Painting, memory and the First World War

[Excerpt] American soldiers who visited Paris while on leave during World War I brought home paper souvenirs of the experience that are remarkably consistent from individual to individual. The year 1918 stood, after all, at the dawn of a new age of mass tourism marked by the homogenizing and commodifying of travel experience.1 Such soldiers kept their Metro tickets (many of these men had never been on a subway before), street maps, guidebooks, postcard booklets, and sundry brochures for reading rooms, historical tours, and wholesome theatricals sponsored by the ubiquitous Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), which worked at the bequest of General John J. Pershing to keep doughboys away from the City of Light’s less wholesome attractions. Still unearthed from time to time in dusty corners of attics or storage sheds, their original owners long dead, these hundred-year- old collections of touristy mementos also frequently contain a souvenir booklet for a now-unfamiliar, long-forgotten Paris attraction—the Panthéon de la Guerre, then the largest painting in the world and one of the most ambitious war memorials ever conceived.