most commentators focusing on how Nash had portrayed nature, in the form of devastated woods, fields and hillsides, as the innocent victim of the war. The Menin Road In April 1918 Nash was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to paint a battlefield scene for the Hall of Remembrance project. He chose to depict a section of the Ypres Salient known as 'Tower Hamlets' that had been devastated during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge. Once his work for the Void of War exhibition was complete in June 1918, Nash started painting the huge canvas, now known as The Menin Road, which was almost in size, at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire using a herb-drying shed as his studio. He completed the piece in February 1919 in London. The picture depicts a maze of flooded trenches and shell craters while tree stumps, devoid of any foliage, point towards a sky full of clouds and plumes of smoke bisected by shafts of sunlight resembling gun barrels. Two soldiers at the centre of the picture attempt to follow the now unrecognisable road itself but appear to be trapped by the landscape. 1920s When the war ended Nash was determined to continue his career as an artist but struggled with periodic bouts of depression and money worries. Throughout 1919 and 1920 Nash lived in Buckinghamshire and in London where he made theatre designs for a play by J. M. Barrie. Along with several other artists, Nash became prominent in the Society of Wood Engravers and in 1920 was involved in its first exhibition. From 1920 until 1923 Nash taught, on an occasional basis, at the Cornmarket School of Art in Oxford. Dymchurch and Iden In 1921, after visiting his sick father, Nash collapsed and, after a week during which he repeatedly lost consciousness, was diagnosed as suffering from 'emotional shock' arising from the war. To aid his recovery, the Nashes moved to Dymchurch which they had first visited in 1919 and where he painted seascapes, the seawall and landscapes of Romney Marsh. The seawall at Dymchurch became a key location in Nash's work. The conflict between land and sea depicted in the seawall paintings at Dymchurch recalled elements of Nash's paintings on the Western Front and were also influenced by his grief at the death of his friend Claud Lovat Fraser in June 1921. In 1922, Nash produced Places, a volume