Joseph Gray's Camouflage Read online

  ‘The enemy reopened a fearful fire upon us. The range was accurate, the shells bursting in hundreds one after another. The concussion was fearful, one seemed to be torn asunder . . . the bombardment reached an awful intensity – we realised now what the Germans experienced at Neuve Chapelle.’ They tried to keep moving. Then Boase stopped abruptly.

  ‘I’m hit, Gray.’

  As he said it, he was hit again.

  The world sped up and slowed down. Joe was pulling out his first-aid dressings, wanting to stem the blood pumping from Boase’s arm.

  But Boase pulled himself up, insisting they continue.

  Joe knew there was a medical officer, Major Rogers, just ahead. The problem was everyone in-between was wounded worse than Boase.

  ‘It was impossible to move forward. Dead and dying choked the passage, so full was the trench in parts that one man, dead, stood erect, sustained by the pressure of the living, who themselves could not move. I assisted Captain Boase along the trench but soon he had to stop, for progress in the trench, slippery with blood and crowded with the living and the dead, was impossible.’ Joe didn’t know what to do. ‘To step outside was suicide.’ But step outside he did, using all his strength to drag Boase with him.

  ‘After a desperate rush across the open we reached the first aid post.’12

  A desperate rush. Open ground. Was it luck that kept Joe alive or was it something else? There was a skill to keeping low and moving fast. He was deaf to the noise, blinded by the smoke, but he managed to survive. They both did.

  After he watched Boase loaded onto a stretcher, someone tugged at his tunic.

  ‘What about you? You are wounded.’

  Joe didn’t understand until, looking down, he saw that he was covered in blood. But it wasn’t his, it was the blood of other men.

  Many soldiers, once they’d been through this war, would find it impossible to talk about. How to describe the horror, the despair, and then how to acknowledge the guilt that came with survival. Joe would make it back to Dundee, marry a beautiful woman and have a child, but in the one surviving photograph he’s still in his Black Watch uniform, his eyes tired and troubled. He would remain buried in the trenches for another five years, ‘slithering in mud’ and ‘soaked to the skin’;13 he would wake in the middle of the night in a sweat of panic, then be gripped by a coldness in his bones he couldn’t shake.

  Men fresh out of the firing zone would come to his studio, dazed, blinking in the sunlight of civilian life. He’d relive ‘hot moments’ with them and then make them pose as models, and as they talked, he’d sketch. Day by day, Joe reimagined action scenes and battle charges, he drew medical officers and stretcher-bearers carrying out their duties, different moments from trench life. And as he collected stories, so he gathered objects, paying well for billy cans, bayonets and belt buckles as props to furnish every picture.

  Because Joseph Gray was still observing, and he had to be authentic.

  He would be made official war artist to The Graphic, a popular rival to the Illustrated London News. Everyone wanted realistic front-line images and Joe offered that. There, alongside the photographic spreads of the Home Front and endless maps of France, were drawings by Solomon J. Solomon, Francis Dadd and Joseph Gray. His sketches brought to life what was happening in the trenches, illustrating the drama of specific offensives or different artillery and equipment. They had an immediacy and naivety which spoke of direct experience and so had huge appeal. Around half the working domestic population were now reading newspapers. This was the first mass-circulation war and artists’ impressions were seen by a far wider audience than anything in a gallery.14

  But a gallery would soon be needed.

  The newly founded Imperial War Museum would purchase seven of Joe’s pen-and-ink sketches, all of them ‘drawn in the firing zone’. They were less idealised treatments than his sketches for the newspaper, depicting different corners of the Western Front and the battlefield after Festubert. Sir Martin Conway, the directorgeneral, travelled to Dundee to open the ‘Victory’ exhibition of war relics at Kinnaird Hall, where he singled out Joe’s drawings as ‘a record of priceless value’ and ‘the work of a man who had fought’.15 The two men took the time to discuss a larger commission.

  ‘It will be called The Ration Party.’ Joe already had the composition in mind, pinned to an actual event.

