Visions of World War One

This is Mametz Wood in the Somme.

It's an eerie, haunted place.

Between the 7th and the 12th July, 1916,

more than 1,200 Welsh soldiers died here.

They were either mowed down by German machine guns

as they walked across the open fields,

or else they were killed in hand-to-hand fighting in the woods itself.

Many of their bodies still lie here.

This is hallowed ground.

This was the bloodiest battle fought by the Welsh throughout

the First World War.

Three months later, a painter came here to record the scene.

He was Christopher Williams from Maesteg,

Wales' leading artist of the day

and friend of David Lloyd George.

This painting commemorates the sacrifice of those Welsh Tommies,

but did it also distort what really happened?

Was it a piece of propaganda?

The First World War was the first modern industrialised war,

but it was also the first mass media war,

with thousands of posters, paintings and photographs produced.

Welsh artists created some of the most memorable images of this conflict.

In this programme, I'm going to look at the work they produced.

It's full of surprises.

It shows very different sides to this brutal war to end all wars.

I find it almost impossible to imagine what life must have

been like for soldiers in the trenches of the Somme and Ypres...

..but I do know what warzones are like.

As a foreign office minister,

I went to Iraq and Afghanistan a number of times

and I took my sketchbook with me.

The artists in the First World War

recorded many of the things that I saw

because wars are not just about blood and guts,

they're about soldiers sitting around waiting, preparing,

about villages almost ignoring what's going on around them.

And it seems to me that art tells us much more than any

number of photographs about the reality of war.

When the war against Germany was declared on the evening

of August the 4th, 1914,

Britain was largely unprepared.

No-one imagined that a shooting in Sarajevo would

escalate into a world war.

There was a huge publicity drive to raise awareness about the war

and recruit a new Citizen's Army.

This was the golden age of the poster

and billboards were festooned with government pronouncements.

Many were blunt and patronising,

but some were works of art in their own right.

They weren't shown in galleries but underground.

London Underground was at the forefront of graphic design,

largely through its visionary head of publicity, Frank Pick.

He hated official government war posters and felt he could do better.

He commissioned top graphic artists

to create more interesting images for tube travellers -

two had links with Wales.

Gerald Spencer Price came from a prominent West Wales family and

in 1914, volunteered for the Belgian army,

drawing what he saw around him.

Frank Brangwyn was born in Belgian to an English father

and Welsh mother.

At the outbreak of war, he was a leading designer

and keen to highlight the plight of his birthplace.

World War I stuck on walls everywhere

and now important historical artefacts.

At the Imperial War Museum in London,

they have a fantastic collection of these images.

Richard, what have we got here, with these posters?

Well, we've got three posters from the beginning of the First World War.

These two, here, are by an artist called Frank Brangwyn

and this one's by Gerald Spencer Rice and, as you can see,

these are much more, kind of, artistically focused.

The sentiments, also, are very, sort of, kind of, high-minded

through darkness to light,

fighting to triumph, the only road for an Englishman.

These are, sort of, pitching the messages at the typical

commuter using the underground,

the professionals, the people

working in the finance and the city,

a more, kind of, educated audience.

-They're actually very beautiful objects.

-Absolutely, yeah.

I mean, this is what Pick was all about.

He was about getting the best designs for the underground, basically.

Pick, himself, you know, took pride in the idea that he was

actually bringing quality art to the masses, basically.

What they do show is the importance of posters

during the First World War.

Obviously, this was at a time before mass, sort of, communication,

the internet, televisual and radio and things like that,

so posters was the only, sort of,

tried and tested method of mass communication.

And when you're involved in a situation of total war, you have

to get the public onside and the poster was the best way of doing it.

Now, these are very dramatic images

but Frank Brangwyn got into some trouble, didn't he,

with another very dramatic image?

This is a poster advertising the sale of war bonds

and it was called Put Strength In The Final Blow,

which showed this very, sort of, violent image of a Tommy

bayoneting a German soldier.

