Rex Passion

The Lost Sketchbooks Rex Passion

In 1917, while still in art school, Edward Shenton joined Company B, 103rd Engineers of the Pennsylvania National Guard. He stocked up on art materials, including many canvas-bound sketchbooks and a watercolor set, and went off to train and fight. Corporal Shenton was a combat engineer first and an artist second. He could dig a trench, build a bridge or kill a man with a bayonet, and that was his job, but in his time-off he drew the scenes around him. Whether it was an American ambulance, the cootie-filled shed where he was billeted, a destroyed town or the bodies of dead soldiers, they all made their way into his sketchbooks. Company B held off the German advance across the Marne in July, built bridges across the Vesle under German fire in August and put a road across the Argonne no man's land in the early hours of September 26th. All these exploits were illustrated by his pencil drawings.

When Ed returned home, no one wanted to hear about the war, much less see images of the horrors of battle. He went back to art school and his sketches were put away and forgotten. He had a brilliant career as an illustrator. His drawings graced the cover of Scribner's Magazine for ten years and embellished books by, among others, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolf.

Edward Shenton had a long career as an outstanding illustrator, author, and teacher and, after a very full life, died at the age of eighty-two. Nine decades after they were put away, his son came across Ed's sketchbooks and he and I decided that they, along with his father's wartime story, had to be shared with the world. The result is The Lost Sketchbooks: A Young Artist in The Great War.