Crisp against the gloaming, a bugle sounds a rising then falling strain.

　　It’s 5 pm. It’s cold. Yet in the nation’s capital, something embers. While DC’s iPhone-occupied evening toilers and travelers scurry about to their next diversion, the lone uniformed Doughboy standing at 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue signals a time-honored but incongruous musical thought of reflection for day’s ending.

　　My feet or my heart or my head have drawn me back here again, to the inscribed words, the murmuring water splatting, and the parading in bronze—of the human, and of the nation— that all together make up America’s newest national monument, the National World War I Memorial, at Pershing Park.

　　Alongside of its American precursor, the French version of “Taps”, la sonnerie “Aux Morts”, was sounded. Dignified French and American speakers at the event reminded their audience that between their respective militaries is the “oldest continuous military friendship our [American] nation has ever known.” Such words are fitly sounded here, mere steps south from Lafayette Square and the White House, and within the statuesque hearing of the general tasked with America’s arguably first physical repayment of its Revolutionary War debt to France, with Pershing’s command of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) onto French soil.

　　Since 1862, “Butterfield’s Lullaby”—better known as “Taps”—has sounded across US military installations each evening to signify the close of the day as also to remind their members to honor by a moment of recollection those who have given their lives for the nation. Since May 24, 2021, Taps has also each evening sounded from this juncture. Inspired by the nightly sounding of the “Last Post” at the Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium and at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia, the National WWI Memorial is the only memorial in the United States to host daily Taps by a live performer. Individuals can even entwine themselves into the Memorial’s living history by sponsoring a daily performance/bugler, honoring a veteran(s) of their choosing in the process.

　　Taps is the twenty-four note secular “Nunc Dimitis” for the sleeping soldier—while the last bugle call of the day, it gives promise of reveille. The tradition harkens back to ancient sunset rites, performed to ensure the sun’s return. No wonder Taps is also, famously, played at every American military funeral—evenings and funerals alike bearing witness to endings and the hope of renewal. Is such the promise too, to a nation, of the national memorial?

　　For those approaching from the White House direction, the outward-facing raised inscription on the west side, on the granite wall which doubles as the “Peace Fountain,” seems to introduce a similar question with this challenge pulled from ambulance driver cum artillery officer Archibold MacLeish’s poem, “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak”:

　　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 have died, remember us.

　　Give our deaths meaning. Remember us. I’m struck suddenly by whether this request gives voice to the individual combat soldier silenced by the imperious Pericles in Thucydides’ famous version of the Athenian Funeral Address of 431 BCE. Then, Pericles had insisted that it was the glory of all those dead soldiers to remain nameless and anonymous behind the name of Athens. Since Athens was the “school of all Hellas,” it was enough that they had died expanding Athens’ glory. But Americans have always wanted to know who their soldiers were. Hence, national cemeteries and the creation of the dog tag. Hence, each individually carved name or presence on each headstone in every national cemetery. Hence, each of the 58,000 inscribed names on Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial further down Constitution Avenue. Citizenship, for us, is never merely collective.

　　What of honor and glory does a nation receive because of its everymen? What does each individual citizen receive of honor and glory by mere virtue of being a citizen of that particular nation? To what extent is it a symbiotic flow? On the other side of this MacLeish inscription is the heart of this Memorial: American sculptor Sabin Howard’s 58-foot long, ten-foot tall, 25-ton “movie in bronze,” The Soldier’s Journey. It is now the largest free-standing, high relief bronze sculpture in the Western Hemisphere.

　　These sons—and mothers and daughters too—of America, have followed their great-souled forbearers in making good in blood, sweat, treasure, tears, and futures leveraged, their citizen pledge.

　　I think again of how Thucydides called his written retelling of the greatest world clash of his day, the Peloponnesian War, an everlasting possession that he was gifting posterity. And of how (also world-encompassing) Roman civil wars survivor Horace called his own war-born poetic enterprise a monument more lasting than bronze. Sabin Howard says simply of his art: “bronze beats mortality.”

　　Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them—this succeeding verse from the MacLeish poem is nowhere carved on the Monument but its sense everywhere pervades the space. If not a Pericles, someone must still articulate a meaning.

　　When then-25-year old architectural design intern Joeseph Weisharr submitted what would become the winning Memorial concept to the World War I Commission in 2015, he titled it, “The Weight of Sacrifice.” The Commission was wanting to restore the memory and honor of the 4.7 million Americans who served and the over 116,000 who died in WWI. Weisharr and his sculptor partner Howard likewise wanted to rescue and resuscitate the figure of the human from the desiccating abstractionism that followed WWI. Naturally, their thoughts narrowed to the individual AEF soldier and his experience of war—his coming into war, his being at war, and his eventual coming out of war, whether through death or a return to civilian status.

