A new essay on WWI poet John Allan Wyeth, "Rendering a Ravaged Landscape: the Steady Eye of John Allan Wyeth" can be read in its entirety at:

http://oldworldwar.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/rendering-a-ravaged-lands...

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EXCERPT:

Wyeth’s poems invite comparison with certain AEF field artists, particularly Wallace Morgan, W.J. Aylward, W.J. Duncan, J.A. Smith and E.C. Peixotto, who tend to present the war as a series of precisely-rendered landscapes, seen from a certain distance, so that the men and machinery of modern war never dominate the scene, but are shown as transitory elements in a larger landscape which has already borne witness to countless earlier wars and which will endure long after the present war has passed into memory. The war, in other words, is kept in perspective.

Such a drawing, with soldiers and tanks in the middle distance, moving steadily across a broad landscape, is Wallace Morgan’s “Infantry and Tanks Advancing on Field”. Note the nearly identical perspective presented by Wyeth (who after the war would become an accomplished landscape painter in his own right) in the following descriptive passage from “Molliens-au-Bois: Division Headquarters”:

. . .  “What’s that—Oh yes, the brigade goes in today.”
Noon blazing blue gold in a summer sky
and helmets bobbing just above a thick
wheatfield, and through the dust of motorcars,
like streaks of rain the rifles slant and shine.
“Look, there they go—” …

Or this, from “Harbonnieres: Regimental Maps from Headquarters”:

                       … A rush of foaming flanks,
Australian caissons rattling, galloping by
and dust clouds sifting slowly on to the plain.
“You men seen any Americans anywhere?”
“No sir.” …

Or this description from “Corbie to Sailly-le-Sec” of a ruined church in a ruined village, set in a broader landscape, all in neutral tones. The poignance of human loss is all the truer, all the sharper, for its understated rendering, as the war is all the more ominous for being only faintly perceptible beyond the horizon.

                        . . . We motored through
to the poplar marsh along the river’s shore.
Sailly-le-Sec—her church one candlestick
on a broken altar, and beyond it, part
of a rounded apse—a dusty village husk
of rubble and tile. Low hills ahead, all blue,
and twinkling with the phophorescent soar
of rockets leaping in the fringe of dusk.

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