“A bit of it is my own fantasy about him crawling through the leaves and the sunrise in the morning when the battle starts and him getting wounded and him crawling to this tree to protect himself and then he falls over backwards and looks up at the light spattering down through the canopy and it’s all beautiful and he closes his eyes and doesn’t end up dying. He ends up surviving and goes on to paint a tree often for the rest of his life. The same tree over and over again,” recounts Blondes.

Therefore, 100 years after David Jones crawled, wounded, to the base of a huge tree to await his fate, Jeffrey Blondes set about filming the ash tree he found. “In the first World War most of the trees were decimated by shrapnel,” he explains, “and if you look at the film this one must have survived; all the trees are new growth, narrow little things and this one monster of a tree. So, my fantasy is that he [David Jones] became fixated on the tree that saved his life and he went on to paint it, and now I’ve filmed it…” David Jones and, perhaps, Blondes’ ancient ash tree, survived le Bois de Mametz, unlike 400,000 of his countrymen.