  On the night of 11th March the artist was one of a party that left the trenches to bring up rations for the company. The night was wet and stormy and the flat ground was flooded. The only light was provided by bursting star shells. The picture shows the return of the ration party to the front lines. A star shell has dropped near to the men – Their position, now exposed, is swept by machine gun fire and they make a wild dash forward towards cover.16

  Joe would depict the men ‘who were actually present when the incident took place’. He had to ‘make the painting accurate in every detail’ and for all the survivors to pose as models ‘(but photographs will have to be used in the case of men who were killed)’.17 He also supplied an outline sketch identifying each man. The first, the central character, was already a hero. Charles McCririck had fought with Joe at Neuve Chapelle and Festubert, earning the nickname ‘McGurkha’ for his bravery.18 After losing a leg at the Somme, McCririck had been awarded a Military Cross, and though he never once talked about the war to his son or grandson, they treasured Joe’s sketches of him. Because Charles came time and again to Joe’s studio, and he stands at the centre in A Ration Party, a ragged spectre, pushing his way through the debris of No Man’s Land as if wading through a fast-flowing river.

  A Ration Party is an eerie painting, its bedraggled soliders half sunk in mud, half lost in shadow. They are caught in a kind of limbo, between light and dark, between life and death, and Joe is right there with them. I know it’s him because he identified himself on his own list, but he is the most obscure figure in the corner, a face hooded and hidden in the shadows, almost invisible. Almost a ghost.

  By going back over each moment of each battle, Joe was making sense of it, to make his subjective war objective, but the line between the dead and the living was less and less distinct. By the time he came to write up a history of the 4th for the Dundee Advertiser every family in the city had lost someone they loved. Joe would try to give a focus to their grief, filling his columns with vivid descriptions of each battle, reminding everyone this was ‘the greatest test of all’19 and it wasn’t all a waste, but breaking up each column were the grainy, head-and-shoulder photographs of soldiers mentioned in the narrative – all either dead, wounded or missing. Their faces accumulated steadily and silently, saying far more than words ever could.

  ‘Nothing in our time will haunt us like the War. Our dead comrades live on in our thoughts, appealingly, as if afraid to be forgotten.’20 But forgetting wasn’t an option. Joe knew that he had survived for a reason: to keep his friends alive.

  Years later he wrote: ‘In the last war, all of my best friends died alongside of me. As they went, one by one, all in their early twenties – all men of subtlety and imagination – really the best in the country – I remember the conviction that I formed that it was ridiculous and absurd to assume that because their bodies were shattered and finished that they were finished too. Of course they went on.’21

  They went on in his paintings. He wouldn’t let them vanish. But the Battle of Loos on 25 September 1915 would be his last.

  It was just before six o’clock in the morning. A mine exploded beneath the German trenches, and the ground shook over half a mile away, where the 4th were waiting. Two minutes later British guns opened fire, the gas was turned on, and candles were used to thicken the great clouds of smoke, which billowed ominously across No Man’s Land. Soon the enemy lines were blotted out behind dense yellow and black fumes.

  And there was Joe again, charging over the parapet. He ducked close to the ground and tried not to look at the men who fell down on either side not to get up again.22 It was impo
ssible to see further than a few yards but he was one of a very few who stumbled into the first enemy trenches. Any Germans left alive were huddled in corners, gibbering and terrified, ready to surrender.

  ‘Carry on!’ came the order.

  They tried, they really did, but the artillery fire was suddenly more brutal. The Germans had recovered from the surprise of the first onslaught and now aimed all their artillery on the captured trenches, blasting them to bits. Men’s bodies were mangled in the earth. High explosives dived into the midst of little groups crouching in shell holes. Everyone was killed.

  ‘The battleground was a bloody inferno. The dense clouds of smoke from the enemy’s bombs filled the air; it was almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe.’23 Reinforcements, so badly needed, would never come. Communication lines had been cut, shrapnel had ripped out the cables. When Colonel Walker tried to get word back, he was picked out and killed instantly.

