At the outbreak of war Dix joined up voluntarily and was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In 1916 he fought in battles in both the Somme and in Flanders, and in 1917, the year this picture was painted, he was sent to the Eastern Front of Russia.

"During the War Dix drew incessantly, partly to ease the boredom during the many periods of waiting, and partly to capture on paper the unique experience of being there. He sent these drawings, gouaches and watercolours to Helene Jakob for safe-keeping and did copies of many of them on the back of postcards he sent to her for her own collection. Together, this gives a very clear picture of what interested him in the war. Although Dix does draw the dead and the wounded, he is not overwhelmed by 'the pity of it all' and rarely draws the war's true horrors. Neither did Dix concentrate on actual battle scenes; and when he did, they are dissolved into the force lines of Futurist dynamism...Dix's main effort went into portraying the complete metamorphosis that the land had undergone - into a landscape of craters, trenches, barbed wire and ruins, a landscape devoid of people and totally unlike anything he had seen before." (K. Hartley, Otto Dix, London, 1992, p. 77)

Dorfteich (am Trmpel): Souchez Tal was painted before the Autumn of 1917, when a largely Expressionist drawing style still predominates. However, as can be seen by the jutting diagonals of this gouache, Dix developed a style very close to Campendonck and Franz Marc

This work is recorded in the Dix-Kartei.