What the Shell Became
A scholarly essay by JCA Archives examining "What the Shell Became", its material evidence, attribution, and historical context.
Abstract
Not gradually. Not in stages. By the terms of the Armistice signed that morning in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, hostilities on the Western Front were to cease at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. And so, after four years and three months of nearly continuous artillery fire - fire so constant and so heavy that veterans described the silence on November 11 as physically disorienting, as something that pressed on the ears like a change in altitude - the Western Front went quiet.
Essay
What the Shell Became - JCA Archives JCA Archives · Collection Essay · JCA.2026.084 What the Shell Became Trench Art, the 81st Wildcat Division, and the Armistice of November 11, 1918 Object U.S. WWI 37mm Gun Model of 1916, AEF Trench-Art Shell Date Case: 1916–1918; Engraving: c. 1918–1919 Accession JCA.2026.084 Collection War & Conflict I. Introduction: The Silence After the Guns At 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the guns stopped. Not gradually. Not in stages. By the terms of the Armistice signed that morning in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne, hostilities on the Western Front were to cease at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. And so, after four years and three months of nearly continuous artillery fire - fire so constant and so heavy that veterans described the silence on November 11 as physically disorienting, as something that pressed on the ears like a change in altitude - the Western Front went quiet. What the men who stood in that silence did next varied. Some wept. Some fired their weapons into the air in celebration. Some sat down and could not move for a long time. And some, in the days and weeks that followed, in billets and field hospitals and transit camps across northeastern France, picked up spent brass cases from the ground around them and began to engrave. JCA.2026.084 is one of those objects. A 37mm cartridge case, seven inches tall, fired through an M1916 infantry gun at some point in the autumn of 1918, recovered from the spent-brass aftermath of combat and transformed, by an unknown hand, into a record of what that person had witnessed. The inscriptions cut into its surface - VERDUN. AEF. 81. O-C-L. 11-11. 1918. - are not decoration. They are testimony. They are the only account this object's maker left behind. II. The 37mm Gun Model of 1916: An Infantryman's Weapon To understand what this cartridge case is, it is necessary to understand what it was. The 37mm Gun Model of 1916 - the Canon d'Infanterie de 37 modèle 1916 TRP in its French designation - was developed by the French Army in 1915 to address a specific and urgent tactical problem: the German machine gun nest. Positioned in hardened emplacements of timber, sandbag, and concrete, a single German Maxim gun could suppress an entire infantry advance, killing dozens before an assault even reached the German wire. The machine gun was the dominant weapon of the Western Front, and destroying its emplacement required something more precise than artillery, more direct than a mortar. The answer was the 37mm gun: a 188-pound direct-fire infantry cannon, accurate enough with its APX telescopic sight to put a round through a narrow bunker aperture at close range, and fast enough in trained hands to fire every four seconds. An experienced crew could walk a succession of rounds into a target with a precision that indirect artillery could not match. The French called it an accompanying gun - a weapon that moved with the infantry rather than supporting it from behind. When the American Expeditionary Forces arrived in France from 1917 onward, the 37mm gun was adopted wholesale into the U.S. Army's infantry organization. Every U.S. infantry regiment in France was assigned a cannon platoon equipped with the M1916, and these guns saw intensive use throughout the Meuse-Argonne offensive of September–November 1918, the largest military operation in American history to that point. The gun and the Stokes mortar together provided the bulk of American infantry direct-fire support in the critical final weeks of the war. The cartridge case of JCA.2026.084 is stamped on its base: 37MM GUN, MODEL OF 1916, LOT 1075-27, P.E.&M.CO. That last mark identifies the manufacturer: Poole Engineering and Machine Company of Baltimore, Maryland, one of the industrial contractors that produced American ordnance components at scale during the war. The primer at the base shows a visible firing-pin strike - the case was fired. Whatever the gun was aimed at that day east of Verdun, the round went downrange. The case fell to the ground, was collected, and waited. Object Record · JCA.2026.084 Caliber 37mm (37×92mm R) Dimensions 7 in. tall × 1.65 in. diameter Weight 612 g Materials Brass cartridge case; ferrous projectile body; copper-alloy driving bands; primer component Headstamp 37MM GUN, MODEL OF 1916 / LOT 1075-27 / P.E.