It has a very dubious honour of managing to offend both

people in Britain and in Germany. And, in Britain, it was deemed too

violent an image, which might, actually, have a, kind of,

detrimental effect on morale.

When news spread of this poster to Germany, it caused a bit

of a scandal and the Kaiser, Wilhelm, was actually rumoured to

have been so enraged that he actually placed a bounty on the head of Brangwyn,

but it was a, sort of, kind of,

a blip in his career, but it didn't really do him any long-term harm.

Brangwyn wouldn't have minded being on the Kaiser's hit list.

Germany's leader was loathed in Britain,

especially after the invasion of Belgium,

which displaced more than a million and a half people.

Over 250,000 refugees came to the United Kingdom

and many came to Wales, including several noted artists.

They were brought over by the Davies sisters,

the women whose Impressionist collection

hangs at the National Museum.

Some of the Belgian artists' work is still to be

found in the sisters' former home of Gregynog.

This is a painting by Valerius de Saedeleer,

one of the Belgian refugee artists who were helped by Gwendoline

and Margaret Davies to escape from Belgium

ahead of the German invasion in 1914.

Did the Davies sisters see this as an act of patriotism?

Because of their own interests in the arts,

and in the visual arts in particular,

they were very keen to welcome Belgian artists to Wales,

partly to help them out,

but they certainly hoped, on a more practical way,

to influence the standard of art that was being produced in Wales at the time,

which they felt was not as wonderful as it could be.

This is a painting of Wales, but it looks very Belgian, Dutch.

It certainly does.

That was partly because that was the tradition that he came from,

that the artist came from,

but also it was his link with home.

He had this wonderful, very delicate way

of using oil paints in very thin,

with a bitter pencil in it and you get this wonderful, delicate effect.

-Is it a nostalgic painting?

-Oh, I think so, yes.

Probably was a comfort to him to paint as he'd always done

and to actually interpret the local landscape through his own

particular vision, you know.

Now, I understand that this artist, de Saedeleer,

cut a very unusual and elegant figure in Aberystwyth.

Well, the story goes that he used to...he wore a big, black cloak and a big, black hat,

a bit like GK Chesterton, I suppose, and would...

could go swanning up and down the prom...

with the cloak blowing in the wind as the tide came in.

I can just imagine it, really.

And he certainly became a well-known figure in the town.

He used to pay all his girls with paintings...

-in the great tradition of artists.

-SHE LAUGHS

I think this is a really beautiful picture. I love it.

It's nice being able to walk past it every morning.

SHE LAUGHS

But if Belgian artists were finding peace and tranquillity in Wales,

for those artists who joined up,

life at the frontline was very different.

The war, now into its second year, had ground down to a stalemate,

with trenches stretching from the English Channel to Switzerland.

One of those who volunteered was Carey Morris from Llandeilo.

He'd studied at the Slade School Of Art

and, at the outbreak of war, was already aged 32.

But he volunteered for the South Wales Borderers

and was posted to Belgium, and took his paints with him.

Carey Morris was posted here, the village of Boesinghe,

a few miles outside of Ypres, right on the front line.

We know this because he did a painting on this spot.

This is Boesinghe Chateau,

since rebuilt.

But 100 years ago,

its jagged outline was a landmark on the front line.

Morris' painting is remarkable because it

was done on the battlefield,

the Chateau lit by flares,

soldiers in the shadows,

visible only from the glow of their cigarettes.

Carey Morris wrote about his experiences during the war.

By all accounts, he was a quiet, reticent man,

who never spoke about the horrors that he had endured.

But in one letter, his guard slipped.

"Everything on both sides was being hurled over.

"It was hell let loose.

"Above the din, I heard an explosion very near.

"There was a tremendous rattle of metal in front of me

"and, at that moment, a soft, wet mass struck me in the face.

"I realised, with sadness,

"that it was the flesh of one of our own men.

"This one incident should be enough to deter anyone

"from rushing headlong into a war again."

One person who knew Carey Morris is Ann Rhys

and she has two sketches he made in the trenches.

