As we remember VE Day...

Eighty years ago Sven Berlin had been serving in the Royal Artillery in France, Belgium and Holland and by the end of 1944 was suffering from jaundice and shell shock. Throughout he would draw, sketching local scenes, the children, the soldiers, the villages and inevitably there were self portraits made while in the challenging Bocage (the huge hedgerows of Normandy) where a battle raged until the end of August 1944. It would be another five months before the war in Europe came to an end, although the Forgotten Army continued their battles in Burma and the Far East until August 1945.

As in all military operations there were times of stillness and boredom. Sven filled them with writing and sketching, resulting in letters to the art critic Adrian Stokes that would form the basis of his book I am Lazarus and more than sixty pen and ink and pencil drawings

On D-Day plus 48 Berlin writes:

"These last days I have been written out. There have been heavy rains and we have been flooded out of our trench - mud and water everywhere. Everyone has been short-tempered. Nothing to do but wander along the hedges searching for German equipment. I am a pair of officer's jack boots to the good. I suppose that is what is called Walking in Dead Men's Shoes."

Over a period of five days Berlin has noted the daily appearance of the rotting corpse of a German soldier driven to recording it in a gruesome drawing. The German prisoners also made a resounding impression on Berlin as they were rounded up and put to work (see below).

"I looked into the faces of these men; there was no torture or despair; I rather thought that in their eyes there was relief; some smiled a little nervously... It no longer mattered that they were Germans, for one's hatred - if hatred there had been - ended here... Surely it is for the victor, without any condescension, and even with some humility, to show compassion for the conquered, in spite of what they have done."

Centre image below is of 'Bombardier Tonks' who was the driver of the truck in which Sven travelled. "He is jealous of the carrier, which he loves and cares for and maintains. He is proud of his youth and fine looks, apprehensive of age, spoilt by his sisters and mother."

And finally, one of numerous drawings of the children of Sint Anthonis (Netherlands), Mina. "During today the children came in to play with us... Mina is thirteen... she has a thin tilted nose, protruding teeth and a full face, wearing her hair in short plaits tied with bits of tape. Her clothes are queer: a blue serge jacket, an old tartan skirt over which she wears a clean pink apron...over her black stockings she wears a pair of thick white ones that reach to her knee...then plain wooden clogs."

German prisoners nr Pont sur Bessin by Sven Berlin

The O carrier driver, presumed to be Harry Tonks in I am Lazarus, by Sven Berlin

Mina of St. Anthonis, Holland, one of the many children Sven portrayed.

The final weeks of the war in Europe saw Sven transferred to hospital in Hampshire with jaundice and then, to address his shell shock, to Birmingham "a huge red-brick madhouse which was converted to a military hospital, and there, like fallen statues from a lost civilisation, we were repaired and set upon our feet again..." where he was demobbed on VE Day. Eventually, in a fragile and emotional state he joined his friend, the artist John Wells, a doctor on the Scilly Isles to make a recovery and return to Cornwall and ultimately life in his studio, The Tower.