He decided to depict a section of the Ypres Salient, that had been devastated during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge, at the top of the Bassevillebeek Spur, where the British called a cluster of German pill boxes Tower Hamlets.

[6] Nash started painting the huge canvas, which was almost 60 sq ft (5.6 m2), at Tubbs Farm near Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire, using a herb drying shed as a studio in June 1918.

When they had to leave the shed, Paul Nash struggled to find somewhere to work on his painting but eventually, after using two other locations, completed The Menin Road in a room in Gower Street, London in February 1919.

[7] The Menin Road depicts a landscape of flooded shell craters and trenches while tree stumps, devoid of any foliage, point towards a sky full of clouds and plumes of smoke, bisected by shafts of sunlight resembling gun barrels.

Nash had combined graphic ability with sophisticated design, spreading the composition all over the canvas, creating an anti-hierarchy, where the corners and anonymous spaces contain some of the most important and hideous images in the narrative.

Modernist spatial distortion merged with a colour scheme echoing Flemish tapestry, showing the anachronisms of that "phantasmagoric land", in what Wyndham Lewis called "an epic of mud".