Coming out at Hill 60

Depicts members of the 1st Australian Imperial Force, 4th Division, in full kit walking along duckboard tracks over trenches, in a war damaged landscape. This image was reproduced in 'Australia at War' (London, 1918) with the following caption; 'Little groups of men burdened with the appliances of their trades file slowly across the hummocks of Flanders mud. They come out of endless holes and go into endless holes like lonely ants bent on some ant-like service … Ant-like in the distance, they loom upon a nearer vision things elemental and Homeric, big with destiny. They are merely soldiers at the base, perhaps shopmen at Brisbane, but they are things of mystery in the line. I feel that here all soldiers of all ranks tend to have the baffling profundity of the peasant, that sense of the nearness to the beginning of things which makes the artist see in the peasant the simple, unsolvable mystery of life reduced to its least common multiple – man shorn of all his vast cultures, which are not mysterious, and left simple man, which is.’

Will Dyson was the first Australian official war artist to visit the front during the First World War, travelling to France in December 1916, remaining there until May 1917, making records of the Australian involvement in the war. He was formally appointed as an official war artist, attached to the AIF, in May 1917, working in France and London throughout the war. His commission was terminated in March 1920.