laststandonzombieisland

Much as once a week I like to take time off to cover warships (Wednesdays), on Sundays (when I feel like working), I like to cover military art and the painters, illustrators, sculptors, and the like that produced them.

Combat Gallery Sunday : The Martial Art of C. LeRoy Baldridge

Born May 27, 1889 in Alton, New York, Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge was a gifted artist even as a youth. Accepted at age 10 as the youngest student at Frank Holme’s Chicago School of Illustration, he paid his way through the University of Chicago painting signs and selling sketches, graduating in 1911.

About that time he joined the Illinois National Guard as trooper in the Chicago Black Horse Troop, 1st Illinois Cavalry Regiment and, like all the other mounted units of the U.S. Army and reserves, was called up in 1916 and rushed to the border with Mexico following the attack on Columbus by Pancho Villa’s raiders. Once demobilized, he sought adventure in Europe and, as the U.S. wasn’t in the war just yet, enlisted as a medical orderly (stretcher bearer) with the French Army.

When the Americans did go “over there” Baldridge was able to transfer to the AEF but, instead of using him as a cavalryman or corpsman, Pershing used him as a member of the growing number of war correspondents. Roaming the Western Front embedded with the doughboys, he made hundreds of sketches from the front line. He even bumped into his old mates from the Illinois National Guard who had left their sabers behind as their regiment had been rechristened the 124th U.S. Field Artillery and saw the elephant at St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne and the Lorranie.

This immense body of sketches appeared back home in Leslie’s Weekly and Scribners while the troops he covered saw them in Stars and Stripes. He remained in Germany into 1919 with the army of occupation.

After the war, many were fleshed out for his first book, I Was There with the Yanks on the Western Front, Sketches, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919. The 340-page work is here for free.

An idealist who once said of war, “If only I can make the public see what war is – what a dirty, low thing it is, and how brutal it makes men, fine clean men – then they’d fight to the last ditch for the League of Nations,” Baldridge was a champion of peace in the 1920s and 30s, leading a small and controversial segment of the American Legion.

He co-founded and later led the New York-based Willard Straight Post of the American Legion who took what was seen then as a leftist and downright pacifist attitude towards war. The post was later investigated in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

During this time he roamed the Earth with his wife, producing hundreds of works for books and magazines alike, bring the world back to readers in the U.S. the way a camera never could.

During WWII he helped illustrate and produce a series of Pocket Guides to West Africa and Iran for the War Department as well as lending his brush to war loan art.

Once his beloved wife died in 1963, Baldridge began something of his own quiet decline.

The end of his career saw him in the desert, painting haunting landscapes in which people seem far off and in a dream. No more trenches. No more machine guns. Just high desert and adobe for as far as the eye can see.

One summer afternoon at his Santa Fe, New Mexico home in 1977, he ended his own life with a pistol he had been issued in World War I while “with the Yanks.”

His work is celebrated extensively by the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, to which he made large contributions while smaller collections exisit at the Smithsonian,  New Mexico Museum of Art, and Fisk University.

Baldridge’ old unit remains as the 106th Cavalry Squadron, part of the 33rd Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois Army National Guard.

Thank you for your work, sir. May you find peace.