World War I Poster - Verdun: Road to Y.M.C.A. Canteen
Description:
“Verdun Road to Y.M.C.A. Canteen.” World War I poster. The poster shows a soldier on horseback riding under an arch. Two soldiers riding in a motorcycle are heading the other direction. In the foreground, rubble litters the street. On the bottom it reads “Sketched on spot by Y.M.C.A. secy.,” with the YMCA emblem in the left and right bottom corners. The poster bears a striking resemblance to a Daniel Putnam Brinley sketch titled Ruines de Guerre: Ligne Hindenburg, Soissons, Verdun, Arras, but it is not known if the poster is based on this drawing or whether he created the artwork for this poster.
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During World War I, America depended on posters for mass communication as they never had or would again. The artists who produced these posters typically worked for free. The chaplain of the forces in Verdun wrote that “the work of the Y. M. C. A. man was always with us. . . contributing immeasurable to make life worth living under circumstances well nigh impossible.” While there are accounts of secretaries injured or killed, some accounts of soldiers dispute their presence at the front line. When the United States entered World War I, the YMCA became involved running the military canteens (today called post exchanges) in the United States and France. YMCAs took on war relief for both refugees and prisoners of war on both sides, and worked to ease the path of African American soldiers returning to the segregated South among many other tasks.
The bottom left-hand corner and top left-hand corner have withstood some damage; To see the Daniel Putnam Brinely Print that resembles or that could have been the basis for the poster, see the Kautz YMCA Family Archives Digital Collections - https://dcl.umn.edu/search/show_details?search_string=Daniel%20Putnam%20Brinley&per_page=60&&page=5
