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Thélus, Zivy Crater Cemetery

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The ravages of bombardment

‘Well, if you knows a better ’ole, go to it’, cartoon by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, The Bystander’s Fragments from France, London, no date.

‘Well, if you knows a better ’ole, go to it’, cartoon by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, The Bystander’s Fragments from France, London, no date.

The most famous soldier cartoonist of World War I was Englishman Captain Bruce Bairnsfeather, and arguably his most famous cartoon was ‘Well, if you knows a better ’ole, go to it!’ It depicts two British soldiers under shell fire in that most characteristic of Western Front locations, a shell hole.

The front–line areas of the Western Front have often been described as ‘lunar’ landscapes, pockmarked as they were by endless craters – the result of artillery shells and underground mine explosions. When he first went to the Belgian town of Ieper (Ypres) in August 1917 as Australia’s newly appointed official war photographer, Captain Frank Hurley observed the devastation of the shells:

Returning to the car in the evening over the shell–cratered roads we came on an enormous crater, – God knows what did it, but pacing around the lip it measured 75 yards round, its depth about 25 to 30 feet! Then we came to a tiny courtyard which had escaped for some time the ravages of bombardment. Straffed trees were coming cack to life and budding, and there beside a great shell hole blossomed a single rose. How out of place it seemed amidst all this ravage. I took compassion and plucked it – the last rose of Ypres.

Frank Hurley, diary, 4 September 1917,
http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms–ms883–1–5–s23

A shell crater measuring 68 metres in circumference, Ypres, Belgium, October 1917.

A shell crater measuring 68 metres in circumference, Ypres, Belgium, October 1917. [AWM E00707]

A German Army artillery barrage during an attack on Hill 204 near Chateau Thierry, Aisne, France, c.1918. [AWM H04425] A German artillery crew firing a camouflaged 15cm gun, Arras, France. c. 1917. [AWM H13150]

Royal Marine artillerymen unloading 15 inch [0.38 metres] howitzer shells, Menin Road, Ypres, Belgium, October 1917. [AWM E00922] A German artillery crew loading a 21 cm howitzer, Arras, France, May 1917. [AWM H13160]

The crew of a German Army heavy railway gun preparing their partly camouflaged weapon to fire, France, 1918. [AWM H13304]

Artillery on the Western Front

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© 2008 Department of Veterans' Affairs and Board of Studies NSW :: Last update - November 2008