Career When World War I began, Baldridge traveled through occupied Belgium and France as a war correspondent and illustrator. Using a German letter of passage he interacted with the conquered and their conquerors. He traveled through war zones on bicycle, horse cart and horseback until his money ran out and he returned to Chicago. Called to Mexico as a member of the National Guard he was on the Mexican/American border in 1916 to repulse Pancho Villa and in 1917 he joined the French Army as a stretcher bearer. The entrance of the United States into the war required his transfer to the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). In the AEF he joined the talented team that brought the Stars and Stripes newspaper into being. Baldridge was the chief artist on staff that included Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker, Alexander Woollcott, drama critic for the New York Times, and others who later achieved considerable fame. As a journalist, Baldridge traveled freely and saw as much as any general. His work appeared in virtually every issue of Stars and Stripes from March 1918 until the end of the War in November, 1918, and portrayed the full range of emotion of soldiers facing death at the Front. HaroldRoss called him the greatest illustrator of the War. Cyrus Baldridge saw as much of the War as anyone could, having traveled with the German army as a journalist in the beginning, and later being part of both the French and American campaigns. He had walked among piles of dead soldiers and lines of innocent people filling the roads after their homes had been destroyed. He had begun as an idealistic follower of the Wilsonian dream but, by the end, was dreadfully disillusioned with war and the colonialism that lay behind it. In the Chicago Evening Post he described what he had seen as ". . . a nightmare of horror: a red vision of machine guns and dead men, inspiring only a feeling of disgust for the cold efficiency with which it was accomplished." Baldridge's reputation as an illustrator was launched in the United States when his battlefield drawings appeared on many covers of Leslie's Weekly and Scribners. His illustrations in Stars and Stripes reached an audience of 530,000 soldiers weekly by the end of the War and many copies were sent home to family and friends. After the war he assembled his sketches