　　Surely, within such a journey was an almost necessary echo of the archetypal “hero’s journey.” And surely, within the AEF soldier’s journey was any soldier’s journey. The journey always begins rooted in a family and a community, being uprooted from it, being changed thereby, and returning back to a community and a family, to compute the dividends of what no longer is against what has endured. From their standpoint in the 21st-century, Weisharr and Howard thought of that WWI American soldier’s story as being the American Soldier’s story. They call the central figure in the Memorial’s centerpiece, The Everyman.

　　Thirty-eight roughly human-sized figures make up The Soldier’s Journey. The Everyman is, of course, recurring and the most prominent figure across the sculpture’s five continuous panels, read left to right. But the only figure otherwise that occurs twice is the one that introduces and concludes the human parade, that of the soldier’s daughter, in mirroring acts of giving to and receiving from her uniformed father his battle helmet.

　　When standing several steps back from the sculpture to take in the whole tableau, one notices how it is the daughter alone who steps into and away from the bronze backdrop, her figure half illuminated by the more brightly colored granite structure against which the sculpture is anchored. If what compels a person as a citizen of a liberal democracy to enter into a war is to secure the freedom of and a future for his children, then that future having been secured, his children will still have to face the choices presented by the legacy of that war, including the choice or the necessity of entering additional wars.

　　Or, as one US Marine Corps officer exhorted a 250th USMC Birthday Ball audience at Henderson Hall last November: “Inheritance is responsibility.”

　　The century the soldier-father hands to his daughter in his upturned helmet is, soberingly, the century of World War II; the Korean War; the Cold War; the Vietnam War; the Bosnian War and the Yugoslav Wars; the Gulf War; 9/11 and the War on Terror. It is a century of a world laboriously reconstituting itself along different lines. Only 100 years removed from WWI do we know that this rough legacy is also within the meaning of America’s participation in the Great War.

　　The five panels that depict the Soldier Everyman’s journey flow fluidly from “The Departure”, to “The Initiation”, through to “The Ordeal”, on to “The Aftermath”, and finally to “The Return.” The reluctance that characterized America’s entry into WWI is subtly indicated in a half-turned female’s attempt to grip onto the forearm of the already turned-away soldier, himself being pulled forward arm-in-arm with another soldier, both having yet to pick up their rifles. This is not Edward Berger’s scene of the young German school boys enthusiastically rushing to enlist in the German Imperial Army in the 2022 film Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). There are no schmaltzy soaring eagles or American flags in hand to plant on foreign soil—just the soldier, half-kneeling to pick up finally his bolt-action rifle to join the fray he can no longer avoid.

　　Perhaps American glory is commensurate with a tangible, even roughly measurable, physical commitment to the truths it holds to be universally true.

　　Nor is this a monument to some supposed glory that is war. But perhaps it is a monument to that yearning in the human breast for a freedom that sometimes requires fighting wars. The rifle the soldier picks up from the earth, muzzle upwards pointing, could be a question or a statement, left for the viewer: Is there some shared heritage in valuing human freedom that propels all Americans, a something in our shared “clay”? So many of these AEF soldiers themselves had barely become American citizens before they returned to Europe, now clad in a United States uniform. Is what motivated so many of them a sense of personal responsibility to defend the belief in a right to freedom, universal to all human beings, for which they had so tangibly striven for themselves, despite this particular war not occurring on America’s soil?

　　Do shared material interests alone suffice to make a nation? Ernest Renan famously posed the question to a Sorbonne audience in 1882. He did not think so: “Communities of interest determine commercial treaties. However, sentiment features in the making of nations. A nation is a body and soul at the same time.”

　　Howard is showing us the soul of a nation. It is in the surging bodies, male and female both, propelling ever forward. It is in the outstretched hands, now leading, now guiding, now rescuing, now entwining and comforting, and finally offering—or giving outright. It is in the undulating flow of movement and stillness that makes up the whole tableau. It is in the conviction of each of the figures’ stances. And above all, it is in the faces, etched with the experience of a hundred emotions.

　　Howard has sculpted another gift to the nation within this particular memorial, and it has to do with these faces. They bind together in a flesh that will never decay 100 years of warfare and soldiering: Post-9/11 soldiers who saw combat in Afghanistan and Iraq served as Howard’s models. “You have to get veterans because the faces have to look like they carried that history of combat and what they went through…. It’s a pretty telling story of the horrors of war revealed in the facial expressions, and it’s on that wall to be there forever…,” Howard has revealed. Elsewhere, Howard has been explicit that “this sculpture is in service of our nation…. It is in service of the veterans today and the veterans that are no longer with us…. [T]hey will be revered, because this sculpture is for them.”

