The memorial is located in the downtown's east end, between Water and Duckworth Streets. A bronze statue of a woman stands atop the memorial's central pedestal. She represents liberty and the dominion's willingness to serve in the First World War.
Below her stand four other bronze figures: a sailor of the Newfoundland Royal Naval Reserve, a soldier of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, a seaman of the Mercantile Marine, and a woodsman of the Newfoundland Forestry Corps. Sculptors Ferdinand Victor Blundstone and Gilbert Bayes designed the statues and E.J. Parlanti cast them in bronze.
The monument faces the harbour and sits on a stone plateau at the top of a stairway that rises from Water Street to Duckworth Street. It is partially enclosed by a low, semicircular, granite wall.
"The monument itself is one of which any city might well feel proud, and it fittingly commemorated the glorious sacrifice made by those Newfoundlanders who laid down their lives for King and Empire in the Great War. In design it is remarkably appropriate, and beauty and grandeur have been combined to make a tout ensemble which is most imposing. ... To attempt to do full justice to the Monument in cold print is an utter impossibility. It rests now, an imperishable Memorial to our gallant dead, and a shrine which generations of Newfoundlanders will venerate as a vital reminder of the price which was paid by so many of their compatriots that the world might be made safe from the perils of militarism."