Well, here they are...

Two drawings.

They're wonderful drawings, aren't they?

How did he do these drawings? What did he use?

Well, he'd lost all his paints after painting the Chateau.

With great foresight,

he found little bits of charcoal from the burnt wood

and used those to do these very rapid, immediate sketches...

Which are very emotional and telling, aren't they?

Cos they were done there and then.

-It looks like a group of his comrades...

-Yes.

..trying to keep warm in front of a fire, maybe.

It's very evocative, isn't it?

And this one is the bombardment.

From what I gather, the bombardment, as he described it,

went on for five hours.

And he said that the Bosche had lit these lights

and the lights dropped like gold dust into the trenches.

-It must have been spectacular, mustn't it?

-Absolutely.

-Frightening and...

-And there's... There's a soldier...

-There's a soldier there.

-..who's just peeping over the wall.

-I know.

Cos, of course, if you stick your head up too far...

Well, that would be it.

Did he ever...speak about this and these events?

No, not to me and certainly not to my husband.

From what I gather, he had to get the...

My husband, that is, had to get the history of what happened,

and where and when and how, from his diaries.

And he was a very eloquent writer - his writing is beautiful.

And he got more of the history from a friend of his in Llandeilo -

Brigadier Costello - who told him the story of Carey's war,

but he never, ever spoke about it.

And his lungs were in a terrible state from being...

He was gassed at the end, severely breathless,

terribly short of breath,

couldn't really walk up the hill in Llandeilo.

Could only draw, paint for half an hour

and had an awful productive cough.

But, there you are. He was lucky to survive, wasn't he?

So, in a sense, these are what he communicated

-to the world about that experience.

-Yes, yes, yes.

We now see the war through experiences of soldiers

like Carey Morris and poets like Siegfried Sussoon and Roberts Graves,

who expressed the futility of the war.

But, at the time, it was widely supported.

There was a huge appetite at home for news and pictures of the war.

Newspapers and magazines sold in their hundreds of thousands

and were full of illustrations, some by Welsh artists.

They are almost forgotten now, but one Welsh cartoonist

was one of the most successful artists of the whole war.

Now this cartoon here, by Bert Thomas,

this is a very heroic-looking figure, isn't he?

Yeah. Bert Thomas, who was born in Newport in 1883,

grew up in Swansea and then worked in London,

drew for Punch and the weekly London magazine Opinion.

But this is a Welsh cartoon - Stick It Welsh! -

and it shows a Welsh soldier advancing,

presumably into no-man's land,

one would imagine, during the Battle Of The Somme.

Its title is Stick It Welsh! and that refers back to one of the first

engagements for Welsh troops in the war.

And the phrase "Stick It Welsh!" resonates because it was a phrase

uttered by Captain Mark Haggard in 1914.

One of his last remarks before he passed away,

having been severely wounded.

Hmm. And... And, of course, it was Bert Thomas who produced

one of the most famous of the First World War...

Yes, this is Arf A Mo Kaiser,

which Thomas drew, apparently in-between 10 and 15 minutes

for The Weekly Dispatch

and this was sketched to raise money for the tobacco for the troops fund,

and is estimated to have raised about a quarter of a million pounds.

And it actually went for the cause of buying

tobacco for the troops on the Western Front?

Yeah, tobacco for the troops on the Western Front,

tobacco for wounded soldiers back in hospital in this country.

And I think this is a wonderful example of how Bert Thomas,

through his art, captured the sort of endurance, the good humour,

the somewhat slightly disrespectful of authority nature of the Tommy.

You can see that the cap on his head is slightly askew.

And he's not going to be hurried, so you've got a British Tommy here,

lighting his pipe and just asking Kaiser Bill to give him a moment

before he has to go into battle.

And, of course, it was that kind of resilience, I think,

that robustness,

which eventually meant that the British army endured the war.

The Daily Mail called Arf A Mo Kaiser the funniest cartoon of the war.

But Bert Thomas wasn't just a cartoonist,

he was also a highly successful poster artist.

