"After the torch-light red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and place and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience"

 - T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

Lying by the water, nakedly savoring the peace of the grass, two British soldiers take a brief hiatus from the poisonous gas and flinging bullets that plagued the trenches of World War I. Yet despite this image of a short peacetime, death still looms, willing to take even the most vulnerable men under its wing.

John Singer Sargent and T.S. Eliot both shuddered at this atrocity, unwilling to accept the disposability of human life that filled European battlefields for four years. Yet Sargent's Tommies Bathing and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" have a similar sentiment of futility regarding the deaths resulting from the first World War. The nudity and curled positions of the two British soldiers in Sargent's painting show a heightened vulnerability, as they sprawl on the only patch of living shrubbery in sight. Surrounding the men is an abyss of dead, muddy grass, encompassing the image of new life with a looming death. Even without "the shouting and the crying" of the battle, the men still face inevitable expiration. World War I left all artists barren, replacing joyous, carefree images with desolate, nihilistic portrayals of human nature. Death became simply a body count, and individuality meant nothing in the wake of such large-scale extermination.