 What's the kind of tone of the memorial? It's a cavalry charge and it's kind of got those those little you know the iconic touches There's the captain in front and he's got a saber up and they're pointing forward and there's flag streaming and there's you know Muscles rippling in the horses and it kind of feels like a traditional heroic Celebration, what's going on when you look at it more carefully? Uh-huh What's happened to this guy? Yeah, I mean the horse has has either been hit or has tripped What's what is about to happen? I mean what is the story that's gonna unfold here? Yeah, there's a cascade of You know the guys in the back are totally unaware of What's happened in front and the guy the officer leading the charge has got this heroic You know pose and a heroic look on his face But is it oblivious to the fact that this is like the other one kind of in the process of falling apart What's gonna happen to this guy? There's a pretty good chance he's going to be trampled You know because the horses are going to be unable to stop That is supposed to represent Shreddy the sculptor in fact the faces model after his face Which is a kind of odd touch He didn't live to see the entire thing cast and commissioned But you've got the same kind of sense like there's there's energy coming But if you look closely there is the beginnings of a sort of Disaster happening You have to look for it if you just step back you say oh standard cavalry charge looks a lot like the heroic monuments That you would see at Gettysburg or Antietam look more carefully and it's you know kind of brutal realism Not everybody you know not the the charges didn't always work the you know the horses folk fell down What's going on on the ground in both of them? I mean there's like mud in motion How many monuments do you recall seeing where there's so much attention to the Just the ground and how now I mean there's a there's a chop-down tree trunk on the other side I mean it's not like you know these civil war it recognizes these civil war battles didn't happen on a manicured golf course But they happened in in really nasty conditions, and there's it's all in motion too. I mean it's it's mud that's being kicked up It's kind of a dirtier grittier more realistic version of warfare, and this is pre-World War one And this is really you know really different if you if you look at most Statues of generals particularly from the Civil War or statue of Washington, you know They're turned out in you know their general regalia their officers codes, and they're insignia and they're you know Standing erect and their chests are out, and it's a heroic celebration, and that this is something different You get a little bit of that in the front But it's kind of got this ironic twist in that this glorious charge that he's leading is About to meet with a sort of disastrous end I was noticing a few of the other elements You usually don't see in statues as you mentioned the mud and the tree back there But look at the horses mouths and about three or four the horses. They're exhausted The tongues are hanging out especially the one on the far side here the one on the near side Has a wide open mouth, so they've been you know charging for a while This isn't just automatically happening, you know, we're not just starting it that one sort of looks terrified too I mean there's like in the horses and on the on the artillery side There's a sense of you know that they're portraying the fear which is a real part of of the experience that again You don't normally see so what do you think that? What do you think that the? The people who put this up who donated money to it who designed it who casted who erected it How do they want you to think about the war? More realistic Yeah For me and I'm trying to contextualize it within the end of the gilded age and the beginning Imperialism and I'm trying to make sense of it, and it doesn't it doesn't jive with my preconceived notions of what? Expect out of a monument during that time. They were into the stuff that was grandiose and heroic And this is heroic, and it's in a very raw way, but it's not Raw I like that word This should have been erected in 1918 or 1919 right I mean that would fit in with the narrative of how we understand that people kind of gave up their glorious view of Warfare and and adapted a more realistic tone, but it doesn't