That was part of a promo they were doing back during World War I to sell war bonds. The thing is, you see it and say, "Well, how hard is that? You scratch out a huge statue in the dirt with your shoe, then have everybody stand on it."

The problem is they didn't have arial photography back then, so they had to take a picture from a fairly short tower nearby. That means the perspective is skewed, so to make it look right they had to distort the whole image so that when viewed from that angle it would still be in proportion. So, if you could see a top-down view, the torch would be enormous and the feet would be tiny (there are 18,000 men in the formation--and 70% of them are standing in the torch and flame). It's inspirational to see so many men coming together to create something in perfect unison like that, but the whole thing looks like an enormous pain in the ass.