If you have not heard of master sculptor Sabin Howard, it’s time you take a look at his powerful work. Art, Howard believes, “speaks to the divine nature of how the Universe is assembled.” Art comes from the human experience, he says, but through his work he also projects a “sacred element elevating other human beings.”

The sculpture at Washington DC’s WWI memorial is 58-feet long and includes 38 life-sized figures. You can find photos and video of the sculpture on Howard’s website but for the full experience, take yourself to 14^th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW and view it in person.

Below is a letter I’ve recently written to Mr. Howard.

Dear Mr. Howard,

Last week I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Washington DC Archives Metro station to the WWI Memorial. Even before I reached there, my heart expanded. I had watched the CBS Sunday Morning story about your sculpture, but I was determined to visit even before that.

When I approached the shallow pool in the middle of the square, immediately I went to the map carved on a marble slab. I found Belleau Wood and traced my finger over the gold lettering where my husband’s great uncle Wells Bradley Cumings took shrapnel in his gut while fighting with the U. S. Marines against the advancing German army. Dragged from the battleground to an infirmary tent, he lived an agonizing four days before death took him. He was eighteen years old, one month shy of his nineteenth birthday. 

I am writing a book about Wells and his brother John Bradley Cumings, Jr., a lieutenant in the Yankee Division of the U.S. Army at the same time. Jack’s job was billeting majors and generals behind the front lines, and he survived the war until his release from service in 1919. At my elbow is a spiral-bound book of Jack’s letters to his mother and grandmother mailed from France. Jack, two years older than Wells, trained Army recruits in the operation of the Big Guns. When on leave, he attended the opera in Paris and ate in nice restaurants, those still open. Most touching is the letter telling his mother of his visit to his brother’s grave at Belleau Wood, which I will visit this coming February. 

Their mother, Florence Cumings, was a first-class passenger on the Titanic. She was in lifeboat number four with Madeleine Astor as she watched the ship sink, carrying her husband with it. Bradley Cumings now rests at the bottom of the sea with the wreckage. I told her story in my novel Sheltering Angel. Now, in my working novel, I intend to tell the story of Wells and Jack through Florence’s aging eyes.

In my deep research into the fighting of WWI, I believe your sculpture has captured the precise emotions of the war in France, and I commend you. I shed many tears as I stood before those proud and anguished figures, especially knowing how true you were to the humanity behind statistics and dry historical accounts of the fighting. Learning about the Great War and visiting your sculpture has given me a renewed respect for our nation’s highly trained and committed military. 

I dearly hope everyone sees and appreciates not only your artistic skill but also your understanding of the real and living men and the depth of sacrifice our military made, and continues to make, to keep us free. Thank you.

Truly,

Louella Bryant