栄光への道

Nevinson took the title from a line in Thomas Gray's old poem: the paths of glory lead but to the grave. He painted it in 1917, showing two British soldiers lying dead in the mud among the wire, face down, going nowhere. That was the problem. When he wanted to show it in London in 1918, the official censor forbade it, on the grounds that pictures of British dead would damage morale at home. Nevinson hung it anyway, at a London gallery, with a plain brown paper strip pasted across the bodies bearing the single word Censored. The War Office reprimanded him, both for showing a banned image and for using that word in public without leave, and the row brought the painting far more attention than a quiet showing ever would have. The Imperial War Museum, which had commissioned him, bought it straight from the exhibition.