L’Enfer

‘the sun-lit chalk is everywhere absorbing fresh stains’

‘The grassy bank with million daisies spangled’

'Silver beams search the interstices, play for breech-blocks underneath the Counterfeiting bower-sway; make-believe a silver scar with drenched tree-wound'

‘Down in the under-croft, in the crypt of the wood, clammy drippings percolate’

‘There between the thinning uprights at the margin straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch whose silver queenery is draggled and ungraced And June shoots lopt And fresh stalks bled’

‘Behind ‘E’ Battery, fifty yards down the road, a great many mangolds, uprooted, pulped, congealed with chemical earth, spattered and made slippery the rigid boards leading to the emplacement. The sap of vegetables slobbered the spotless breech-bloc

‘Saturated, littered, rusted coilings, metallic rustlings, thin ribbon-metal chafing – rasp low for some tension freed; by rat, or wind, disturbed.’

‘Stealthily, imperceptibly stript back, thinning night wraps unshrouding, unsheafing— and insubstantial barriers dissolve.’

‘A splintered tree scattered its winter limbs, spilled its life low on the ground. They stepped over its branches and went on’.

‘tottering perpendiculars lean and sway; more leper-trees pitted, rownsepyked* out of nature, cut off in their sap-rising.’

‘Cloud shielded her bright disc-rising yet her veiled influence illumined the texture of that place, her glistening on the saturated fields; bat-night gloom intersilvered where she shone on the mist drift.’

‘and birds complain in flight – for their nests fall like stars’

‘The inorganic earth where your body presses seems itself to pulse deep down with your heart’s acceleration.’

‘No-man’s land whitened rigid: all its contours silver filigreed, as damascened. With the coming dark, ground-mist creeps back to regain the hollow places’

Silver Gelatin Chemigrams

The work takes its name from Le Bois de L’Enfer (hell), a small copse from which the London Scottish Battalion ventured forth in their first charge of the Battle of Messines, Halloween 1914. The woods served as the Battalion’s HQ and the site of a make-shift dressing station; it was here that the dead and wounded were brought back, whilst the battle raged on.

The London Scottish were the first territorial unit to see action in World War One. Tasked with reinforcing the Allied line on the Messines Ridge, they faced overwhelming odds. Despite being vastly outnumbered and having been issued with faulty magazines which caused their rifles to jam, the men held the line. The losses were heavy, with over half of the Battalion killed or seriously wounded as a result of the battle that day.

The Ypres Salient was fought over almost continuously for the duration of the war, leaving the landscape devastated, towns and villages destroyed and almost half a million dead. One hundred years on, the fields yield their harvests once more, daisies and poppies bloom in the ditches beside the roads; the wounds of war have healed, yet scars and traces remain.

The series of chemigrams shows an altered landscape, which both hides and reveals its past. From the violation of the land and the decomposition of the soldiers’ bodies, comes new life and new possibilities.