequence of events that has been " covered " 
on so many different planes — mental as well as material. 
We have had careful topographical studies of wide fields of 
operations, from the ground and from the air, comments on the 
vast mechanical forces employed or on the phenomena of 
explosions, notes on the human side of the close-packed life of 
trenches, and so on. Leaving out individual differences of 
#;tyle, artists have concentrated on many different aspects of 
the war as if, in addition to being artists they were tacticians, 
geographers, engineers, chemists or novelists as the case 
might be. Mr. Handley-Read gives us war from the land- 
scape painter's point of view ; or, more precisely, from the 
point of view of the landscape. The emotional background to 
which all his pictures are finally related is that of the sufferings 
of Nature. 
An impression, however, is left outstanding — at first passed 
over in the great chaos. It is bom of the tortured trees 
twisted into unnatural shapes, splintered at their bases, up- 
rooted and bent or stretching gaunt arms to the sky. Here 
is a veteran of the forest battered and torn, there a slender and 
graceful trunk with a few twigs as yet only oullet-clipped. 
Sturdy willows are seen hurled, root upwards, into a shell 
hole. Such sights fix themselves ineflfaceably in the roind. 
Everywhere the murdered trees haunt the vision. 
Beyond showing, as do also the notes to individual drawings, 
that Mr. Handley-Read is as eloquent with the pen as with the 
pencil, the above passage leaves no doubt as to the real naotive 
of his work. Incidentally he has made many drawings of 
towns and villages, but it is as part of the landscape rather than 
as examples of architecture that they have app)caled to him. 
Even the topographical accuracy which excites the admiration 
of hgliting men is really incidental ; and this brings home the 
valuable truth that an artist is never so likely to be true to 
life as when he is moved by some general idea behind the facts 
of life. The fallacy of conscious " realism " is to suppose you 
can find truth in a moral and emotional vacuum. It is because 
Mr. Handley-Read has been so possessed by the " murdered 
trees " luat he has been accurate in his delineation of ruined 
buildings and in his implied suggestion of all the otlier aspects 
of the war. Truth to feeling always results in truth to the 
facts — even if the facts are not stated ; and working faithfully 
on one plane Lieut. Handley-Read has been, almost without 
knowing it, faithful on all the others. 
Even the remarkable absence of the human clement from his 
ti.awings is due, not to negative indifference to the human 
side of the war, but to positive concentration upon the land- 
scape side of it. There never was an event, or scries of events, 
of which it could be said with more point : " You cannot 
both be in the procession and look out of the windovy. ' And 
even if you are not actually " in the procession " you cannot 
see the landscape and the fighting at the same time. The 
weakness of most war pictures done at home, even by men 
familiar with war, when they deliberately set out to give 
a full impression of it, is that they do try to combine the 
fighting and the landscape. In some vv'ars this may have been 
.jjossible, and even in some incidents of the present war ; but 
then the fighting did not look in the least like fighting 
but only_ like a lumbering trot across broken ground, 
not more significant of battle than the straggling 
across the course at the end of a race — as may be 
seen in that astonishing Canadian ofhcial photograph 
of " The Taking of Viniy Ridge." So that the drawings by 
Lieutenant Handley-Read must not be looked upon as studies 
of the background with the fighting left out. The fighting 
was not there, or at least not visible, though possibly going on 
between the foreground and the middle distance. Asthe artist 
says : " Never has there been such a secretive war. A man 
may travel to his fire trench, and never appear above ground. 
He may be in the same neighbourhood for weeks, and see 
nothing of it beyond the glimpse that his loophole or peri- 
scope affords. He may be surrounded with hurrying life, 
troops massing for an attack, relieving trenches, carrying up 
supplies, but he will see nothing but his own immediate 
surroundings, and a glimpse of the still more deserted stretch 
of ' dead land ' between his own and the enemy's trenches." 
" Ruin, emptiness, heart-breaking dreariness " are the key; 
notes of the drawings. But, being true tt) feeling, they do not 
imply that all is over with the landscape. They show the 
wounds in the bosom of Nature, and the ruin of the works of 
man that arc nearest to that bosom,, but they do not fail to 
suggest the tenacity of life in trees and the breath of life that 
moves in the atmosphere. It is astonishing, indeed, how 
much of season and weather the artist has conveyed while 
seeming only to mark the destructive effects of war. There- 
fore the drawings are not depressing ; they retain the assur- 
ance that life goes on, in the landscape as in the human spirit. 
None of the drawings happens to deal with one of the worst 
brutalities of the enemy ; the wanton destruction of orchard 
trees ; but in this connection I lately read something so per- 
fectly in sympathy with the artist's ideas about Natmc that it ^ 
will not be out of place to speak of it here. It was that in 
every English village the women and children should plant two 
saplings of apple, pear, plum or cherry, one to be trans- 
planted in France or Flanders when opportunity shall olifer, 
the other to be reared at home. By this means not only will 
the orchards of France and Flanders be renewed, but there 
will be established between the Allies a sisterhood of fruit- 
bearing trees. The scheme, for it has already passed beyond 
a suggestion, seems to me as practical as it is beautiful. 
With all his con.sistent grasp of the particular aspect of 
the war that he has been moved to illustrate, and all his inci- 
dental accuracy, it is finally the emotional interest of land- 
scape that the artist brings home to us. For the future his 
drawings will preserve the mood as well as the look of the • 
British Firing Line in its present condition. It only remains 
to add that his publishers and printers have done all that skill 
can do to preser\'e the quality of the original drawings in 
reproduction. , 
Copies of Lieutenant E. Handlcy-Read's Portfolio, price £5 5s, 
are to be obtained from '"Land & Water," 5, Chancery Lane,W.C.2. 
