Daily Mail, 'Marching into the jaws of death: Haunting Mail photo of troops launching doomed Afghan assault that's inspired two works of art.'

At 9.26am Afghan time on July 4, 2009, when most people back home were still safely abed, Mail staff photographer Jamie Wiseman took a picture which was to have an unexpected and remarkable legacy.

In itself, the photograph was quite straightforward. It showed the infantry and armoured vehicles of the Light Dragoons Battle Group crossing the Nahr-e-Bagra canal near Babaji in Helmand province.

They were the spearhead for the main thrust of Operation Panther’s Claw; Britain’s biggest ground offensive of the Afghan campaign. I was there to bear witness that day.

The infantry were led by Major Stewart Hill, Officer Commanding of B Company, 2 Mercian. The Dragoons’ armoured troop was under the command of 27-year-old Lieutenant Guy Disney, who was a talented amateur jump jockey.

What neither the photographer nor the men he recorded could know was the impending catastrophe.

Within an hour of the picture being taken the British advance would experience its first ambush. For the rest of the day they were fiercely engaged by Taliban insurgents. That was to be expected.

But by early evening, an extraordinary series of mischances had led to the command and control of the British battle group being effectively wiped out. Three men died, many more were wounded or in need of evacuation for heat stroke or shock.

The careers of Hill and Disney were ended by the horrific injuries they suffered close to the canal. Others, while relatively unmarked, would never be the same as they were before they crossed the ‘start line’ that morning under Jamie Wiseman’s lens.

July 2009 proved to be the bloodiest month of all in Britain’s 12-year Afghan combat operation, which ended last year. Between July 4 and 8, 2009, the Light Dragoons Battle Group alone suffered 66 casualties. 

That figure could not be reported at the time. Wiseman’s picture — when seen with the knowledge of what was about to happen to the advancing men — captured something profound about the UK’s role in Afghanistan and the futility of much of the sacrifice.

Which is why this haunting image has provided the inspiration for two separate works of art exhibited at major London galleries.

The first to be shown, hung at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this year, was a large tapestry by the flamboyant artist Grayson Perry.

It depicts Stewart Hill and two other soldiers who were also badly wounded in Afghanistan returning across the canal at the spot shown in the Wiseman photograph. The second, painted by Stewart Hill himself, is based directly on Wiseman’s photo, and is on show at the Mall Galleries in Central London.

Hill called it Lines Of Departure — which inspired the same title for Grayson Perry’s work — and in it he crystallises the eerie, pregnant calm before the lives of all involved were changed for ever.

Calamity struck as the British advanced into the enemy-held zone of small, tree-lined fields.

First, a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade struck Disney’s command vehicle. The resulting explosion took off the young man’s right leg below the knee. Crouched in a nearby copse with 6 Platoon, 2 Mercian, I heard Disney report the fact over the radio, quite calmly. No more steeplechasing for him.

The rocket strike also killed 18-year-old Private Robbie Laws, who was sitting inside Disney’s vehicle, while wounding Laws’ best friend Private Dan Eaglesfield. He was the same age, and the pair had been through training together.

Before the advance, Eaglesfield had told me: ‘I wasn’t very good at school so I joined the Army. Me mum was furious I was coming here.’ Sensible mum. The boys’ story was told on the front page of this newspaper later that week.

Under fire, the casualties were tended to by their comrades in the battle group before being evacuated by helicopter. But as Major Hill and his support staff walked away from the landing spot, one of them, Lance Corporal David Dennis, of the Light Dragoons, stepped on a large improvised explosive device.

The enormous blast killed Dennis outright, sent shrapnel into Stewart Hill’s brain, and incapacitated the senior NCO, Company Sergeant Major Paul Muckle, and the attached Special Forces’ Forward Air Controller, whose job was to call in air strikes supporting the advance.

Hill was not expected to live. That night he was flown to the UK in a medically induced coma and operated upon. Two pieces of metal were too close to his brain stem to remove safely. They are there to this day.

The neurological side-effects of his severe injuries derailed what had promised to be a high-flying staff career, and he was eventually discharged as medically unfit to serve. He has not been impressed by the way the Army handled his recovery — but that is another story.

Hill had to take a different path, and it has proved to be one few could have imagined. He has become a motivational speaker, giving talks to audiences as varied as the executives at the aeronautics firm Lockheed Martin and schoolchildren across the UK. What is surprising is his flourishing in the art world.

