The avenue at war

This paper examines artists’ and writers’ interpretations of the avenue, one of the primary landscape motifs in the battlefields of the Western Front during the First World War. As a key element in the iconography of the battlegrounds the tree‐lined road served many metaphorical functions — as an emblem of continental Europe, as a metaphor for both forward propulsion and the disintegration of directional thrust, and as a symbol of the underlying geometric infrastructure of parks and farmlands devastated by years of war. Drawing upon the work of established and amateur war artists the paper traces the several stages in the battlefield road from an undeviating straight and noble avenue to a meandering track lost in the formless void of No Man's Land.