The obverse design, titled “Soldier's Charge,” depicts an almost stone-like soldier gripping a rifle. Barbed wire twines in the lower right-hand side of the design.

Barbed wire was a common element on the World War I battlefields, used between trenches to stifle troop advancement and mechanized machinery movement.

The reverse design is called “Poppies in the Wire.” Poppies are amid lines of barbed wire. Poppies have served as a means of remembering those who died fighting for their countries for nearly a century. The story originated with Lt. Col. John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields,” which he composed shortly after losing a close friend. He wrote about the poppies because they were among the only things that could grow in the barren, war-trodden fields. Inspired by the poem, Moina Michael, an American academic, made and sold red silk poppies in 1921. Anna Guerin brought them to England, where the Royal British Legion ordered 9 million of them. The symbols of life, beauty, and remembrance are in stark contrast to the barbed wire, which caused countless deaths in the brutal trench warfare of World War I.