&M.CO. or similar Primer Marked W&S; visible firing-pin strike indicating fired/spent case Projectile Remains seated; stamped 2018 and 3812 or similar; dark oxidation Engraving date c. 1918–1919, based on Armistice date inscription III. Reading the Inscriptions: An Autobiography in Brass The engraving on JCA.2026.084 is not incidental. It is the entire point of the object's survival. The cartridge case had already served its functional purpose when the firing pin struck the primer and the round left the barrel. What the engraver did to it afterward transformed it from ordnance into document - a first-person record of place, unit, and date that required skill, time, and intention to produce. The inscriptions, read as a group, form a compressed autobiography: Inscriptions · JCA.2026.084 · Hand-engraved, c. 1918–1919 VERDUN Geographic designation. Refers to the Verdun sector of the Western Front, where the 81st Division operated during the final days of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, November 1918. Not the 1916 French battle of the same name - the American inscription marks American service in the same terrain, two years later. AEF American Expeditionary Forces - the formal designation for U.S. military forces in France under General John J. Pershing. Engraved within a shield form, a decorative convention common in AEF trench art that echoes both military heraldry and the visual grammar of unit insignia. 81 The 81st Division, U.S. Army. Organized at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in August 1917. Known as the "Wildcat Division." The numeral appears in direct association with the wildcat emblem, confirming the divisional reference. Wildcat emblem The punched or incised figure of a wildcat - the 81st Division's chosen symbol, derived from the wildcat country of the Carolinas and Florida where the division trained. The wildcat insignia became one of the earliest distinctive divisional shoulder patches in the U.S. Army. O-C-L Initials for Obedience, Courage, Loyalty - the guiding motto associated with the 81st Division's Wildcat identity. The letters surround the wildcat emblem, binding the motto and the symbol into a single compositional unit. 11-11 / 1918 The Armistice date: November 11, 1918, the moment hostilities ceased on the Western Front. The most specific and emotionally charged inscription on the object - a date the engraver judged worth recording permanently in brass. These six elements do not repeat each other. Each adds a distinct layer: geography, command structure, division, symbol, motto, date. Together they constitute the most precise statement this object's maker could produce about where he was, who he served with, and when the war ended for him. It is a record made by someone who understood that memory needed anchoring - that without a mark in metal, the experience would exist only in the body, and bodies do not last. IV. The 81st Wildcat Division: Wildcat Country Goes to War The 81st Division was organized at Camp Jackson, South Carolina, in August 1917, eight months after the United States entered the war. It was a National Army division - a conscript formation assembled from the draft rather than from National Guard or Regular Army units - and it drew its men primarily from the Carolinas, Florida, and the broader Southeast. The terrain that gave the division its name was the backcountry of those states: dense pine forest and swamp, the habitat of the bobcat and the Florida panther, country that bred men accustomed to discomfort and self-reliance. The choice of the wildcat as divisional symbol was not arbitrary. It was a claim about character - about the kind of men the 81st believed itself to be, and the kind of soldiers it intended to produce. The wildcat emblem, combined with the motto Obedience, Courage, Loyalty , represented an aspiration as much as a description: disciplined enough to follow orders, brave enough to advance under fire, loyal enough to hold the line for the men beside them. The division sailed for France in the summer of 1918, arriving in August - late enough to miss the grinding stalemate years of the war but in time to participate in its decisive final phase. The Meuse-Argonne offensive, launched on September 26, 1918, was the largest American military operation in history: 1.2 million U.S. troops attacking across a forty-mile front through some of the most heavily fortified terrain on the Western Front. The 81st Division was committed to operations east of Verdun in the offensive's final days, pressing forward in the sector where, two years earlier, the