  The remaining men dug themselves in, preparing for the worst. Joe closed his eyes, waited, prayed. He couldn’t hear the screams any more; he couldn’t hear anything. It would be hours before the fire decreased. Only then the straggling band of survivors began edging back to their old front line. Some were blown apart as they crawled, literally obliterated by gunfire or grenades. ‘It had been a grand advance but at great cost,’ was how it was phrased in the battalion diary. Nothing, though, could summarise the nature of that cost, as the roll was called next morning.

  The air was thick with smoke and guns still thundered. Mechanically the old orders were called and survivors lined up slowly and quietly. Joe found his place in line, yet it was barely even that. On either side were the spaces where his friends were meant to be. It hadn’t hit him, not yet. He waited. Where were they? Surely they had overslept. Yes, that was it.

  ‘One looks around to the billets. One’s special pal is late for parade again – just as he ever is. In a moment he will peep carefully from behind the billet door. The sergeant’s head is turned away; out he will run and slip stealthily with dancing eyes, and an adroitness that shows much practice, into a place in the rear rank.

  ‘But he does not come – nor will he ever.’24

  The 4th had lost their colonel and twenty officers of the twenty-two who had gone into battle. On the night of the 24th, 423 non-commissioned officers and men had marched to the trenches. From these trenches 167 remained.

  One of Joe’s journalist colleagues later wrote that ‘the heavy proportion of officers killed arose from their wearing, as the other ranks did not, a ready mark for snipers, the gleaming red hackle of the Black Watch in their bonnets’.25 It’s hard to know if that’s true, but as Joe stood quietly, looking around, trying to take in what was left of his battalion, he saw only empty spaces where his friends were supposed to be.

  He had to wonder – how could he not? – if it wasn’t just that the dead men were more visible, but that they had died because they’d been more visible.

  Notes

  CAB = Cabinet Papers

  CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre

  HO= Home Office

  IWM = Imperial War Museum

  PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records

  TNA = The National Archives

  WO = War Office

  Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.

  To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.

  1 J. Gray, ‘The Fourth Black Watch in the Great War’, The Dundee Advertiser, 11 December 1917, n.p.

  2 Ibid.,14 December 1917, n.p.

  3 William Linton Andrews, Haunting Years, The Naval and Military Press Ltd, Uckfield, 2001, first pub. 1930, p. 21

  4 Gray, ‘The Fourth Black Watch’, 14 December 1917, n.p.

  5 Ibid., 17 December 1917, n.p.

  6 Frank Rutter, The Influence of the War on Art, in H. W. Wilson (ed.), The Great War, vol. 12, ch. 263, www.greatwardifferent.com/Great_War/Kitsch/Art_01.htm

  7 Gray, ‘The Fourth Black Watch’, 21 December 1917

  8 Ibid., 22 December 1917

  9 Ibid.

  10 Ibid., 28 December 1917

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid., 29 December 1917

  13 Ibid., 2 January 1918

  14 Stuart Sillars, Art and Survival in First World War Britain, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1987, p. 154

  15 The Dundee Courier, 19 December 1918, p. 3

  16 J. Gray in an undated letter, IWM First World War Art Archive ART/WA1/125

  17 J. Gray in a letter, 27 January 1919, IWM First World War Art Archive ART/WA1/125

  18 Gray, ‘The Fourth Black Watch’, 19 December 1917, n.p.

  19 Ibid., 3 December 1917, n.p.

  20 Andrews, Haunting Years, p. 5

  21 J. Gray in a letter to Mary Meade, 6 January 1941, Barclay Archive

  22 Gray, ‘The Fourth Black Watch’, 5 January 1918, n.p.

  23 Ibid., 7 January 1918, n.p.

  24 Ibid.

  25 William Linton Andrews, The Autobiography of a Journalist, Ernest Benn Ltd, London, 1964, p. 92

  is for Bomber: he’s coming so fast, If he can’t see you quickly, why, dammit, he’s past

  ‘It’s him, surely that’s him. Isn’t it?’

