DELVILLE WOOD by Bertha Everard
DELVILLE WOOD by Bertha Everard
In 1926 whilst living in Paris, Bertha, Edith and Ruth visited the historic First World War battle site at Delville Woods, France.
Bertha Everard painted a series of works of the desolate trenches.
Only ten of these pictures remain to this day. One hangs in the South African Embassy in London. This Delville Wood is regarded as its companion piece.
Background:
In many of Bertha's Delville Wood paintings, the earth forms dominate with their with twisted forms and jagged remains, conveying the feeling of unease and despair.
However in this piece, Bertha has raised her view and focus upwards towards the sky to depict what appears to be a hallow of clouds sitting above the menacing trees.
One can't help thinking that perhaps after several days of being engrossed in the despair and tragedy of the scene and the tangled earth, which swallows the viewer, Bertha is signing off with a slightly more uplifting view. A conscious act of moving away from the fruitless and hopeless perception of war to a more uplighting sense of greater good and purpose in memory of all the soldiers who lost their lives.
In her own word: '...it might give a painful impression...to suggest that the war was useless and worse which must cut the hearts of the parents . At least it was a good cause that their sons were lost in. '
Delville Wood , First World War
05h00 15 July 1916
121 officers and 3032 men of the 1st South African Infantry Brigade moved forward to Delville Wood with the orders to take and hold the wood at all costs.
18h20
20 July
After some of the most bitter fighting of the War, the Brigade emerged with 2 officers and 751 men.'
Delville Wood, Ten Years After
by Edith King
Three times has Delville Wood been cleared
Of bramble and young thorns
In the ten years since these deep wounds
In piteas earth were torn..
The bloody slopes are covered now,
Flowers greet you as you pass,
But the heart hear a groaning sigh
Beneath the heaving grass.
And still the ground is strewn about,
with bandolier and blade,
Pathetic household pots and pans,
Live shell and hand grenade.
And as they plant the stripling oaks
in shell-pit and on mound.
White bones gleam out, poor skulls and feet,
From the warm-coloured ground.
Nay, Peace! ye see but winter grain
Cold iron, riven sod;
At harvest every dying seed
Yields quickening fruit from God.
