Soldiers, nurses and children appear in rubble-strewn battlefields, their faces expressing anguish, determination and pride – everything seems to be in motion as the figures move through the scenes of World War I.
But the story is frozen in bronze.
The dramatic 58-foot-long sculpture, “The Soldier’s Journey,” is the centerpiece and final element of Washington’s National World War I Memorial, located in Old Pershing Park, just four blocks from the White House.
The 25-ton sculpture is scheduled to arrive in Washington on Saturday and, once installed in the coming weeks, will be the largest free-standing high-relief bronze statue in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World War I Centennial Commission.
“It’s incredible,” Daniel S. Dayton, the commission’s executive director, said Wednesday. “It’s just astounding.”
The official unveiling, or “first lighting,” is scheduled for the evening of September 13th.
The sculpture will join the 90-year-old DC War Memorial as a contemporary tribute to those who served and died in World War I. The sculpture is comprised of 38 larger-than-life figures that depict the journey of American soldiers through the trying grounds of World War I, as it was then known.
The film begins with a departure scene in which the soldier’s daughter hands over his helmet to him. The horror of battle, the shock of the aftermath, and the homecoming parade are depicted from left to right, and in the scene where the soldier returns the helmet to his daughter, a new war is likely to ensue.
Soldiers appear to be shouting, screaming and staggering. One soldier, presumably hit by an artillery shell, stares blankly at the viewer. Nurses tend to the wounded and dying. These elements suggest the tremendous noise of war.
The sculpture took over 10 years to create, and was completed nearly six years after the centenary of the end of the war, but it was a large, complex project that sparked much debate about its location, nature and size.
“It’s been an amazing journey, but a bit of a rollercoaster at times,” said Atlanta architect Joe Weishaar, who created the piece with New Jersey sculptor Sabine Howard. “It’s just great to have it over.”
There have been many changes along the way.
His original plan was to create a 324-foot-long mammoth sculpture, he previously said in an interview, but it was shortened to 116 feet, then to 58 feet. There was also a version featuring a horse, but that was scrapped.
“I think the final product is much better because we were forced to edit it so many times,” he said.
The sculpture, originally made from clay, was created in Howard’s studio in Englewood, New Jersey. Using period costumes, high-tech measuring equipment, and models made up of family and staff, Howard spent four years creating the figurine.
Once completed, the sculpture was shipped to Pangolin Editions sculpture foundry in Stroud, England, about 100 miles west of London, for casting. It will be transported to Baltimore earlier this month, bound, wrapped in black plastic and transported by truck to Washington.
“A lot has changed,” Howard said in a phone interview Monday.
He and Weishaar said they studied many images of the war, including John Singer Sargent’s painting “Gas Poisoning,” which shows soldiers blinded by poison gas.
“Some of my earlier work showed soldiers being traumatized and injured by mustard gas,” Howard says, “but I was asked to remove it because it was too painful.”
“When I started looking at images online and historical images, I realized how human these soldiers are, their wives, their fians, their lovers,” he said.
“The reference to these photographs had a big impact on me because I thought this was a memorial that needed to remember the human beings who were part of this,” he said. “I would say this is for human beings, by human beings, about human beings.”
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution loaned a historic nurse’s uniform to Howard, which she dressed on a model.
Howard found military equipment and soldier uniforms from World War I equipment dealers in Pennsylvania and Montana.
Howard said he was amazed to see the sculpture finally cast in bronze. “The foundry was so good, they even had fingerprints on the metal,” Howard said. “I actually made the sculpture, so my fingerprints are on the metal.”
The World War I Centennial Commission was authorized by Congress to erect the national memorial. The entire project will cost about $44 million, according to Edwin L. Fountain, general counsel for the American War Memorials Commission. He said two-thirds of the cost will come from private donations. The sculpture will cost about $8 million.
The 1.76-acre Pershing Park grounds, which date back to the 1980s, underwent an extensive renovation in 2020 and 2021 with new landscaping, water features and inscriptions.
The new monument was built to honour the sacrifices of American troops, who entered the war late in 1917. But the arrival of American “Doughboys”, as their soldiers were called, along with French and British troops, defeated Germany and its allies after four years of industrial-scale slaughter.
Britain lost about 900,000 men and women, France about 1.3 million, Russia about 2 million, and Germany about 2 million.
About 117,000 Americans died, including 26,000 in the 47-day Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918 alone, which was the deadliest battle in U.S. history, according to the National Archives.
