The line this set alludes to was not Pershing's, and the reason it stuck to him is better than the line itself. On 4 July 1917 an American battalion marched to Picpus Cemetery in Paris and stood at Lafayette's tomb, and it was Colonel Charles E. Stanton, Pershing's paymaster, who said "Lafayette, nous voilà." The press could not report that. Censorship forbade printing the name or location of any American soldier in Europe, with exactly one exception — Pershing. The only name correspondents were permitted to print was the wrong one. Pershing spent years handing it back: the credit, he wrote, must go to Stanton for coining so happy and felicitous a phrase.

Two figures on one base, and the gesture is not the man's. Where the villager across the street takes the doughboy by both arms, she gives him her hand and holds it — the older greeting, and the better one for being restrained. She wears a blue-grey shawl over a deep purple skirt and cream apron; he is under full marching load, pack and bayonet, with the gas mask bag riding high on his chest where he can reach it fast. That bag is the detail worth seeing. This is not a parade, and he is only passing through. Put the pair in a village diorama with the doughboy at rest on his rifle and the doughboy in his greatcoat, and the column has somewhere to be going.

W. Britain model 23129. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Two-figure set on a single sculpted groundwork base. Boxed.