Whilst in France Nash had made a pen-and-ink drawing he called "Sunrise, Inverness Copse". Inverness Copse was the site of heavy fighting in the summer of 1917 during the Battle of Langemarck, part of the Third Battle of Ypres and Nash depicts the aftermath of the fighting, showing a landscape consisting of mud and blasted trees illuminated by a pale yellow Sun. Early in 1918, when Nash decided to produce a larger oil painting based on this drawing, whatever little hope that pale Sun represented had vanished. The bitter title, "We are Making a New World", clearly mocks the ambitions of the war but is also a more universal reference than the previous title and represents a scene of devastation that could be anywhere on the Western Front. There are no people in the picture nor any of the details of, for example, "The Mule Track" to distract from the broken tree stumps, shellholes and mounds of earth. The Sun is a cold white orb and the brown clouds of the original drawing have become blood red. One modern critic, writing in 1994, likened it to a 'nuclear winter' whilst one of the first people to see it in 1918, Arthur Lee, the official censor responsible for the British war artists, thought it was a 'joke' at the expense of the public and the art establishment.