-They're really startling images.

-Oh, yeah.

I mean, they're very beautiful...

-Graphic designs, aren't they?

-Oh, yeah.

Well, this one here, it's about "You buy war bonds, we do the rest!"

It's a kind of... It's a pact between the fighting forces

and the public at home.

"You pay for the war bonds, you pay for the weapons,

"and we'll do the fighting", essentially.

So...again, it's about a stoical resolve of Britain's

forces in the First World War.

Bert Thomas did a huge poster, didn't he,

outside of the National Gallery in Trafalgar, Square?

Absolutely. I mean, Trafalgar Square, as it is now,

is the focal point for public gatherings, meetings

and things like that, and that was the case in the First World War.

Bert Thomas' National Gallery poster was the largest produced

up to that date and this rare newsreel shows the artist himself

putting the final touches to it.

We think of these posters as being this sort of size here,

but, you know, during the war, posters could occupy,

you know, the side of a building, basically. And, of course,

this was how the available form of mass communication poster

was used to its fullest extent

and here they would be there, sort of flanking these public figures

as they sort of, you know, banged out their speeches about how it was

patriotic to join up, to help the troops

and to pay into the war, basically...

through your finances, as well.

Inspired by the posters of Frank Brangwyn and Bert Thomas,

young men joined up in their hundreds of thousands.

Many came here, to northern France, to the Somme.

This is a quiet backwater now.

But 100 years ago, it was bustling with troop trains

and with green, slightly bewildered soldiers -

and among them was a young artist called David Jones.

Born in London to a Welsh family, he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

He'd studied at art school

and used his drawing skills to record what he saw around him.

David Jones's sketches are one of the best records we have

of life in the trenches.

He shows men at rest.

They're cooking, cleaning their rifles, waiting.

I've done drawings like this in Afghanistan and Iraq.

War isn't all blood and guts - a lot of it is boring...

sitting around.

David Jones captures this beautifully.

Jonathon, we've got some of David Jones's drawings here.

Now you're an ex-military man. Tell me about the detail -

did he capture what was going on?

Oh, I think this was a very personal thing.

The battalion was doing its final training on Salisbury Plain

before going out to France the following month.

What James has captured here is a couple of his fellow soldiers,

who were trying to get some sleep at night,

wrapped up in their greatcoats and two blankets.

This was well before the days of Gore-Tex.

Trying to get to sleep with only that was quite testing

and so much of a man's efficiency, wellbeing, general happiness

on a campaign depends on getting a bit of good quality sleep at night.

To get a bit of good quality sleep, you have to be warm

and you have to be dry, if possible.

Try doing that in a greatcoat and two blankets.

Now, with this one, this is in France, this is in a trench.

That's right. And, again, this is a casual sketch,

not an official propaganda shot, so the whole thing's a bit rickety.

You can see a trained artist at work here

because he's got a lot of the details.

You can see how the sandbags have been laid,

with the seams inside rather than outside,

so they'll split less easily.

His cap there, that's an important detail.

Clearly indicating that it's before the issue of the shrapnel helmet

because, once the shrapnel helmet was issued,

that's what you wore in the trenches.

Here he is, still wearing the soft peak.

Why are these drawings important to us, do you think?

Well, a photograph at that time would generally have been

taken for official purposes,

it was to portray the war in a particular light to audiences

generally at home or indeed abroad,

whereas a drawing like this is much more personal, it's private.

The fighting that David Jones was training for

happened here, in Mametz, in July 1916.

It was the first battle for the new volunteer Welch division,

taking the wood heavily defended by a crack Prussian regiment.

When it was over, the Welch had suffered over 4,000 casualties,

including 1,200 dead.

Jones was wounded in hand-to-hand fighting.

He wrote later, "Part of me, the artist within me,

"has now left the trenches."

His epic poem, In Parenthesis,

builds up to the brutal battle for these woods.

"When the shivered rowan fell you couldn't hear the fall of it.

