ORPEN'S book, long out of print, was first published in the immediate aftermath of the Great War which is its subject. He went to France in April 1917 as an official war artist a respected category at the time, which included Sargent and Lavery.

Orpen himself was an established painter with a thriving portrait practice, a figure in London society, and like many other civilians he had high minded ideas about the war in general and the Western Front in particular. What he saw, for the most part, was very different from his expectations.

This is not a book of conscious, outspoken disillusionment like the war writings of Sassoon and Graves, or even Henry Williamson. Orpen was neither an intellectual nor a critical, questioning antinomian of the type which became common in the Twenties.

He was an Anglo Irishman of his class and epoch, who genuinely believed that Field Marshal Haig, the British Commander in Chief, was a great man. By becoming virtually an official propagandist Orpen was fighting the good fight for the empire and for Europe.

Most other war artists stayed only a few months at the Front Orpen stayed until the end of the fighting and then painted the signing of that surety for another war, the Versailles Treaty. He had his own car and chauffeur, drove about pretty much as he wished with the help of special passes, ranked officially as a major and struck up a good relationship with Haig.

In spite of this apparently privileged treatment, he had frequent brushes with officialdom and recorded them tartly particularly with an unnamed "Press Major" whose hectoring self importance proved troublesome.

Some staff officers were civil and even hospitable, but others were bullying and rude and treated artists as they might treat a hack writer. Orpen soon seems to have realised that military bureaucracy was very much like any other kind and, being streetwise and adaptable, he learned quickly how to work the system to suit himself.

He met back slapping General Charteris, later infamous as the man who fed Haig flattering reports from the front, and painted most of Haig's army commanders, including Rawlinson and Plumer. Another sitter was "Boom" Trenchard, the prophet of mass civilian bombing.

Curiously enough, there is no mention of General Gough, Orpen's fellow Irishman, a leading figure in the Curragh Mutiny and later Haig's scapegoat for the British retreat in the face of Ludendorfl's spring offensive of 1918.

He also portrayed Marshal Foch, probably the greatest soldier of the war, whose personality impressed him deeply, and on a visit to the Tank Corps met but unfortunately did not paint the brains of this new tactical weapon, whom he merely calls "Napoleon". This was, in fact, J.F.C. ("Bony") Fuller, later to become a major military historian and an acerbic critic of Haig and of the British command in general.

These "formal" portraits are sprinkled through the book, but many of the on the spot sketches show a different side of things. Behind the banter, the jokes and music hall songs, the conviviality in officers messes and French hotel dining rooms, Orpen was experiencing shock, disillusionment and even revulsion.

The scarred, lunar landscape of the old Somme battlefield, the nightmarish sights on the Ypres Salient, the grim debris of battle and the cheapness of human life were experiences which struck home deeply. He began to feel and suffer with the common soldier, to despise the smug civilian attitudes at home, and to wonder where and how it would all end.

He also suffered physically from what he was first told was lice, then scabies, and finally, after a spell in an unspeakable army hospital, was diagnosed as blood poisoning ("I have it still").

Orpen was no artist with words, and much of the book is chat and anecdote of the type which seemingly was expected of artists (vide his and Lavery's memoirs). He was, however, a sensitive man behind the socialising and almost schoolboy humour, and he recorded grim sights with his pencil and brush in an unfashionable mood of stark objectivity.

Bruce Arnold compares his war art with Goya or Rubens this is flying high, and a closer comparison might be with Nash and Nevinson. Nevertheless, it was well worth bringing this two thirds forgotten artist's record back to light. {CORRECTION} 96050200119