We are Making a New World

A shattered battlefield stretches under a cold, rising sun: splintered tree-stumps, churned mud, and shell-cratered earth where a forest once stood, not a living thing in sight. Paul Nash, an official British war artist, gave the picture its bitterly ironic title, We Are Making a New World, mocking the rhetoric of progress with the desolation the war had actually produced. Now in the Imperial War Museum, it is among the most powerful images of the First World War - the devastation of the Western Front rendered as a bleak, almost abstract landscape of total ruin.