center or the initials "C S" intertwined as seen here in the detail from the painting and photo of the Legion in France posing with their flag. This stylized "C S" symbol was used extensively throughout Czechoslovakia during the first republic 1918 - 1939. History in Paris Work on the painting began in September 1914, after the Battle of the Marne, coordinated by French artists Pierre Carrier-Belleuse and Auguste François-Marie Gorguet, with contributions from around 130 artists. The work was undertaken as a private commercial venture, with state support. The completed painting was displayed in Paris in a specially built building next to the Hôtel des Invalides, and inaugurated by the French President Raymond Poincaré in October 1918. Visitors approached along dark corridors to a central viewing platform. It was visited by 3 million people between 1918 and 1927. Display in US The painting was acquired by US businessmen in 1927 and exported to New York, where it was displayed at Madison Square Garden. It was seen there by one million visitors in 8 weeks. Some small changes were made to make the work more attractive to a US audience: Colonel Edward M. House (by then a politician) was painted out and replaced by the US ambassador to France, Myron T. Herrick; an African-American soldier was also added. The work went on a tour of the United States, displayed at the Washington Bicentennial Fair in Washington DC in 1932, at the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago in 1933-34, at the Great Lakes Exposition at Cleveland, Ohio in 1936-37, and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1940. It went into storage in 1940, and was acquired by restaurant entrepreneur William Haussner for $3,400. Liberty Memorial, Kansas City, Missouri Haussner donated the work to Leroy Daniel MacMorris in 1956 to be adapted for display at Memory Hall in the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. MacMorris greatly reduced the size of the work and modified it emphasise the US contribution to the First World War. Only 7 percent of the original work was retained, and large French sections were left out. The reconfigured work has been described as a "Reader's Digest" version, in a Cold War US nationalist context. MacMorris also modified some unrecognisable figures in the US delegations to represent later US figures, such as Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (a First World War