French Army had bled itself nearly to death in the Battle of Verdun. The Americans now fought across the same ground, against a German Army that was exhausted, retreating, and running out of time. It is documented that Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery - commanded by Captain Harry S. Truman, the future President of the United States - supported the 81st Division's attack east of Verdun on November 9–11, 1918. The guns that fired in support of the Wildcats in their final days of combat included Truman's battery. By 11:00 a.m. on November 11, those guns had stopped. V. The Practice of Trench Art: Why Soldiers Made Things The term trench art was coined after the First World War to describe the objects that soldiers and civilians made from the debris of the conflict - shell casings turned into vases, bullet casings into letter openers, helmet buckles into rings, aircraft aluminum into brooches. The practice was ancient: soldiers have always saved material evidence of their service, always made keepsakes from the materials at hand. But the First World War produced trench art at an unprecedented scale, for reasons rooted in the particular character of that war. The Western Front was a war of waiting as much as of fighting. Between assaults and bombardments, there were days and weeks of enforced inactivity in dugouts and billets, hours that had to be filled somehow. Men who had skills - metalworkers, engravers, jewelers, carpenters - applied those skills to the materials the war provided in abundance. Shell casings were everywhere: in the trenches, in the fields behind the lines, stacked in dumps awaiting collection. Brass was warm-toned, workable with hand tools, and durable. It held an engraving cleanly. It would not rust. The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, which holds examples of First World War trench art, notes that some pieces were made in the trenches themselves, while others were produced in hospitals by convalescing soldiers, or in transit camps in the weeks after the Armistice, before men were shipped home. The context for JCA.2026.084 is most likely the latter: the engraving commemorates the Armistice date, which suggests it was made after November 11 rather than during active combat. The most probable window is the weeks between the Armistice and the division's departure for home - a period of demobilization, of waiting, of processing what had happened. Trench art was made for different reasons by different men. Some pieces were made as gifts for family. Some were sold to other soldiers as souvenirs. Some were purely personal, made with no audience in mind - a private act of commemoration that happened to leave a physical trace. The inscriptions on JCA.2026.084 suggest the latter. They are too specific, too personal in their combination of unit, place, and date, to read as a commercial souvenir. This was made by someone recording his own experience, for himself or for someone who shared it. VI. The Engraver's Hand: Technique as Evidence The authentication record for JCA.2026.084 notes that the engraving was executed using punched, incised, and stippled techniques - three distinct methods that indicate a maker with more than casual familiarity with metalwork. These are not the marks of improvised scratching with a nail or a knife point. They represent controlled, deliberate application of appropriate tools to a brass surface. Punching drives a shaped tool into the metal under hammer or hand pressure, producing clean impressions of consistent depth. Incising cuts a line into the surface with a graver or burin, requiring steady hand pressure and directional control. Stippling builds up tonal areas through a field of small dots, a technique that demands patience and a practiced hand. The combination of all three in a single object suggests someone who had handled engraving or metalworking tools before - a tradesman, perhaps, or a craftsman whose civilian skills traveled to France with him. The execution of the wildcat emblem is the most technically demanding element. A figurative image - an animal in recognizable posture - requires the maker to work from a mental model or a reference, to translate a two-dimensional design into incised and stippled brass at small scale. That this emblem is legible, that it reads as a wildcat and not as an indeterminate animal, indicates competence beyond what a first attempt at metalwork would produce. The engraver remains anonymous. No name appears on the object. But the technique itself is evidence of a kind: it tells us that whoever made this had skills, had tools or access to tools, and took the time to use them carefully. The object was not made in haste. It was made with attention. VII. What Remains Unresolved The archive's authentication record is precise about what can and cannot