A Stirring Monument to America’s Warriors

Sabin Howard’s A Soldier’s Journey brings a cinematic approach to the Great War—and defies the arrogance of Washington’s cultural elites.

Sabin Howard’s engrossing 38-figure, high-relief sculpture—the centerpiece of Washington’s new National World War I Memorial, situated on Pennsylvania Avenue just east of the White House and Treasury Department—takes a cinematic approach to sculptural narrative. It commemorates a civilization-transforming conflict in which 116,516 Americans were killed and 204,000 wounded. The several scenes in what Howard calls his “movie in bronze,” portraying a soldier’s departure from home and family for war and its horrors and then his return, unfold from left to right in a work nearly 60 feet wide.

Entitled A Soldier’s Journey, the sculpture is noteworthy for several reasons. Its kinetic design, with changing tempos and moods and a range of character types, seems to resonate with visitors. In remarks at the memorial’s inauguration on September 13, Howard said that his sculpture heralds “an American cultural Renaissance.” There’s also a polemical edge to his public discourse, as when he told the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent podcast interview that the “art world” treats the public the way the government does.

A Soldier’s Journey appears at a time of growing aversion to elite arrogance and incompetence of the kind that foisted on the public Frank Gehry’s bloviated, $150 million Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial (2021), with its rigid, lifeless statuary groups and enormous, unfathomable background tableau of metallic squiggles supposedly resembling the Pointe du Hoc. Back in 2018, Howard and the World War I memorial’s young architect, Joseph Weishaar, confronted such art-world arrogance when their project ran into headwinds at the federal Commission of Fine Arts, one of the guilty parties in the Ike memorial fiasco. The $44 million World War I memorial, mostly paid for with private funds, could wind up fortifying public opposition to boondoggles like Gehry’s, for which the American taxpayer got stuck with the bill.

There is also a technological angle to A Soldier’s Journey: the important role of digital technology in its creation raises serious questions about how sculpture will be made in the age of artificial intelligence and robots. Suffice it to say that Howard’s magnum opus was not cast from 3-D printouts.

At the beginning of A Soldier’s Journey, the kneeling protagonist receives his helmet from his young daughter, then pulls himself away from his wife and sets off for battle with comrades in arms. At the sculpture’s center, he leads a headlong charge into No Man’s Land, arms outspread toward each end of the sculpture, and afterward stands motionless, gasmask hanging from his belt, peering out at us in shock and disbelief at the carnage. Then comes a parade of returning troops under the Stars and Stripes that includes the wounded—and finally he is back home. Standing now and still holding his rifle, he offers his upturned helmet to his daughter, who peers down into it with foreboding, for the years to come will bring more war.

A seven-and-a-half-foot-tall bronze wall stands behind the figures, which are perched on a ledge of varying depth. The shell-shocked protagonist stands to the fore in the war-churned mire, one of his laced boots extending some three feet from the wall. Aside from a single bayonet, only the flag accompanying the returning troops rises above the wall; it extends a background diagonal from wooden war wreckage in the shape of a distorted cross. The cross appears in low relief on the wall, but no figures do. All 38 are free-standing. (Seven of them, including two battlefield nurses, are female.) Figures closer to the wall diminish in size relative to those in the foreground, as background figures rendered in low relief would in a Renaissance or Baroque work.

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