The Suez Canal was an important zone of military conflict during World War I. Allied forces held the canal against advancing Ottoman forces keeping them out of the Egyptian Delta and Cairo. The defense of the canal became a pivotal battle in the Middle Eastern front against the Ottomans and their allies, Germany. To commemorate this battle, the Suez Canal Company (SCC) erected a monumental memorial overlooking the Suez Canal and adjacent to Ismailia at the base of Jebel Meriam, entitled Monument a la Defense du Canal de Suez. Using architectural precedence from ancient Egypt and Greece, two large monoliths combined with winged figures, represented Allied victory in defense of the canal. It was a monumental testament to the importance of the military front in Egypt, which every passing ship would view on passage through the canal. Since the opening of the canal in 1869, monuments, statues, busts and memorials dotted the canal and her cities of Port Sa’id, Isma’ilia and Suez. From the temporary obelisks, which sat at the Mediterranean entrance of the canal in 1869, to the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps at Port Sa’id these monuments etched onto the urban landscape ideas of French company hegemony. The Monument a la Defense was a monumental addition to the statues and memorials that lined the canal. As such, this paper will have several agendas. First, the study aims to place the war monument within the history of SCC memorial and statue-building by showing the similar design ideology, which were shared with earlier monuments and architecture in the cities and along the canal. Design motifs were repeated and the initial conceptual drawings tell a story between the artists ideal and reality. The second agenda is to examine the site of the memorial in the landscape at Jebel Meriam and the building processes that were meticulously documented by the SCC. Photographs also depict the laborers and demonstrate the hierarchy of work. The laborer who is usually elided comes into focus through the visual catalog and you see the Egyptian at work on the monument. As such, the sources from the SCC archive narrate a multi-layered history of the monument. The war memorial thus becomes an urban artifact, ready to be interrogated by the historian.