René-George Gautier joined the French army's camouflage unit in 1916, training first in Paris before reporting for duty in Champagne by 1917. Tasked with painting and concealing military infrastructure, camoufleurs operated between the trenches, often under extreme risk. As G. Scevola argued in his Memories of Camouflage, 'a fighter without weapons, the camouflage artist was nonetheless a fighter.' From bivouacking in the grim ruins of the French countryside, to marching in the frigid snow, Gautier recorded both the mundane and morbid realities of his life on the front in watercolour and chalk. After the war, his drawings (some now in the collection of the Musees de Reims) inspired larger oils, a number of which appeared at the Paris Salon des Artistes. A review of the 1933 Salon noticed that, even still, 'Mr René-Georges Gautier remains haunted by sombre visions of trench warfare.' As a member of the Association des Peintres et Sculpteurs Anciens Combattants (Association of Veteran Painters and Sculptors), Gautier supported fellow soldier-artists, helping them to organise exhibitions, including his own show of war pictures held in 1938 at Maison de l’Union Fédérale. One of the larger pictures, La Releve (The Relief, or, changing of the guard), shows a weary procession of men on their way to temporarily relieve their fellow soldiers from duty. The trio leading the troop, also similar to the Trois soldats français marchant courbés (Musees de Reims), appear as an echo in our picture of soldiers marching through the seemingly endless wasteland.