The Living Statue
The design for the living picture on the inside of our front cover was laid
out at the drill ground at Camp Dodge, situated in the beautiful valley of the
Des Moines River. Thousands of yards of white tape were fastened to the ground
and formed the outline on which 18,000 officers and men marched to their respective
positions. In this body of soldiers are any hundreds of men of foreign birth
— born of parents whose first impression of the land of Freedom and Promise
was of the world's greatest colossus standing with beacon light at the portal
of a nation of free people, holding aloft a torch symbolic of the light of liberty
which the statue represents. Side by side with native sons these men, with unstinted
patriotism, now offer to sacrifice not only their liberty but even life itself
for our beloved country. The day on which the photograph was taken was extremely
hot and the heat was intensified by the mass formation of men.
The dimensions of
the platting for the picture seem astonishing. The camera was placed on a high
tower. From the position nearest the camera occupied by Colonel Newman and his
staff, to the last man at the top of the torch as platted on the ground was
1,235 ft., or approximately a quarter of a mile. The figures below give an adequate
idea of the distorted proportions of the actual ground measurements for this
photograph:
Base to shoulder:
I5O ft. Right arm: 340 ft. Widest part of arm holding torch: 12 ½ ft.
Right thumb: 35 ft. Thickest part of body: 29 ft. Left hand (length): 30 ft.
Tablet in left hand: 27 ft.. Face: 60 ft. Nose: 21 ft. Longest spike of head
piece: 70 ft. Flame: 600 ft. Torch and flame combined: 980 ft. Number of men
in flame of torch: 12,000 Number of men in torch: 2,800 Number of men in right
arm: 1,200 Number of men in body, head and balance of figure only: 2,000 Total:
18,000
Incredible as it may seem there are twice the number of men in the flame of
the torch as in the whole remaining design, while there are eight times as many
men in the arm, torch and flame as in all the rest of the figure. It will be
noted that the right thumb is five feet longer than the left hand, while the
right arm, torch and flame is eight times the length of the body.
Although we have no valid information, from the style of the visible uniforms,
we can assume this picture was taken sometime around the First World War.
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