Soldiers, nurses and children appear on a battlefield landscape littered with debris. Their faces show anguish, determination and pride. Everything seems to be in motion as the figures advance through scenes from World War I.
But the story is frozen in bronze.
The dramatic 58-foot-long sculpture “A Soldier’s Journey” is the centerpiece and final element of Washington’s National World War I Memorial, located in the former Pershing Park just four blocks from the White House. Once installed, it will be the largest free-standing high-relief bronze in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World War I Centennial Commission.
“It’s magnificent,” Daniel S. Dayton, executive director of the commission, said Wednesday. “It’s just stunning.”
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The 25-ton sculpture arrived in Washington on Saturday morning, welcomed by a crew of construction workers and members of the World War I Centennial Commission.
As the sun rose over downtown D.C., an air of anticipation filled the former Pershing Park. Workers in bright green vests and white hard hats meandered through the fenced-off sidewalks, making their way to the site. Members of the centennial commission walked along the perimeter, eyes peeled for the orange trucks hauling the bronze work to the District from Baltimore.
Terry W. Hamby, chairman of the commission, stood on the safe side of caution tape surrounding the park and mused about the personal history that led him to this day. The 77-year-old recounted his family’s six generations of military service dating back to the Civil War. On the Mall, Hamby said he had looked out at memorials for the veterans who fought in Korea, World War II and Vietnam — all conflicts at least one of his family members had fought in.
He was struck by the absence of a federal marker for veterans like his grandfather who fought in the Great War. With no living World War I veterans remaining, Hamby said he felt compelled to advocate for one before the war fell so deep into history no one would think to memorialize it.
“It felt like if this generation didn’t build it, it wouldn’t be built,” he said.
Around 7 a.m., the bronze pieces arrived. The four largest sections weighed nearly five tons each. Workers wrapped the bronze with black plastic to shield the art from curious eyes and then carefully balanced each heavy piece on the hook of a crane. The crane lifted the bronze scene into the air piece by piece and gently set each component in place inside the park.
Moving the chunks of heavy metal sculpture took hours of careful balancing, rebalancing and moving the pieces to fit just so within the park. Throughout the morning, small groups of tourists and passersby stopped to watch the progress. But no one could see the details of the statue work hidden behind black plastic covers.
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The memorial will be revealed in full on Sept. 13 at a “first illumination” ceremony that members of the public can register online to attend. The plastic covers will be removed, the fences will come down and visitors will be able to walk along the tableau of the full bronze sculpture.
The sculpture joins the 90-year-old D.C. War Memorial as a modern tribute to those who served and fell in World War I. It consists of 38 larger-than-life figures that illustrate the American soldier’s journey through the crucible of the Great War, as it was known.
It begins with a departure scene, in which a soldier’s daughter hands him his helmet. It proceeds from left to right through depictions of the horror of battle, the shock of its aftermath, the homecoming parade and then, as the soldier gives his helmet back to his daughter, the hint of another war.
Soldiers appear to shout, scream and stumble. One, apparently shell shocked, stares out at the viewer, stunned. Nurses help the wounded and dying. The elements suggest the tremendous noise of warfare.
The sculpture has been more than a decade in the making and arrives almost six years after the centennial of the end of the war. But it has been a large, complex undertaking that weathered many debates about its location, nature and size.
“It’s been an amazing journey, but sometimes a roller coaster,” said Joe Weishaar, the Atlanta architect who created the piece along with New Jersey sculptor Sabin Howard. “To be at the end is really great.”
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There were many changes along the way.
The original idea was for a mammoth sculpture that was 324 feet long, he said in an earlier interview. That was cut down to 116 feet, and then to 58 feet. One version featured a horse, which was scrapped.
“I think where we’ve ended up is so much better because we were forced to edit so many times,” he said.
The sculpting, initially in clay, took place in Howard’s studio in Englewood, N.J. Using period clothing, high-tech measuring equipment, and members of his family and staff as models, he spent four years creating the figures.
Once finished, they were shipped to the Pangolin Editions sculpture foundry in Stroud, England, about 100 miles west of London, to be cast. They were transported to Baltimore earlier this month and, tied down and wrapped in black plastic, will make their way to Washington by truck.
“It morphed a lot,” Howard said in a telephone interview Monday.
He and Weishaar said they studied many images from the war, including paintings like John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed,” a portrait of soldiers blinded by poison gas.
“Some of my earlier iterations showed the soldiers … traumatized and wounded by mustard gas,” Howard said. “But I was asked to take it out because it was too much, too much pain.”
“When I started looking at images online, historical images, I saw how the soldiers and wives and fiancées and girlfriends were human beings,” he said.
“The reference to those photos had a huge impact on me because I saw this was a memorial where you need to remember the humans that partook in this,” he said. “I like to say it’s for humans, by humans, about humans.”
Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution lent historical uniforms of nurses in which Howard clothed his models.
Howard found military equipment and soldier uniforms from dealers in World War I paraphernalia in Pennsylvania and Montana.
Howard said he was stunned when he saw the sculpture finally cast in bronze. “This foundry was so good that we even got fingerprints in the metal,” he said. “My fingerprints are in the metal from the actual sculpting.”
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The World War I Centennial Commission was authorized by Congress to erect the national memorial. The entire project cost about $44 million, according to Edwin L. Fountain, general counsel for the American Battle Monuments Commission. He said two-thirds of the cost came from private donors. The sculpture cost about $8 million.
The 1.76-acre Pershing Park site, which dates back to the 1980s, was extensively refurbished with new landscaping, water features and inscriptions in 2020 and 2021.
The new memorial is designed to honor the sacrifice of the U.S. forces, which came late to the war in 1917. But the arrival of American “doughboys,” as the soldiers were called, along with the armies of France and Britain defeated Germany and its allies after four years of killing on an industrial scale.
Britain lost about 900,000 men and women, France about 1.3 million and Russia about 2 million. Germany also lost about 2 million.
Almost 117,000 Americans were killed. Twenty-six thousand alone perished in the 47-day-long Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918. According to the National Archives, it was the deadliest battle in U.S. history.
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