A massive new World War I memorial is coming to Washington

The 25-ton statue is expected to arrive in Washington on Saturday. When it is installed in the coming weeks, it will be the largest freestanding bronze high relief in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World War I Centennial Commission.

“It’s beautiful,” Daniel S. Dayton, the commission’s executive director, said Wednesday. “It’s just stunning.”

The official unveiling, or “first lighting,” is scheduled for the evening of September 13.

The sculpture joins the 90-year-old DC War Memorial as a modern tribute to those who served and died in World War I. It features 38 life-size figures illustrating the American soldier’s journey through the crucible of the Great War, as it was called.

It begins with a departure scene, in which a soldier’s daughter hands him his helmet. It moves left to right through images of the horror of battle, the shock of its aftermath, the homecoming parade, and then, as the soldier hands his helmet back to his daughter, the hint of another war.

Soldiers seem to be shouting, screaming and stumbling. One, apparently shocked, stares at the viewer in bewilderment. Nurses help the wounded and dying. The elements suggest the enormous noise of warfare.

The statue has been more than a decade in the making, arriving almost six years after the centenary of the end of the war. But it was a vast, complex undertaking that has endured much debate over its location, nature and scale.

“It’s been a great journey, but also a roller coaster at times,” said Joe Weishaar, the Atlanta architect who created the piece with New Jersey sculptor Sabin Howard. “It’s really great to be at the end.”

Many changes took place along the way.

The original idea was for a 324-foot mammoth sculpture, he said in an earlier interview. That was scaled down to 116 feet, then to 58 feet. One version included a horse, which was scrapped.

“I think we came out a lot better in the end because we had to edit so much,” he said.

The sculpting, initially in clay, took place in Howard’s studio in Englewood, New Jersey, using period clothing, sophisticated measuring equipment, and members of his family and staff as models. He spent four years creating the figures.

Once completed, they were shipped to the Pangolin Editions sculpture foundry in Stroud, England, about 100 miles west of London, to be cast. They were shipped to Baltimore earlier this month and, strapped and wrapped in black plastic, will be trucked to Washington.

“It changed a lot,” Howard said in a telephone interview Monday.

He and Weishaar said they studied many images from the war, including paintings such as John Singer Sargent’s “Gassed,” a portrait of soldiers blinded by poison gas.

“Some of my earlier versions showed the soldiers … traumatized and injured 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 historical images online, I saw that the soldiers, their wives, their fiancés and their girlfriends were just people,” he said.

“Referring to those photos had a huge impact on me because I saw that this was a memorial where you have to remember the people who participated in this,” he said. “I like to say it’s for the people, by the people, about the people.”

Meanwhile, the Smithsonian Institution loaned historical nurses’ uniforms, which Howard dressed his models in.

Howard found military equipment and soldiers’ uniforms from World War I dealers in Pennsylvania and Montana.

Howard said he was amazed when he finally saw the statue cast in bronze. “This foundry was so good, we actually got fingerprints in the metal,” he said. “My fingerprints are in the metal from the actual sculpting.”

The World War I Centennial Commission was authorized by Congress to create the national monument. 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 statue cost about $8 million.

The 1.76-acre Pershing Park site, which dates to the 1980s, was extensively renovated in 2020 and 2021 with new landscaping, water features and inscriptions.

The new monument was designed to honor the sacrifice of the American armed forces, which entered the war late 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.

Nearly 117,000 Americans were killed. 26,000 died in the 47-day Meuse-Argonne Offensive alone in 1918. According to the National Archives, it was the deadliest battle in American history.