The Great Mine at La Boisselle in 1917.

Irish artist Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, visited the Western Front in 1917. In his book ‘An Onlooker in France,’ he records his time on the Front together with some vivid painitings.

This extract is regarding his visit to the great mine at La Boisselle.

The Great Mine. La Boisselle

“The great mine at La Boisselle was a wonderful sight. One morning I was wandering about the old battlefield, and I came across a great wilderness of white chalk—not a tuft of grass, not a flower, nothing but blazing chalk; apparently a hill of chalk dotted thickly all over with bits of shrapnel. I walked up it, and suddenly found myself on the lip of the crater. I felt myself in another world. This enormous hole, 320 yards round at the top, with sides so steep one could not climb down them, was the vast, terrific work of man. Imagine burrowing all that way down in the belly of the earth, with Hell going on overhead, burrowing and listening till they got right under the German trenches—hundreds and hundreds of yards of burrowing. And here remained the result of their work, on the earth at least, if not on humanity. The latter had disappeared; but the great chasm, with one mound in the centre at the bottom, and one skull placed on top of it, remained. They had cut little steps down one of its sides, and had cleared up all the human remains and buried them in this mound. That one mound, with the little skull on the top, at the bottom of this enormous chasm, was the greatest monument I have ever seen to the handiwork of man.

There was another fairly large mine here, just by the Bapaume Road, and there was a large mine at Beaumont-Hamel, and also the "Cough-drop" at High Wood. These were wonderful, but they could not compare in dignity and grandeur with the great mine of La Boisselle.”

View from the Old English Trenches. Looking towards La Boisselle.

(Major Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen, KBE (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931) was an Irish portrait painter. He studied art at the Metropolitan School and at the Slade School in London where, at the time, great emphasis was put on the study of old masters.

William Orpen was made an official war painter of the First World War and in 1917 he travelled to the Western Front. He produced drawings and paintings of privates, dead soldiers and German prisoners of war along with official portraits of generals and politicians. Most of these works, 138 in all, are in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.

He was deeply affected by the suffering he witnessed in the war and his 'To the Unknown British Soldier Killed in France first exhibited in 1923 showed a flag draped coffin flanked by a pair of ghostly and wretched soldiers clothed only in tattered blankets. Although widely admired by the public, this picture was attacked by the press and Orpen painted out the soldiers before the painting was accepted by the Imperial War Museum in 1927).