The name is seventy years older than the war it's stuck to. "Doughboy" appears in accounts of the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, and it began as an insult — mounted troops sneering at the men who walked. One dragoon wrote that no man of spirit and ambition would join the Doughboys and go afoot. That dating disposes of the two origin stories usually told: the dust of the 1916 Punitive Expedition arrived seven decades too late, and the Salvation Army's doughnut girls didn't start frying in France until 1917. Nobody knows where it really came from. The candidates are adobe dust in 1840s Mexico, brass buttons shaped like dough cakes, and pipeclay that turned to paste in the rain.

W. Britain has him standing easy, both hands folded over the upended rifle with its butt on the ground — a man told to wait, doing it well. He wears the M1917 helmet, wool service tunic, breeches and wrap puttees, with the cartridge belt, canteen and haversack rig of an AEF infantryman in France. Rest is a scarce subject in a WWI diorama, and that is what makes him useful: build a village billet behind the lines around him, with the French villager waving the Americans in and the woman blessing them as they pass, and the doughboy in his greatcoat waiting out the cold beside him.

W. Britain model 23119. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Single foot figure at rest on a sculpted groundwork base. Boxed.