[1] The title quotes from a line from Thomas Gray's 1750 poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: "The paths of glory lead but to the grave".

He served as an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps in London but was invalided out in late 1915 due to rheumatic fever.

They lie unburied in a muddy landscape that is bare save for barriers of barbed wire and the detritus of war.

Nonetheless, Nevinson included the painting in his official exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in March 1918, but the work was displayed with a brown paper strip across the bodies bearing the word "censored".

[4] Nevinson was reprimanded by the War Office for exhibiting a censored image, and for using the word "censored" in public without authorisation, but obtained significant publicity, particularly as the first exhibition of official colour tinted photographs from the front (including images of actual dead bodies) opened on 4 March.