start of World War I, Nash reluctantly enlisted as a private for home service in the Second Battalion, the Artists' Rifles, part of the 28th London Regiment of Territorials. Nash's duties, which included guard duty at the Tower of London, allowed him time to continue drawing and painting. In December 1914 Nash married Margaret Odeh, an Oxford-educated campaigner for Women's Suffrage, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square. Her father, Naser Odeh, had been the priest in charge of St Mary's mission and the pro-cathedral, Cairo. The couple had no children. Nash began officer training in August 1916 and was sent to the Western Front in February 1917 as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. He was based at St. Eloi on the Ypres Salient at a relatively quiet time and although the area did come under shelling, no major engagements took place while he was there. Whilst clearly aware of the destruction that had taken place there, he was delighted to see that, with spring arriving, the landscape was recovering from the damage inflicted on it. However, on the night of 25 May 1917, Nash fell into a trench, broke a rib and, by 1 June, had been invalided back to London. A few days later the majority of his former unit were killed in an assault on a position known as Hill 60. Nash considered himself lucky to be alive. While recuperating in London, Nash worked from sketches he had done at the Front to produce a series of twenty drawings, mostly in ink, chalk and watercolours, of the war. Whilst some of these pieces showed the influence of the Vorticist movement and their manifesto, the literary magazine BLAST, the majority concerned the spring landscape and were similar in tone to his pre-war work. Chaos Decoratif, for example, shows part of a trench and a shattered tree amid a scene of almost pastoral calm. The collection was well received when exhibited in June that year at the Goupil Gallery. A further exhibition of these drawings was held in Birmingham in September 1917. As a result of these exhibitions, Christopher Nevinson advised Nash to approach Charles Masterman, head of the government's War Propaganda Bureau, to apply to become an official war artist. Nash was with a reserve battalion near Portsmouth, preparing to return to France in a combat role, when he received word that his commission as a war artist