‘A Soldier’s Journey,’ the centerpiece of the nation’s World War I monument, was five years in the making in New Jersey by artist Sabin Howard

With candles glowing and trumpets blowing, in a ceremony that combined stirring music and somber reflection, America’s World War I memorial was officially dedicated Friday night in Washington, D.C.

“The greats of the Italian Renaissance and their lineage played forward to create excellence in this memorial, and I know they are watching tonight,” said Sabin Howard, who assembled the mammoth bronze frieze over a four-year period in a 5,000-square-foot studio in Englewood.

He was speaking to the crowd of about 1,000 military veterans, politicians and the lay public, gathered at the recently created National World War I Memorial Urban Park — formerly Pershing Park — abutting the Federal Triangle in downtown Washington.

“This memorial is like a wedding ring,” said Joseph Weishaar, the architect of the project. “It is a symbol honor and fidelity and commitment that has remained vibrant for nearly a century between the nation and the men who served in the first world war.”

“A Soldier’s Journey,” the centerpiece of the nation’s World War I monument is a sculpture that tells a story.

So it was fitting that sculptor himself should be on hand, to narrate.

“This is a story of what happens to one family and one soldier when he enters into service for his country.” Howard said in a recorded narration during the presentation. “The soldier is an allegory for the United States. It explains the hero’s journey through World War I.”

In the presentation, called “First Light,” the crowd was taken, panel by panel, left to right, through the 58-foot long, 10-foot high bronze frieze.

As first one section and then another lit up, Howard — his recorded voice — told the story. The father, being handed a helmet by his little daughter, going off to war. The soldier, now one among many, in an agonizing tableau of bayonets and bombs, with fellow doughboys screaming and nurses caring for the wounded. And finally — in the last panel — the returning civilian handing the helmet back to his little daughter.

Then, after the crowd had a good look, sequentially, at the 38 figures, all the lights went up. And there it was, all complete: “A Soldier’s Journey,” dedicated on General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing’s 164th birthday, and the new main attraction in what used to be called Pershing Park on 11th Street.

It is now the National World War I Memorial Urban Park — the $40 million project of the World War I Centennial Commission (the war ended Nov. 11, 1918) and paid for largely through donations.

An appropriate setting

The sculpture itself, the largest freestanding bronze relief in the western hemisphere according to Howard, is just part of the project.

The whole square has been re-landscaped, with fountains, a reflecting pool, and berms on three sides to dampen the traffic noise and create a quiet atmosphere for contemplation. An existing statue of General Pershing by Robert White (grandson of architect Stanford White), on site since 1983, has been worked into the new scheme.

“It’s a very serene place,” said Joseph Weishaar, the architect of the park. “Especially with the fountains going. You have the roar of the water, evocative of the sounds of war.”

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It was Weishaar, winner of a design contest by the Centennial Commission for his submission “The Weight of Sacrifice,” who brought Howard on board as his sculptor of choice.

“His accomplishment is one of amazing craft,” Weishaar said. “I don’t think it’s rivalled anywhere. My role is like a jeweler making a ring. I made the ring. But Sabin is the diamond. The sculpture is the diamond. That’s the piece that everybody is going to be wowed about.”

On the reverse side of the tableau is inscribed part of a poem by Archibald MacLeish:

“Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope

or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We died. Remember us.”

Howard’s sculpture, like this verse, is not jingoistic. But neither is it cynical. It invites viewers to ponder the first modern war, the “war to end all wars” that killed 116,516 Americans (40 million worldwide) in a global cataclysm that was viewed by many afterwards as a tragic, senseless waste.

“As an artist, I’m very anti-war,” Howard said. “I didn’t make a sculpture about the glorification of war. I made a sculpture about human beings that are there in a very noble and heroic act of being in service to one’s country. This is their story. It’s to honor them. And I’ve had hundreds of letters from military families saying thank you, finally, for acknowledging us. The cool part is, they’re saying thank you for your service.”

That was, in its way, heroic too.

A long term project

For five years, Howard, his assistant Charlie Mostow, and a handful of others put in long days in the Englewood studio. For hours on end, models posed, Howard sculpted, and his wife, filmmaker Traci Slatton Howard, documented.

One by one, Styrofoam “maquettes” were covered with clay to create the figures, which were then transferred through a silicon mold to wax, which in turn became the ceramic shell. These were sent over to England to be cast in bronze. For the last month, on and off, Howard has been on-site in Washington D.C., supervising as the pieces were put in place with cranes, in the setting that Weishaar created for them.

“The reassembly was incredible,” he said. “Four panels, 38 figures, and everything has to fit. If it doesn’t, what are you going to do — chop away the stone or something?”

“A Soldier’s Journey” is a monument, in more than one sense.

To all the soldiers and civilians who served and died in World War I, certainly. More, to all soldiers, in all wars (veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars served as models).

But additionally, it’s a monument to an idea: Sabin Howard’s fervent belief that modern America needs a public, neo-classical art. An art that unifies rather than divides. An art that can ennoble our squares and promenades, the way Michelangelo’s and Donatello’s sculptures adorned the piazzas of Florence.

“In the Renaissance, they used to make sculptures like the David, and they would put it in the square,” said Howard, who trained in Italy and at the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts).

Such art, he said, uplifted. “It was a symbol of rising to the occasion, as a nation, and on a citizen level,” he said. “This is the exact same damn thing. I made a sculpture with 38 figures that shows a tapestry of the United States and its variety, with women, children, Democrats, Republicans, all under one flag as Americans. We are one unified country. That’s what the sculpture is.”

African Americans, Asians and Native Americans are included among the figures (though Howard takes the liberty of showing Black soldiers fighting alongside whites; the U.S. army was then segregated).

“This is something that brings us together,” Howard said. “Most modern art brings us apart.”

Aftermath of war

Ironically, it was World War I itself, and the ensuing cynicism about war and sacrifice, that gave rise to the iconoclastic modern art movements that dominated Western culture for the last 100 years. With “A Soldier’s Journey,” Howard wants to use that same war as a jumping off place, to bring the heroic back to art. “This is an American cultural renaissance,” he said.

His next project is also in that vein: an “American Exceptionalism Arch” project in Dallas, which will probably be completed 10 years from now. It too, will uplift and ennoble. “It’s another epic sculpture, which this many figures and this amount of story,” he said.

One thing he says he learned from working with veterans during the World War I project: the notion of being “in service of.”

“I feel that my work is in service to something greater than myself,” he said. “That’s what I’m so excited about.”