Fields of Battle Lands of Peace 1914 - 1918

Images shape the memory of the Great War until now – black-and-white photographs of devastation and battlefields. The more astounding are images that show the old battlefields in a completely different way – photographs full of colour and comeliness.

After the wars of the 19th century nature reconquered the battlefields in shortest time; a few month after heaviest battle the cornfields heaved again attending the harvest. In the Great War this was different. To heavy had been the artillery impact on the soil of Europe and the traces of its devastation had been visible for long. But after hundred year also these scars only can bee found at a few places and give an impression how waste they had been laying once.

Michael St Maur Sheil shows with his gaudy photographs in this book, how the battlefields in France, Alsace-Loraine, Italy, Eastern Prussia, the Namib desert, the Dardanelles an in Palestine look today. He didn’t go for the dull industrial estates that were built over the old trenches but focused on the way nature healed the blody wounds of the Great War and recreated flourishing landscapes.

The results are photographs of an outstanding poetic power. In a ten years photographical odyssey Michael St Maur Sheil traveled the sites of the Great War together with the late Richard Holmes and built up a unique collection of photographs that pay tribute to the adamant course of time and show how nature metamorphosed those places of slaughter and horror into landscapes of amazing beauty and silence.