English: The preliminary drawings show that Colville worked on uniform details and on specific parts of the soldiers' stances and anatomy. He worked with two concepts for the finished painting, however. One features the figures moving towards the viewer, and the other, away. The only completed watercolour is of the latter, which suggests that the final composition was not the one the artist initially chose to develop. Colville himself was brief in a diary description of how the composition came into being: "On 1 February [1945] I envisaged my first big canvas - the subject being infantry marching in single file along a road. That morning I made numerous sketches of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles marching, then a study of a desolate road. The following day ... I did a pen and wash drawing, Infantry, from the previous day's sketches.