September 13, 1918, St. Mihiel (The Great Black Cloud)

Considered a masterpiece of Kerr Eby's printmaking, the etching September 13, 1918, St. Mihiel (The Great Black Cloud) shows a mass of soldiers in a plodding march through a war-ravaged landscape beneath an ominous black cloud. The troops are a faceless, ant-like army of tiny figures in identical helmets, a dotted line straggling across the bleak open land broken only by the stark upright trunks of denuded trees. On the fringe of the marchers, soldiers labor to move a cannon, preceded and followed by officers on horseback; along the edge of the road, resting soldiers sit, some slumped over in exhaustion.

Eby's image records a decisive World War I military counter-offensive in which French troops and the allied American Expeditionary Force, led by General John J. Pershing, reclaimed the trenches and territory around the town of Saint Mihiel in northeastern France, which the Germans had captured in 1914. The battle was one of the first actions of the war in which American forces were involved, and the victory did much to enhance their prestige and morale. Rather than celebrating the triumph, however, the print suggests the hollowness of victory, the dehumanization of military life, and war's equal devastation of nature and the human spirit. Eby manipulated contrasting tones to evoke the grim desolation of the scorched terrain and the gigantic "Cloud of Blood" that reportedly lingered for days over the advancing troops. In the foreground's dense complex of fine, hairlike lines, figures seem entwined with the ground, prisoners of the clinging mud hampering the progress of the marching army with its ponderous artillery.

Prior to enlisting in the military in World War I, Eby was noted for his prints of idyllic New England landscapes. After serving as a soldier in France, he was haunted by the harrowing brutality and destruction he had witnessed. In 1919, he made his first print of the assault at Saint-Mihiel based on his own wartime experience there. In 1934, distressed by growing conflict around the world, the artist made a second, larger version of the print, of which this impression is one. Eby believed that graphic reminders of war's destructive force would persuade viewers to advocate peaceful solutions instead of another catastrophic war. His faith in the power of reproducible images to influence popular opinion was a view shared by many printmakers of his generation, as demonstrated in such diverse works as Cartoon Warmonger (TF 2004.9) by William Gropper and Raphael Soyer's The Mission (TF 1996.6).

Giardina, Bernadette Passi. Kerr Eby: The Complete Prints. Bronxville, New York: M. Hausberg, 1997. No. 182, p. 127.