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

Kerr Eby, who enlisted in 1917 as an engineer attached to an artillery regiment, experienced firsthand the horrors of war in the battles of Château-Thierry and Saint-Mihiel. This print powerfully depicts the immense cloud that hung for several days above the troops; it perhaps recalls the gas that poisoned many soldiers but also suggests the crushing darkness of mind that haunted survivors. The cloud occupies three quarters of the picture space, dwarfing a long line of trudging troops and cartloads of wounded arrayed in monotonously repetitive procession, hunched bodies reduced to faceless anonymity and wrapped in gloom. The print is all the more arresting when one realizes from the date, 1934, that it is a retrospective memory of horrors experienced many years before.