First he appeared as an actor, playing someone like himself, in a touring production about Afghanistan’s military toll. It debuted to some acclaim in the West End at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, under the tutelage of Sir Trevor Nunn.

The play, and Hill with it, then toured the UK and as far afield as Canada, which also lost some 158 soldiers fighting the Taliban.

Hill has also taken up painting. And he is rather good at it. His first attempt at interpreting his own Afghan experience on canvas was a variation of the Wiseman picture.

Hill says: ‘The painting was taken from what I view as an iconic photo of my time in Afghanistan, showing my Company crossing the tactical line of departure before the day affected many lives. For me, the canal represents the line of crossing from friendly territory to enemy.

‘But there are many layers to this painting and image; a departure from my military identity to my civilian one, a departure for Robbie Laws from this life to a different world; for Guy Disney, a departure of his previous physical ability; also a departure from the safety of my career to entering an enemy, new territory, thrust upon me by the shrapnel entering my brain. 

'I placed the birds on the skyline to add balance to the composition, but also the symbolism of it; birds have been interpreted as harbingers of doom. 

'The soldiers are the focal point and I have intentionally diminished the clarity of them and made them more ethereal to suggest a physical departure.’

He adds: ‘I removed the vehicle in the centre of [Jamie Wiseman’s] photo as this distracted the viewer’s eye from the important aspect, the soldiers.’

What then of the other soldiers in the Wiseman shot? CSM Paul Muckle — who has six children — continued in the Army. He was one of the most senior NCOs in the infantry, but was given a Late Entry Commission. Now he is Captain Muckle.

Private Eaglesfield left the Army four weeks ago. He is now a builder, we are told, and has his life ahead of him. 

Jem McIlveen, who commanded Hill’s 6 Platoon, did a second tour of Afghanistan before leaving the Army in December 2013. He has recently married and works for Goldman Sachs in the City. He was at the gallery’s private viewing this week to support Stewart Hill.

Robbie Laws will long be remembered, not least by Guy Disney, who commanded the vehicles captured in Jamie Wiseman’s picture of the canal crossing.

Disney’s achievements have been extraordinary. In December 2013 he was part of Prince Harry’s Walking With Wounded team which reached the South Pole.

This February he came third in the Royal Artillery Gold Cup at Sandown Park, thus becoming the first steeplechase jockey in racing history to ride with an artificial leg.

Leading professional jump jockey Ruby Walsh spoke to Disney before the race and said he was glad to have been at the track to witness his achievement. ‘It’s amazing. It just goes to show that any human being who puts their mind to something can do it,’ Walsh said afterwards.

‘I’d say it was a bigger mental battle than it ever was physical. I tip my hat to that.

‘I think the guy is an inspiration.’

Earlier this month Guy Disney travelled to Worcestershire to visit Wendy Laws, Robbie’s bereaved mother. ‘Guy, Stewart, Jem and others are in contact with me at this time of year,’ she told me.

Robbie’s memory lives on. A recent fund-raising cycle ride by friends from Tower Bridge to Paris brought the Champs-Elysees to a halt.

‘They don’t forget,’ said Mrs Laws. ‘But those who were there, they can’t forget.’

They are touched that so high-profile an artist as Grayson Perry chose to honour their sacrifices.

In his explanatory note when his piece was hung at the National Portrait Gallery, Perry wrote: ‘Stewart Hill showed me a photograph of a troop of soldiers crossing a shallow river in Afghanistan. It was the last photo taken before they were attacked and he received the head wound which was to change his life.’

Perry said that he wanted his tapestry to suggest how Hill and the other soldiers were ‘crossing back over another battle line, on their return to the challenge of civilian life as a wounded soldier’.

Hill’s Line Of Departure painting is being displayed at the 81st Annual Exhibition of the Armed Forces Arts Society, at the Mall Galleries close to Buckingham Palace. He has already been awarded two art prizes.

On July 4, 2009, Jamie Wiseman took a number of other, more technically accomplished, photographs, which would later see him recognised by his peers at the British Press Awards. But nothing else he shot has had the lasting impact of that image of a British column marching to their fate.

The Annual Exhibition of the Armed Forces Arts Society is at the Mall Galleries until July 18. Entrance is free.