Patrie" with Mr. Shepperson's lithograph of wounded arriving at a London railway station. Mr. Shepperson has seen an interesting pattern of black and white in the gloomy tunnel of the train shed and the lights that filter through it. Had he intensified we might have felt the desolation of helpless men in a black vault as though visibly in the shadow of death, or escaping as from a tomb. But Mr. Shepperson obviously had experienced no reaction intense enough to prompt him to intensify his pattern. Perhaps because he feared to be too gloomy, more probably because the scene aroused no profound emotion, whether gloomy or gay, he leaves his lithograph a sketch, vigorous and picturesque enough,

which asserts that wounded soldiers are unloaded at a railway station, just as his other lithographs indubitably demonstrate that these same wounded are originally carried to a field dressing-station and ultimately recuperate on the lawn of a country estate. Mr. Nevinson's hospital scene "La Patrie" is black, also, but the artist has something to convey by the mere quality of blackness. He is not afraid to make it as gloomy or as unpleasant as may be necessary to express the reality before him. And here he is not concerned with the record of hospital routine, but with the gaunt fact of human agony. The gloom of this barn is its pall; the sharp lights accentuate the stiffened contours of men rigid in

pain, the ponderous and monotonous rhythms of helpless bodies. There is pain here, death, the patient gesture of suffering. In 1930 you might label Mr. Shepperson's lithograph "Arrival at Charing Cross of Victims of a Railway Accident", and no one but a collector of first editions of English lithographs would be any the wiser. But the fact of war is inherent in every line of Mr. Nevinson's field hospital. To any spectator it will always proclaim: "In a great war this was our agony."

But the modern battle itself baffles the artist because its point of impact may be beyond the horizon or in the air. Not even at its climax does its action focus itself. Its essential action is the colossal impulse of mechanical forces crashing from horizon to horizon, the particular machine trivial in comparison, so that our conception of battle is an almost abstract thing

a concept of conflict we cannot wholly visualize.

The Futurists with whom Nevinson experimented insisted on the importance of conceiving the life of a city street as abstractly, the buildings vibrating to the concussions of careening motor-busses, and the tremors of subways roaring invisibly through their foundations. But the "lines of force" which they invented to express the dynamics of modern life and their bewildering kaleidoscopes, were inexpressive because our emotion at the sight of a skyscraper does not depend on our learning that, to stand, it must be built to sway so many inches to and fro. But our emotions at the sight of an aeroplane force us to conceive space as a mass that is thrust against, cleaved. If the aeroplane dives we feel the volume of air resisting the pilot as water a diver, and we imagine air currents as having surfaces on which his

III

But whatever the sublimity of the panorama which obliterates the soldier, we wait for him to emerge when he can again become articulate as a human being, and achieves expression in his moments of reflection and comment. For this is the first war in which the value of war has been so universally questioned, and in which the morale of any infantryman depended less on his faith in victory than on his philosophy of victory and his political creed however crude. He is a brother in arms to the race of peasants who plough their fields under fire, and to the machinist who may be turn

ing shells on his lathe while dreaming of industrial revolution. M. Jonas, Lieutenant Fabre, and Mr. Flameng tour the front and produce their official paintings which contain merely collections of animated uniforms, for they cannot distinguish the soldier from the conscript of any other epoch except for the details of his equipment. But the most summary drawings of Steinlen or Forain stamp his personality. Of Steinlen Anatole France wrote: "He has suffered and laughed with the passer-by. The soul of the crowd has passed into him. He has felt its terrible simplicity and its grandeur." Steinlen never forgets

that the poilu was yesterday the passer-by with whom he laughed and suffered the beggar huddled asleep in doorways, the lovers in mean streets, the street-singer of Montmartre, the factory-hand of Montrouge, the gamin of the streets. The advent of war can add nothing to Steinlen's hatred of militarism for he has pictured workmen facing armed police during a strike. He has portrayed a line of locked-out workmen trudging heavily, aimlessly through the snow. He understands as instinctively a column, a line of them as soldiers trudging through the mud of Flanders-men again suffering in a struggle which to them is inevitable-though he portrays the soldier as an individual in that line. Because he could feel compassion for the loneliness of trampings through country villages at dawn, he can portray the loneliness of soldiers on leave in an empty street and call them "Stray Dogs".

Forain's line is the product of his wit as Steinlen's is the product of his compassion. Beneath a summary sketch of two soldiers chatting in a trench he wrote:

"If they only hold out."

"Who?"

"The civilians",

and rallied Paris more effectively than any battle-cry. France roared for a year to the echoes of "Pourvu qu' ils tiennent les civils" until the watchword of Verdun silenced them. And this same power underlines another newspaper sketch of two poilus kneeling beside the grave.

"What do you expect, old fellow? This is life."

Is any more final expression of the soldier's attitude toward death possible? Or of the life of the trenches than in "War Landscape:1" in which the lines of the trench almost hide a few distant sentries at their listening post, their backs to two graves near a plank walk? All our outcry against atrocities and the brutalities of invasion are epitomized in drawings which show nothing more than the gesture of a dead peasant's body sprawling in a field, or a helmet on a table and a child staring at a closed door. Forain's propaganda in war is powerful because he has always been a propagandist, intensifying his line until he could use it as a weapon. All his etchings and lithographs as well as his political cartoons, have attempted to express a criticism of life, whether he drew a criminal or a parvenu, judges or actors, deputies or stock-brokers. The penetrating power of his irony which made him the satirist of his contemporaries and perhaps the wittiest commentator on French life, has enabled him to make an army articulate.

For American painters who depart officially or unofficially to picture the war, the lesson of Steinlen's and Forain's lithographs, or Nevinson's paintings is the same. The opportunity of seeing the war at first-hand will not prove the essential stimulus. The mere impact of their experiences will