Gassed Scene

Regrettably, I never met my grandfathers who both died young from suffering gas attacks during World War one and two.

“Gassed” by John Singer Sargent depicts the aftermath of a mustard gas attack during the First World War. The oil painting completed one year after the end of WWI shows a line of wounded soldiers walking towards a dressing station.

The composition is focused on a central group of eleven soldiers depicted nearly life-size. The wounded soldiers walk in a line, in three groups of three, along a duckboard towards a dressing station, suggested by the guy ropes to the right side of the picture.

The gas has temporarily blinded their eyes, so medical orderlies had to assist them. Many suffered from inhaling the gas which affected some more than others. However, in the case of my grandfathers for example, they both had difficulty with beathing disorders.

Many dead and wounded soldiers lie around the central group. Another train of injured, with orderlies, advances in the background on the right.

In the background, the moon is rising, and several men play football in blue and red shirts, as a distraction from the carnage all around them.

Sargent was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to document the war.

Although Sargent was 62, he traveled to the Western Front in mid-1918, spending time with the English Guards Division near Arras, and then with the American Expeditionary Forces near Ypres.

The size of his original painting is 231 cm × 611 cm (91 in × 240½ in), and it was completed in March 1919. It is on display in the Imperial War Museum of London.

Take care!

Prof. Carl Boniface

Vocabulary builder:

Duckboard (n) = walkway, boardwalk, path, planking, catwalk, gang plank

Orderlies (n) = hospital attendant, nurse

Carnage (n) = killing, bloodshed, slaughter, massacre, bloodbath, butchery