Death Awed

Percy Smith was an early volunteer in the World War I, but unlike Muirhead Bone and others, he was a war artist only unofficially. Throughout his service, he made sketches of his observations and even had a few etching plates smuggled out to him in between magazine pages. His allegorical etchings of World War I, collectively known as the Dance of Death, were created back in Britain during a period of leave. Smith wrote that Death Awed was etched almost entirely at one sitting, no doubt contributing to its intensity and immediacy. The figure of Death, wrapping close the rags around his bones, is viewed from below against a vast and nearly empty landscape into which the wooden ties of a single track disappear. No bush or tree, no human or animal life, breaks the stillness of the flat distance. Death looks down askance at a pair of boots, empty but for a few shards of bone, mute testament to senseless but thorough killing.