WHAT: Grant Memorial, Washington D.C.

His pedestal of white marble is 22 feet high, and Cincinnati, his enormous war horse, stands in bronze on top of it, so that by the time you reach Ulysses S. Grant himself, the crown of his slouch hat is 43 feet up in the air. Behind him the white dome of the Capitol gobbles the sky. Before him the long Mall stretches far away.

Grant watched thousands of good men die. In two amazing sculpture groups to the general's left and right, onrushing Union soldiers, desperate and doomed, are fighting the Civil War.

The sculptor, Henry Merwin Shrady (1871-1922), a businessman with a law degree, was scarcely known when he won the big commission 105 years ago, and is scarcely known today. In terms of monuments, he didn't do much else. Shrady worked for 20 years on the memorial's three great bronzes, gave them all he had, and it killed him.

The grand thing about Shrady's three grand sculptures — the artillery to the right, the cavalry to the left, the general between them — is that they don't only lead you back to the Civil War, they also take you to the movies.

His sculptures, like the movies, offer horses at full gallop, drama, ceaseless action, bugle calls, grunts and screams. Shrady has set his art on an old aesthetic line that runs through the white horses on the Parthenon, and through the bronze ones at San Marco's, and then veers off toward John Wayne.

Grant wasn't your usual general. He didn't strut, he shambled, and he didn't march in time. "The art of war is simple enough," he wrote. "Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can; and keep moving on."

You sense him in his statue. Shrady's Grant — like Daniel Chester French's marble Lincoln at the far end of the Mall — feels uncannily inhabited. It's got someone in it. His ruthlessness is palpable. He is the last enemy you'd ever want to see.

WHEN TO GO: The Grant Memorial is seen best in dismal weather, with squishing mud, cold rain and ghost moans in the wind. Rain drips from his hat. In just three weeks in Virginia, the army he commanded suffered 44,000 casualties.

But you don't have to imagine. You can see it. There are a dozen other horses, and 11 other soldiers, in Shrady's Grant Memorial, and not one is at rest. The metal swoops and swirls. The horses neigh and stumble. Their tongues loll from their mouths. The soldiers shout and clench their jaws.

This is just about as vivid, and just about as violent, as memorial sculpture gets.