Salute

Many a picture has been taken in Madison Square Garden, Manhattan, of reeling, dripping men with their eyes swollen shut, their noses bleeding, their knees weak, their arms painfully raised to strike each other more blows for the glory of becoming champion pugilists or for the bald necessity of fighting to earn a livelihood. People glance idly at these fight pictures at home, in the newspapers.

Last week people looked at a new kind of fight picture, 25,000 of them journeyed daily to Madison Square Garden to see it. They had long waits for their turns because the two circular viewing platforms built for the occasion would hold only 600 people at a time.

Around the platforms, which were at two levels, stretched on steel framework at an angle producing an optical illusion of startling actuality, was the 402 x 45-ft. oil painting, "La Pantheon de la Guerre" (TIME, May 2), showing last week for the first time outside of Paris.

In from the once-green fields of France, with dusty roads and winding rivers, in the hazy distance, rides and marches a mighty host, the Armies of France returning victorious from fighting the enemy. Some hairy-chested sappers with picks and shovels shouldered, a squad of mounted trumpeters and a squad of fierce Bedouin cavalry whose cutlasses flash over their white stallions' necks, have already passed between two massive marble cenotaphs that stand at the entrance of a great amphitheatre.

Opposite this entrance, ranged like a football crowd on the tiers of a stadium, beneath a classic portico and around a towering monument of Winged Victory, stand the leaders of the French nation--Marshal Joffre in the centre, "Tiger" Clemenceau, arms crossed, four-square with hands behind his back, with Marshal Foch close by, brooding alone at one side; President Poincare, expectant, surrounded by frock-coated colleagues.

On either side of the French stadium, the white wall of the amphitheatre is low enough to let the beholder see over it into the still-smoking battlefields, seen as from a high hill in geographically exact detail. Within the wall, which is divided into panels by inscribed monuments, stand leading representatives of the Allied Nations, grouped on shallow steps, with each nation's name engraved on a smooth tablet.

George V of England, in naval uniform, stands hand on hip beside a pensive Wales in khaki. David Lloyd George is carrying a cane, fingering his monocle. Lord Kitchener listens attentively to something Lord French is explaining. A white-turbaned Maharajah smiles behind a bag-piping Scot.

No triumphal breezes billow the drooping banners of Belgium, where King Albert stands bareheaded, his children clinging to their mother's hand. Cardinal Mercier smiles forgiveness. Two Red Cross dogs pant patiently. The famed bicycle boy looks ready to ride again. In front of all the Belgians lie the broken fragments of Gothic masonry. Between Belgians and British, lilies at her feet, stands Nurse Edith Cavell with posthumous decorations on her flowing cape.

In "Italie," Poet D'Annunzio makes an impassioned gesture towards King Vittorio Emanuele. Mussolini is not present. Russia, Rumania and Japan are grouped together, a Bolshevik stealing toward them with a flaming brand.

In front of the small dark door of a stately sepulchre, kneels a woman's figure in black, alone, anonymous, the mother of the Unknown Soldier.

Artist Pierre Carrier-Belleuse, who, too old to fight in 1914, banded 19 other French painters together and with money from a retired banker projected this vast canvas monument to the greatest of France's wars, and who painted his Winged Victory while German guns were echoing in Paris itself, has apologized for the proportionately small space given to the U. S. section of the "Pantheon." The reason is simple enough. The original painting was completed before April 6, 1917.

Only with much labor and patience was the ensemble readjusted to introduce, between Siam and the Balkan States, a section showing Woodrow Wilson, a manuscript in hand, standing beneath a bust of Washington with Secretary Lansing, Theodore Roosevelt, Samuel Gompers, Colonel House (now replaced by Ambassador Myron Timothy Herrick) on one hand and Secretaries Daniels and Baker, Admiral Sims, General Pershing, Anne Morgan and many more on the other side. Marching by in the formation made famous by Painter Archibald M. Willard's "Spirit of '76," led by a West Point cadet with drawn sabre, an overalled workman, a white-collar businessman (carrying the Stars & Stripes) and a woolly-legged cinema cowboy. "Doughboys" and "devil dogs" look on. The naval men have not come to attention for the flag salute. But that is because the whole panel, like the whole painting, is a salute.

In Manhattan, the "Pantheon" is being exhibited to benefit the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. Its present owners, J. S. Bretz of Manhattan and R. R. Powers of Paris, plan to send it on tour to any U. S. cities having funds and a place to show it. Later it will go to South America, London and back to Paris where, if the owners have got their investment back and fulfilled all their pledges to patriotic organizations, it will become the property of France and be established as a permanent national exhibit.