be established. The case itself - the brass cartridge, the headstamp, the primer, the seated projectile - authenticates as a genuine U.S. WWI 37mm Gun Model of 1916 cartridge case, consistent in dimensions, weight, and markings with known examples. The firing-pin strike confirms it was spent before decoration. On these points the authentication is secure. The engraved elements authenticate as a coherent historical group consistent with 81st Division AEF commemorative trench art. The wildcat emblem and the numeral 81 compare closely with established 81st Division insignia traditions. The VERDUN and 11-11/1918 inscriptions align with the division's documented service in the Verdun sector during the final Meuse-Argonne operations. The motto O-C-L matches the 81st Division's known guiding principles. What cannot be established: the identity of the engraver, the specific regiment or battery from which the case was fired, the precise location of that firing, and whether the case was fired by a member of the 81st Division or by another AEF unit operating in the same sector. The inscriptions indicate divisional association and commemorative intent, but they do not prove that the man who fired this round was the man who engraved it, or that both men were Wildcats. The object should be understood as associative evidence of 81st Division service near Verdun at the Armistice - strong, coherent, and consistent, but not individually documented. No documented chain of ownership exists prior to the archive's acquisition. The object carries its history in its surface, not in any accompanying paper record. VIII. Conclusion: After the Guns Set the object down and consider what it required to exist. It required the development, in French arsenals in 1915, of a lightweight infantry cannon precise enough to destroy a machine gun nest at close range. It required the industrial production capacity of the Poole Engineering and Machine Company of Baltimore to manufacture the brass case and seat the projectile. It required the transport of that round across the Atlantic and through the French supply system to a cannon platoon of an infantry regiment operating east of Verdun in the autumn of 1918. It required a gun crew to load it, aim it, and fire it - a crew that may or may not have been Wildcats, whose names are not recorded here. And then it required the guns to stop. And then it required one man, in the silence that followed - in a billet or a field hospital or a transit camp somewhere in northeastern France - to pick up this brass case from among the thousands that littered the ground after four years of war, and to decide that it deserved to carry something more than the factory stamp it was born with. To decide that VERDUN should be cut into it. That AEF in its shield, and 81 , and a wildcat, and O-C-L , and 11-11 , and 1918 - that all of these things should be made permanent in brass, because brass lasts longer than memory, and memory was already beginning to blur at the edges. The archive preserves JCA.2026.084 as what it is: not the ordnance it was made to be, not the weapon it briefly became, but the record it was transformed into by someone who understood that the date November 11, 1918, and the place Verdun, and the unit the 81st Wildcat Division, and the words Obedience, Courage, Loyalty - that these things were worth the trouble of cutting into metal. Because metal holds. Because he had been there. Because someone should know. JCA.2026.084 · U.S. WWI 37mm Gun Model of 1916, AEF 81st Wildcat Division Verdun Trench-Art Shell · Case: 1916–1918; Engraving: c. 1918–1919 This essay is a companion to the full scholarly dossier available at jcaarchives.com/collection/JCA.2026.084/scholarly . The dossier includes extended description, technical analysis, provenance, authentication methodology, comparative works, and bibliography. U.S. Army Center of Military History. Meuse-Argonne: 26 September–11 November 1918. U.S. Army Campaigns of World War I series. · NCpedia. "Wildcat Division." North Carolina Government & Heritage Library. · U.S. Army Institute of Heraldry. "Shoulder Sleeve Insignia: 81st Division." · Laemlein, Tom. "World War I Bunker Buster: M1916 37mm Infantry Gun." The Armory Life, January 2023. · Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum. "Trench Art," April 2017. · Imperial War Museum. "Beauty From The Battlefield: 10 Pieces of Trench Art." · Liberty University Digital Commons. "Obedience, Courage, and Loyalty: The 81st 'Wildcat' Division during World War I" (doctoral thesis). · National Archives and Records Administration. "The Meuse-Argonne Offensive." © JCA Archives. All rights reserved. This record is published for educational and research purposes. ← Return to object record
Citation
JCA Archives. “What the Shell Became.” Collection Essay, JCA.2026.084.