1943 Exhibition of British war pictures exhibition

WAR AND THE ARTIST by H. V. MORTON The pictures in this exhibition reflect in an accurate and almost prosaic manner the sights now familiar to every one in the British Isles. Nothing like them, of course, has been seen before, because no generation has ever been forced to endure the ironies and the humiliations of Total War. It is not the lovely England of green lanes and thatched cottages,, of old churches rising from elm trees, but it is a greater and finer England that is here presented for your inspection. To my mind, there is nothing depressing about this exhibition. We see venerable and historic buildings levelled to the earth; we see churches that we have known all our lives standing starkly in the roofless dignity of death; we see famous streets cold and silent as Pompeii; we see the human species hiding like rabbits in the depths of the earth; we see children, with their pathetic little gas-mask boxes, round their necks, en route for what is known as a "safe area All these are the commonplaces of life in Great Britain to-day; and while I agree that y u may call them ugly, unfortunate, regrettable, and so forth, I do not think you should call them depressing, because they are the outward signs of a War that we intend to win. The truly depressing pictures of this War could not be painted on canvas. They would depict not buildings, but souls, in ruin; they would picture, not a few frail human bodies, but the spirit of nations cowering in the shelter of abject surrender. Everything that has, so far, happened to our bricks and mortar could be put right in a year or two; but if the same thing had happened to our immortal souls, we could rebuild them only with the tears and humiliations of many a miserable generation. So I beg you, when you look at these pictures, not to say "How terrible!" or "How tragic! ", but see in them the first pictorial records of the first War against civilians, and realize that the more loathsome and terrible Total War becomes the greater is the determination of Britain, not only to hold on and to endure, but to win through to Total Victory. WILLIAM DRING . I often think how remarkably we in Great Britain have changed during the last two years. Strangely enough, most of us are unaware of this. It is, however, only necessary Petty Officer L. C. McKinnon, R.A.N. to encounter someone froin a neutral country or from a country not yet actively engaged 7