  I lean in to examine the hunched, shabby figure of the soldier. Dark hair, a moustache, and yes, the profile is almost right. A sudden breeze makes my skin prickle.

  ‘It’s possible,’ I sigh. ‘Yes, I suppose it could be Joe.’

  Maureen has her arm looped through mine and we stand together for a moment, staring long and hard at the canvas in front of us. She screws her eyes up tight whilst mine drift along its length. It’s impossible not to be drawn to every small detail: the light glinting off freshly cleaned bayonets, the rough grain on a wooden crate. I know I should be looking at the men, but the surface of the painting is so bristling and agitated it shocks me. Every small stroke of the brush registers. I step back because I need to, but Maureen won’t. She presses down on her walking stick, smiling and leaning forward. She knows this painting well, this battlefield.

  Like it is her own.

  She turns to me, her voice suddenly bright.

  ‘Come now, my dear, he did put himself in his paintings, didn’t he?’

  I nod, scanning the surface quickly to be sure.

  ‘Yes he did.’

  After Neuve Chapelle (10 March, 1915) was presented to Dundee City Art Gallery in 1922 and has hung here ever since. It’s not exactly a battle painting, since it depicts the aftermath of the Battle of Neuve Chapelle; the gathering together of exhausted survivors, waiting for new orders from their lieutenant colonel. Harry Walker is issuing his directives, with Boase just behind him, listening intently, and Rogers, the medical officer, standing to one side.

  Joe made sure every man was known and named. Beneath the painting a small plaque lists the main characters: Colonel Walker, Major Tosh, Captain Boase, Lieutenant Weinberg, Major Muir, Captain Rogers, Lieutentant Tarleton, Lieutenant Weinberg, Lieutenant Stephen, Lieutenant Stevenson, and Sergeant Major Charles. These are the men mentioned in Joe’s newspaper articles, their postage stamp-sized photographs scattered through his narratives. The glorious dead. He captured each likeness faithfully. He knew each man, he knew their families, he had seen some of them buried: Walker and Tosh at Pont du Hem, Weinberg at Vieille Chapelle. Of the ten named, seven had been killed in action, so it was always going to be more than a painting. It was to become a shrine.

  We stand and stare, quite in awe. The eye-watering detail pulls the viewer in, demanding full attention, but now this painting is posing a new question.

  ‘So. Is that him?’ Maureen is pointing to a kneeling figure in the foreground to the right.

  I can’t be sure, but how can I te
ll her that? We’ve made this epic trip for her, because we all know it’s the last time she will see it. Perhaps, because it is the last time, she is trying to see something new here.

  ‘Joe did put himself in A Ration Party,’ I say. ‘But he was right at the back in that, in shadow, so you couldn’t even know it was him.’

  That was more his style. The man who was so good at hiding wouldn’t make himself too obvious. This creates fresh debate amongst our small group. My mother, my aunts, an uncle, a cousin – we’ve all come along to share this enounter. But is that Joe? Nobody can say for certain. I close my eyes, open them again and take another look. For a minute it’s like I have lost my balance, then I really focus. If I look hard enough, the connections are there to be made. I see him.

  ‘There!’ I point. ‘There!’

  Of course it’s him, I am sure of it now, but he’s not where everyone thinks. He is not the crouching figure. He is neither in the foreground nor in the background, but sits on his own, bowed and thoughtful and almost in the middle, and of course his face is blurred. This I know is deliberate – whilst every other detail is precise, right up to the guns propped just in front of him.

  ‘He’s that figure in the middle,’ I say. ‘No doubt about it.’

  After a few more minutes we all agree.

  ‘Oh! Oh yes! Of course!’

  We cluster around, pointing and chatting.

  It’s a cold and clear Saturday morning in March and we’ve come a long way for this moment, this meeting within a meeting. The gallery guide is intrigued and then excited to meet the daughter of the artist Joseph Gray.

  ‘I used to come here all the time with my schoofriends,’ Maureen tells her. ‘I would show them the painting and say, “Dad painted that!” and everyone knew about it. I felt almost famous.’