First Division Headquarters Kitchen - St. Mihiel Drive

William James Aylward's charcoal and gouache drawing documents a mess kitchen behind the front lines during the St. Mihiel Offensive. Approximately twenty-seven soldiers gather around the ramshackle stone building, eating and resting between duties. The composition captures the mundane reality of military life—cooking vessels, supplies stacked against walls, and men in uniform distributed across the courtyard. Aylward's technique, with its loose handling of figures and architectural detail, conveys both the temporary nature of field operations and the exhaustion of soldiers at a major 1918 engagement. The work belongs to official war documentation efforts that provided visual records of American Expeditionary Forces operations in France.