The Story of the Memorial Tablets and Massive Bronze Doors at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore
While the Regiment was overseas, the Women’s Board of the Fifth Regiment, which was organized in 1916 when the Regiment went to the Mexican Border, applied and obtained permission from the State authorities to erect an additional Memorial Tablet containing all of the names of the members of the Regiment who died or were killed during the war. The Women’s Board then engaged renowned Baltimore sculptor, Hans Schuler to design and create the tablets.
Hans Schuler was born in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France in 1874 when it was under German sovereignty. His family emigrated to the United States while he was a youngster. He graduated from the Maryland Institute of Art and continued his training in France at the Academie Julian. Returning to Baltimore, he built a studio at 7 East Lafayette Avenue in 1906. Hans Schuler created many public monuments including a statue of President James Buchanan in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C. The sculptor, working with Mr. J. Arthur Limerick, owner of the J. Arthur Limerick Foundry Company, and a committee organized to oversee the design, deter- mined that it would be impossible to balance the two tablets. One bearing the names of over 2,000 volunteers would not harmonize with the artistic tablet the Women’s Board was going to erect. It was during these discussions that Mr. Schuler recommended that bronze doors should be included with the plans for the bronze tablets.
The doors would be in the medieval style. Flanking them and topped by victorious bronze eagles three feet high, would be two bronze tablets bearing the entire roster of the Fifth. Above the doors would be another tablet, on which would appear the names of all those of the Regiment who died or were killed. Surmounting the doors and the memo- rial tablet would be a gray stone arch with a bronze figure of Victory, 13 feet high against a background of rays of the sun.
Hans Schuler spent a year designing and modeling the memorial from photo- graphs of former soldiers and officers of the Fifth Regiment. Particular interest lies in the treatment of the memorial by the sculptor. The group of soldiers depict the Regiment at “zero hour” charging over a trench. One soldier lies dead across the parapet; another, clasping tightly his gas helmet that has fallen off, is sinking to the ground. Around these men are soldiers “carrying on”. One is in the act of loading his rifle.
The two massive bronze doors were installed at the main entrance to the Fifth Regiment Armory in October of 1924.The large bronze tablet above the main entrance to the Fifth Regiment Armory was unveiled at the armory on Armistice Day, November 11, 1925. The memorial tablet bearing the names of 116 members of the 115th Regiment of the 29th Division who lost their lives in the war, was presented to the State by Mrs. Washington Bowie, Jr., chairman of the Women’s Board of the Fifth Regiment. Governor Albert Ritchie accepted the memorial from the donors.
Bishop John Gardner Murray delivered the dedicatory prayer and the large American flag which veiled the tablet was drawn aside by three young boys, sons of members of the regiment. Following the unveiling “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played by the band, after which Taps was sounded. Members of the Veteran Corps sat at each side of the speakers’ stand.
In the principal address delivered at the unveiling of the Fifth Regiment Memorial, Senator William Cabell Bruce declared that the lesson to be learned from the war “is as old as the pass at Thermopylae, old as the plains of Marathon, that the motherland has a claim to our lives which comes before anything else. The citizen serves his country in various ways – the members of the police force occasionally are called upon to lay down their lives in the performance of their duty, but a soldier holds his life continually in his hands and must be ready at any time to lay it down.”
Comments