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L'Anneau de la Mémoire, or the Ring of Memory in English, is a circular monument of a perimeter of 345m composed of around 500 plates on the ones are written the names of the 579 606 soldiers who die on the battlefields of the Artois, they are classed in alphabetic order without distinctions of the rank, of the nationality nor of the religion of those soldiers. It has the names of 241 214 soldiers of the Commonwealth, of 173 876 German soldiers, of 106 012 soldier who had the French uniform as well as the ones of 2 326 Belgian soldiers, of 2 266 Portugese soldiers, of 1 037 Russian soldiers, of 6 American soldiers and of several soldiers from around 30 other nations (that I can't mention as I haven't found which ones and how many from each but there certainly are the names of Chinese soldiers as well). The first name of the list belongs to A Tet, a Nepalese soldier and the last one to Zschiesche Paul, a German soldier.
The monument was inaugurated on 11 November 2014.
Personnaly, this monument is very important for me as it's the first time that the name of my grear-grand-father is mentionned on a monument by the French State without having any intervention from my family as we had to do when we learnt in the 1990s that his name was mentionned nowhere when he was reported missing in September 1915 at few kilometers from this monument during the third Battle of the Artois.
The monument was inaugurated on 11 November 2014.
Personnaly, this monument is very important for me as it's the first time that the name of my grear-grand-father is mentionned on a monument by the French State without having any intervention from my family as we had to do when we learnt in the 1990s that his name was mentionned nowhere when he was reported missing in September 1915 at few kilometers from this monument during the third Battle of the Artois.
Category Photography / Miscellaneous
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1280 x 960px
File Size 705.8 kB
Listed in Folders
Indeed, it's massive, each panel is 3 metres high, and there are 500 of them... The first time I realised how many people were lost during this war, was the first time I actually went to Northern France, to find the plate that was added within Notre-Dale-de-Lorette, the biggest French military cemetery. With my parents, we had stopped in a cemetery which I recall was close to Neuville-St-Vaast, the city he was killed in, but I never managed to find it again afterwards. That cemetery was installed on a hill, and what shocked me, was that the hill was covered with white crosses, from the entrance to the summit, and these crossed were only belonging to soldiers fighting under the French uniform. I don't know how many were buried there, but that wasn't even the biggest cemetery around... As a comparison, Notre-Dale-de-Lorette is the resting place of around 44 000 men just from the losses of 1914 and 1915, half of them resting in mass graves as they couldn't be identified at the time...
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