"Barrage with counter-barrage shockt

"Deprive all several sounds of their identity,

"what dark-convulsed cacophony conditions each disparity

"and the trembling woods are vortex for the storm".

Mametz Wood was brutal and controversial.

After the first attack was beaten back, Britain's army chief,

Field Marshal Haig, criticised the Welsh troops

and sacked their commander,

who had been personally appointed by Lloyd George.

But in Wales, the battle was celebrated as a great victory

and one painting, which Lloyd George had a hand in,

shows this more than any other.

Beth, tell me about this extraordinary picture.

Well, this enormous painting, which is over three metres wide,

is Christopher Williams's painting

of the Welsh division at Mametz Wood.

The charge of the Welsh division.

He's not a soldier,

he's not someone who experienced the battle first-hand,

but what he was trying to do is to have the second best thing,

which was to go there to see the site and to meet the soldiers

who had been fighting to get their first-hand experience.

Then, I think he felt that he really wanted to do justice

to the Welsh division and this is the result.

-Why did he paint it?

-He was commissioned to paint it.

So, soon after the battle, he was commissioned by Lloyd George,

who then arranges for him to go out to France as well.

It's a tremendously theatrical painting, isn't it?

Well, I think, if you speak to any soldier,

they'll tell you that his is totally unrealistic

and it's not how it would have happened,

but there's always artistic licence.

So, what he wanted to do

was to try and convey an entire battle in one scene.

There are images and details in this picture that are horrifying.

The bayoneting that's going on,

this figure stretching across to put a bullet

into this German soldier here.

There are not many paintings, actually,

that show such intense battle.

No, so what he's decided to do is not look at the whole field

but to draw your eye in to a very particular battle.

Yes, this arm is right in the centre of the picture,

but it also shows what they were up against

cos this soldier has a pistol,

whereas he's fighting German soldiers, who have machine guns.

It's very much a story of David and Goliath -

the volunteer Welsh amateur soldiers up against

the very well-trained professional Prussian soldiers.

Yet, if you notice, they are on top of them.

They are the ones who are commanding this battle.

But you get that sense of chaos and noise and, you know,

just a scene of devastation happening before your eyes.

I like the figure right at the end, where you don't see his eyes,

his face almost, but his mouth is open

-and he's just about to release his grenade.

-Grenade.

How did Lloyd George feel about this painting

when he took ownership of it?

Well, we don't have written evidence to what he thought about it,

but we do know that he hung it in Downing Street,

so it was in the drawing room at 10 Downing Street

whilst he was Prime Minister and stayed there until 1920,

which is when it transferred here to the National Museum of Wales.

I mean, it would have been the talking point of the room, I think.

Yeah, it's very difficult to see anybody sitting down

and having a quiet sherry with this hanging behind them.

Christopher Williams writes that it was always intended to be hung

in an institution as part of the military history of Wales.

It's not a domestic painting to hang at home.

Do you think Lloyd George was trying to rub the generals' noses in it

every time they came to see him?

No, I think he was showing pride in a battalion

that he had put together and trying to show the heroics

that they were up against in this particular battle.

But what interests me is that it's still being discussed today.

It's painted for a reaction.

I don't think you're meant to look at this and say, "That's nice",

you're meant to react to it.

Question war - was it right, was it not right?

Who's the hero, who's the villain?

The soldiers want their experience to be recorded.

They want history to know about what they've done.

I think, through this painting, this is how we can learn, really,

some of the gruesome fighting that did go on.

This, literally, was man-on-man, which is one of the things,

I think, that made Mametz such an emotional battle.

Christopher Williams had special permission from Lloyd George

to go to the front.

Also, in 1916, the government set-up a unique official war art project

to enable artists to portray what was taking place over there.

The first to take part was a Scot, Muirhead Bone.

He went to Mametz Wood and this is his drawing.

Along the edge there is some mud, mud from the Somme,

stuck here for 100 years,

after he had put the drawing down for a minute.

Where Muirhead Bone and Christopher Williams went, others followed.

