Tuesday 31st October
"What a difference a day makes, twenty four little hours". Usual routine followed by a request from Hammam to contribute some work to the show he's putting on next to the University Gallery. I said I was honoured. Now I just need to find something to go into the show. Hammam likes the large red (Faustian-Esq.) circle I've painted on my floor, and also any brass bullets recast from the shrapnel I collected from my three days walking around Verdun.


Verdun had been chosen by the German Crown Prince as the place where Germany would “bleed France white”. Verdun’s heavily fortified town represented French national pride and was also the key to Paris.
Over 20 million shells fired in one battle, the largest and longest battle in history. Over 8 months of continuous fighting withn an area of 10 square miles, resulted in nearly 1 million casualties.



Three weeks ago I had decided then was the time to visit, and left the very next day to look for my shrapnel.
24 hours later I was very much lost in the ominously named Mortte Homme Forest, stuck in thick bramble and branch, ankle deep in mud, when I noticed an animal the size of a large dog with a bushy tail, only twenty yards away. Do they have wolves in Northern France? I pondered. Probably, I told myself. The second thought was who knows that I am here? Only my Tutor Richard Bell. I made my way out of the Forest.

I did not enjoy being alone in the forests of Verdun. I could not bring myself to scavenge around on the Forest floor, utterly crater marked and trench scarred as it was, as if in painting by John Nash. “Ypres Salient at Night” or the more striking “We are making a New World” being two of my favourite works.



90 years had seen the trees return from the same kind of pitiful stumps recorded by Nash’s masterpiece, yet the floor after all this time would no doubt still be rich in the debris of conflict and death. The guide book carried the following warning.

“It can be difficult and dangerous to walk through the forest because of the shell holes and un-detonated explosives.”(6)


The Forrest, vast and dark, lay deeply silent now, every hole lay in front of me like an open grave, making me think of lines from Wilfred Owens “A strange meeting”.

“It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
To fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared.
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. (7)



I later read the following official account of the clear up operation following the battle.

“In every shell hole there were one or more corpses. There were human remnants and mangled limbs everywhere. We walked along an almost entirely filled up trench where we can see here and there an arm a leg or a head coming out.” (8)

During the three days walking I had only the occasional farmer to inhabit the landscape with me and so my thoughts would run through a myriad of memories. Bill who I had known or rather briefly befriended had served in the trenches of the Somme at 16, receiving the George cross for his trouble. My Grandmothers brother lost at Ypres and her father serving on the Somme. My Grandfather struggling to understand his own life. His father lost to influenza on returning from the war meant his mother was plunged into the Work House, where, my grandfather’s earliest memories were of his brother’s birth and the death of his mother. His only experience of the wider world being a grand tour of North Africa and Western Europe. Stopping off briefly, to clean out the ovens at Dachau before returning home after four years away, un recognised by his own children. I do miss him.

Such memories are not unique or uncommon. It is a sorry example of Human history that such events and experiences are visited upon people daily, throughout the world. Events considerably more confused and harrowing than those mentioned.

If the forests looked as though they had been painted by Nash then the fields appeared to have been painted by Kiefer and global warming meant record breaking September and October weather.

The fields were once again heavy with crops leaving me none of the ploughed fields hoped for.
The only success I did have in Verdun was walking a field containing very new crops, and as I had done so 18 years ago, on the same battle field, I found lump after lump of debris sitting on the surface.


I photographed and picked up all I could carry, before being chased by a farmer on his tractor. I ran into the Forest and hid in a trench. I will take my chances
in the Forest with its unexploded ordinance, Wolves and ghosts rather than with an angry French farmer.


detail of shell compared to detail of surface of Mars

Anyway to more recent events. After talking with Hammam I finished a small ply wood bullet (an idea stolen from the Richard Hudson show earlier in the year) and then at lunch bumped into Kevin. Kevin runs the metal casting workshops at the collage across the road. As I drink with him and some of the other tutors, he'd agreed to let me use his facilities to recast some of the shrapnel. "Tomorrow afternoon would be great" Kevin said.



Richard Hudson/ Maralyn?

I spent the afternoon filling a suitcase with all the plaster, wood and stone debris off my studio floor. I even smashed two large concrete bullets and started to knock lumps off a large stone I have hidden under my chair. I also wrapped my plaster bullet in razor tape, it needed something, but it still doesn’t work.

Left the studio as it was obvious I was no longer being productive, did my banking, went home had a sandwich and went off to work. "What are you reading" the janitor asked. "The Perfect Crime" by Jean Baudrillard" I replied. "Oh you like that sort of Crime thriller do you; I like that book "The Rats".

I eventually convinced myself not to go down the pub but instead went home and made some notes while Chelsea and Barcelona played.
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(6) Yves Buffetaut“The Battle of Verdun” pp82 (8) pp 80 (7) Jon Stallworthy “The Oxford book of War Poetry” pp193 excerpt from “A strange meeting” by Wilfred Owen.