　　Reverence is something different from triumphalism. Revealing the glory of a noble deed and conviction is not the same thing as glorifying the bloody occasion that may have called either forth. Howard wanted, he told Smithsonian magazine, “to make something relevant to our age, to find the thread that runs through humanity—that human beings can reach great heights, and they can sink to the level of the animal.” As the bronze tableau suddenly becomes kinetic in the third panel, “The Ordeal,” the mass of soldiers surges forward, still making their charge toward the unseen enemy despite some slipping and falling into the mortared mud. The Everyman Soldier recalls American Marine Sargeant Major Daniel “Dan” Daly, whose iconic war cry as the US Marines charged in Belleau Wood in June 1918, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” has inspired (if not embodied) many a succeeding Marine.

　　The shock of that encounter is spelled out in “The Aftermath,” with nurses helping to tend to the shattering soldiers. There’s a battlefield pieta against the gas mask and discarded helmet detritus, and the iconic barbed wire cheval de frise, here supplying the physical cross missing in Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial pieta further down the National Mall. Nurses reappear in the scene, upholding a soldier and masking his eyes against the carnage. But what that soldier caught in the suffocating horror cannot see is the final tableau, set off startlingly by the Everyman Soldier, now standing upright, eyes wide, and fully frontal to the eyes of us and all the world.

　　Is he standing in witness to all those lives lost behind him in that long journey, or in confrontation to all us civilians who neither did then nor attempt now to retrace their steps? Or is he a declaration? The memory if not the experience that must be taken forward for us to move forward? Only after that unscripted standoff between the Everyman and us do the entwined figures turn homeward in “The Return”, their feet gradually leaving the uneven battlefield mud to rest on firmer, cleaner ground. And only here, with soldiers sustaining their battlefield brethren shoulder to equal shoulder away from the chaos, do their rifles with their muzzles now downward-pointing announce the possibility of carrying a flag—the American Flag—unfurled forward. But that flag always remains in hand—it is never planted in that foreign soil. Then it returns home, just as the Everyman Soldier does, to hand off to his daughter and the next generation of Americans—if not a still young America.

　　The flag moves forward but its symbolism trails behind. Pulled from Willa Cather’s war novel One of Ours, and inscribed on the northeast side of the WWI Memorial, are her words that seem to guide the rest of the tableau: “They were mortal, but they were unconquerable.” Arriving at the conclusion of Sabin Howard’s A Soldier’s Journey, one is convinced of the magnificence of the human memorial. It is not a monument to the glory of war, but that does not mean that it is not a monument to the glory that can be man-made, whether by human individuals or nations, and sometimes in war but never, for Americans, only by war. What then is the meaning of the American glory represented so artfully across the National WWI Memorial?

　　Perhaps American glory is commensurate with a tangible, even roughly measurable, physical commitment to the truths it holds to be universally true about the inherent human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As with America’s War of Independence and its Civil War, so WWI was also a downpayment or interest come due in blood and suffering on its commitment to those principles—this time on an international rather than domestic scale. We finally made good on our promise to our oldest ally, France, by sending General Pershing to stand on its soil with American soldiers. And so perhaps what is so important to Americans about WWI is that it illuminates what American glory is: a trust fulfilled to upholding its honor.

　　With all his strength of an impassioned Frenchman, Ernest Ronan averred that a nation has far less to do with geography and more with “a soul.” That soul is made up of a common past and a present shared in common of our national memories (“une nation est une âme, un principe spirituel,”):

　　The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, sacrifices, and devotions…. A heroic past with great men and glory (I mean true glory) is the social capital upon which the nation rests. These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered.

　　A nation is therefore a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make.

　　Perhaps without either of their knowing, Sabin Howard and Joeseph Weisharr exercised Ronan’s meaning via their Soldier’s Journey and their Everyman, and yet quite American, soldier. The Memorial itself, and the contemplation of it by everyday citizens, prompts the civic dialogue between our shared past and our shared present necessary to sustain a democratic future that we would want to live with, not less gift our children. Perhaps what is not so important is coming to some definitive national agreement about the wisdom, alignment with the American Founders’ vision, or even strict constitutionality, of America’s first deployment of its soldiers abroad to fight a foreign war—all legitimate questions inevitably wrapped up in our considerations of WWI. Perhaps what is more important, or at least more valuable, is what this newest national monument gives us: a chance to contemplate what one generation of Americans committed to as their understanding of American honor.

　　They say we leave you our deaths, give them their meaning / We were young, they say, we have died, remember us. Time, it seems, a long passage of time, has been necessary for us to make meaning for America of the totality of the Great War both then and in our national story. And this 250th year of nationhood has added even a new sheen to the National WWI Memorial: This is America’s monument in bronze that indeed these sons—and mothers and daughters too—of America, have followed their great-souled forbearers in making good in blood, sweat, treasure, tears, and futures leveraged, their citizen pledge to each other of their lives, their fortunes, and above all, of an honor sacred to them as Americans and as free and equal human beings.