Soon, everyone wanted to be a war artist,

including Wales's most flamboyant painter.

Augustus John was a legend of London's artistic Bohemia

and he didn't want to miss out on the action.

He badgered his friend Lord Beaverbrook

to get him a commission and he joined a Canadian regiment.

He was allowed to keep his beard,

the only British Army officer to do so apart from King George V.

When he was driven around the frontlines, soldiers,

seeing him, saluted him because they thought he was royalty.

You can imagine how much Augustus John loved that.

His output was limited.

He later admitted to being overawed by the horrific

spectacle of the battlefield.

There are some tender portraits of young Canadian soldiers,

but Augustus John's brief military career ended in disgrace.

He got into a fight with a fellow officer

and was sent home with his tail between his legs.

He needed Beaverbrook's help to stop him being court-martialed.

The conflict between 1914 and 1918 was the first truly global war,

and Welsh soldiers and artists travelled the world.

Lunt Roberts was another cartoonist who served with

the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

His sketchbooks from Palestine and Gallipoli show what he encountered.

Jonathon, these are the sketchbooks of Lunt Roberts

and they show, of course, that the war wasn't just in Europe,

-it was a world war.

-Absolutely.

Lunt Roberts, from North Wales, a trained artist, worked commercially

before and after the war for major publications like Punch...

-As a cartoonist?

-As a cartoonist. Very well-known in his day indeed.

And here he is with a bunch of other boys

from Caernarfonshire and Anglesey,

many of whom probably had never been abroad before,

suddenly transported to the Suez Canal.

Here we have the canal and the railway running alongside it.

It is beautifully drawn and painted,

very much the work of a trained artist

who's got a keen eye for observation.

It's a wonderful composition. Lovely painting.

Hasn't he got a great eye?

And by the time he gets to Gallipoli, of course,

he's knows what it is like, living in the trenches.

He's done a drawing here, which is absolutely wonderful,

-full of detail.

-Yeah.

He is probably the dirtiest soldier in the world, attacking what

looks like a tin of bully beef in the trench,

hat on the back of his head, bristly moustache.

Probably very hot and very fed up and, boy, doesn't he look it?

Lunt Roberts survived a war which was a very vicious war -

a lot of people got killed out there.

Gallipoli, in particular, was very close up and personal.

The trenches, in some places, were just a few yards apart.

A bad climate, a lot of flies, a lot of sickness, illness, disease...

Everything revolting that you can think about was there.

Artists at of the front, whether soldiers like Lunt Roberts

or those on the official war art scheme, were all men.

Women weren't allowed to take part.

Jobs all over Britain were now being done by women and they weren't going

to be left out of the artistic war effort either.

Wales's leading woman artist, Margaret Lindsay Williams,

was no exception.

She later painted kings and presidents,

and one of her wartime paintings hangs in a very grand setting -

the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

This is the regimental headquarters of the Army Medical Services

and it's also the home to

Margaret Lindsay Williams's most impressive painting.

It shows a nursing sister tending wounded soldiers

at Cardiff Royal infirmary and, as it was painted in 1916,

those soldiers were almost certainly wounded at Mametz Wood.

It's quite an extraordinary painting because it depicts a ward

in the hospital where First World War soldiers were being treated.

A lot of the hospitals were set-up around Cardiff,

some in schools, but this particular hospital was given over to

military use for the length of the First World War,

and that particular ward that she's painted ended up being

called Mametz Memorial Ward.

So, even at the time, it was recognised that

Mametz was such an important battle for the people of Wales,

but what's fascinating for me is that you can see the actual

soldiers behind them and what they were doing.

There are some smoking pipes, they are relaxing.

They are obviously not critically ill, but they're there

recuperating in this very neat and organised hospital ward.

Now, it's a big painting, isn't it? It is a very impressive canvas.

It is. She did some very huge paintings

and that's not the largest one, by far.

But it actually hung in the hospital,

so it was to be seen in a public place,

so that's why, I suppose, it was so big.

It wasn't for a domestic house - it was for a public space.

