Smith was posted to the Somme in 1916 as a gunner with the Royal Marines. Unauthorised sketching was forbidden, but Smith had a sympathetic Captain who allowed him to continue. In 1917 his parents smuggled etching plates out to him and he began his ‘Thiepval etchings’, actually drypoints, which he was later able to print at Southampton Art Club. It was the year after the War ended that Smith produced his most famous War etchings: the series of seven that comprise The Dance of Death; powerful anti-war images with the allegorical figure of Death, inspired by the medieval concept which had gained momentum during the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, an ‘echo’ of the 1918 influenza pandemic which Smith himself experienced.