While in France, they saw heavy action, and at the end of the war in November 1918, of the 3,700 men originally in the regiment, 580 men were killed and 1,487 wounded, with four of the regiment's soldiers being awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The memorial depicts seven men. It was dug out of the sand in which it had been buried for nearly 2,000 years and was encased in a great iron cylinder, 92 feet (28 m) long and 16 feet (4.9 m) in diameter. Photographs taken near the time the obelisk was erected in the park show that the inscriptions or hieroglyphs, as depicted below with translation,[15] were still quite legible and date first.