She wanted to go to the front and paint the battlefield,

-but she wasn't allowed, was she?

-No.

Unfortunately, no females were allowed on the front line,

even nurses, at that time, and all artists who were proposed

or put their services forward were rejected.

So, although she wrote to Lloyd George asking, personally,

if she could go and become an official war artist,

she wasn't allowed.

She did, however, do what she could, so she held exhibitions in Cardiff,

for instance, where all the proceeds went to Welsh soldiers.

She also offered commissions at reduced price to raise money

and, of course,

painted this huge painting of the care of wounded soldiers.

The painting shows the growing importance

of women to the war effort.

Women were now working everywhere...

..driving buses and trains, working in munitions factories.

Sadly, little of this is documented in Wales,

but there is one remarkable collection of photographs.

They show women brick-workers at a factory in South Wales.

The women look surprisingly contemporary

and even appear to be having a good time.

But by 1918, the terrible human cost of the war was becoming clear

and artists, even official war artists, began to reflect this.

CRW Nevinson and was born to a family with Welsh roots.

He had worked as a medic at the beginning of the war

before becoming an acclaimed war artist.

In the final year of the conflict,

he produced his most controversial painting.

-Richard, this is a very powerful painting.

-Hm.

-And it was one that was suppressed by the War Office, wasn't it?

-Yes.

It cuts across the reality of, you know, the mud,

the barbed wire, the death at the Western Front.

Now, Nevinson was commissioned, officially, to paint this picture...

-Hmm.

-..or to paint A picture.

Yes.

Well, he was commissioned to produce a body of work,

of which formed part of it.

And the War Office didn't like it?

Unsurprisingly, the War Office censor banned it,

saying that images of this kind can have a detrimental effect

on public morale. And there was an injunction placed on it, basically.

It wasn't allowed to be shown.

You can see why the War Office didn't want this exhibited.

So, what did Nevinson do in order to show it to the public?

He thought, right up to the 11th hour, that the ban would be lifted

and, when it wasn't, he kept it in the show,

his one-man show at the Leicester Galleries.

Instead of taking it down, he pasted a strip of brown gum-strip

over it and wrote "censored", as ever the showman,

the self-publicist, which of course created tremendous public outcry.

And, you know, the people flocked to see this banned painting.

Nevinson, of course, got into no end of trouble with the War Office

over this, but it was water off a duck's back.

He got hauled over the coals over it,

but he gleefully reported back

to his employers at the Department of Information that his show

was enjoying a record-breaking attendance,

so, you know, it had done the job for him.

This painting by Frank Brangwyn was commissioned originally

for the House of Lords but, after the war had ended,

the grim reality of the huge numbers of men killed and wounded

had sank in.

The House of Lords rejected the picture.

They didn't want it, perhaps because it reminded them

too much of the horrors of the previous four years.

But there were some works of art that played

a vital role in commemorating the war,

and they're to be found in every town and village across Wales.

Over 35,000 men from Wales died during the First World War,

and memorials were erected everywhere to mark their loss.

This memorial is in the centre of Wrexham and commemorates

the men of the Royal Welch Fusiliers who were based in this town.

It was designed by William Goscombe John, Wales's most famous sculptor,

and it shows an 18th-century fusilier

passing on the colours to a veteran of the First World War.

This is the war memorial close to the school that

I attended in Mountain Ash.

Building these memorials was a huge project -

nothing like it had been attempted before.

They were built to last and often involved using

the best sculptors, and their power resonates even after 100 years.

In the 21st century, we have technology that allows us

almost instant access to the images

and sounds of battlefields across the globe.

None of this existed during the First World War.

What we know now about life in the trenches has come to us

not only through official photographs and accounts but,

more importantly, from those artists who witnessed the dangers

and hardships of battlefields from the Western Front

to Gallipoli, Palestine and beyond.

Even after 100 years, the drawings, paintings

and monuments that came out of the Great War have the power to

move us as profoundly as anything generated by a century

of subsequent wars and conflict.