ARTOIS - Notre Dame de Lorette
- by Pierre Grande Guerre
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- 03 May, 2019
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Year of visit: 2008, 2014
(For more details about the Second and Third Battle of Artois, visit my previous Neuville-St. Vaast - Souchez photo impression.)
A thick fog clouded the panorama over the Douai Plain. With clear weather this spot would offer a beautiful panorama over Souchez.
During our visit in the last week of September 2014, the situation near the statue of General Maistre, south of the Nécropole Nationale, had changed. Construction workers were busily finishing a huge memorial, the Ring of Remembrance, to be inaugurated on 11 November 2014.
To give you an impression of the memorial and to keep you up-to-date, in this frame below I show you some photos, which I collected from several publications in the French media, released in November 2014. Of course I hope to photograph myself the completed memorial in 2015 to show you later my own photos.
| “L' Anneau de la Mémoire” |
Source and photos: several publications in the French media of November 2014.
We make a short tour around the Nécropole Nationale de Notre Dame de Lorette to the north side of the hill, where we park our car near the "Brasserie" to visit the relics of the trenches.
First we will visit the French 2nd line. View from the 2nd line over the 1st line and farther on.
In October 1914 the Germans drove the French to the west side of the hill. On 9 May 1915 the 21st Division and the 33rd Division attacked the south side of the hill. Maistre’s XXI Army Corps attacked from the north. Algerian Zouaves and Moroccan units played an important and heroic role. The Divisions made some progress, but the area around the Basilica, on the cemetery on the top, was not yet fully conquered. |
The French 1st line.
No Man's Land. Note the shell holes. Left the German positions, right the French.
On 18 June the French succeeded to reach and occupy the summit.
The Germans continued to occupy Souchez and the Douai Plain until 25 September 1915.
The French 13th and 70th Infantry Divisions captured Souchez that day, and the 77th Infantry Division cleared the area around Souchez and Cabaret Rouge.
According to estimates, both belligerent parties had 140,000 casualties at the end of the Second Battle of Artois.
After the trenches we will now visit the "Cimétière Nationale de Lorette Ablain-St-Nazaire".
The national cemetery was built on 13 hectares comprising 20,000 individual graves.
22,970 Unknown soldiers are buried in eight mass graves. One collective grave is situated under the main base of the Lantern Tower.
Right from the northern entrance: a portion of the cemetery has been reserved for Muslim soldiers...
Besides Muslim headstones, Jews and soldiers without a religion have their own tombstones instead of the traditional Christian crosses.
In the first row near the south gate lies the grave of Général Ernest Barbot. Barbot was killed on 10 May 1915 in Souchez.
The church walls are covered with private and national memorial plaques. The cupola ceiling.
Mademoiselle Louise de Bettignies - 15 July 1880, Saint-Amand-les-Eaux - 27 February 1918, Cologne (Köln)
Louise de Bettignies was under the pseudonym, Alice Dubois, a French secret agent for the British Army during World War I. She decided to engage in espionage and resistance against the German invasion of her residence since 1903, the city of Lille, in October 1914.
Able to speak French, English, German and Italian, she ran from her home in Lille a vast intelligence network in northern France, on behalf of the British Army and the Intelligence Service, under the pseudonym Alice Dubois. The network provided the British important information via occupied Belgium and the "neutral" Netherlands. It is estimated, that she has saved the lives of over a thousand British soldiers during the 9 months of her most active period (January to September 1915).
Bettignies’ network consisted of a hundred people, and it was so effective that she was nicknamed by her superiors the Queen of English Spies.
One of her last messages was to announce the preparation of a massive German offensive on Verdun in February 1916. This information was relayed to the French "Grand Quartier Génerale" (GHQ), which refused to believe it.
In September 1915 Bettignies was arrested by the Germans, and then held captive for 3 years. She died in 1918 as a result of tuberculosis, contracted in prison, in the hospital, "Heilige Maria", in Cologne. Louise died only a few months before the Armistice. Another woman, treated by the Germans as a spy, was the British nurse Edith Cavell. Her arrest in August 1915 and execution by firing squad in September 1915 caused widespread condemnation.
Louise was of great importance to the Allies. Louise was awarded a "Croix de Guerre aux Palmes" in August 1915. The original Citation of Joffre for the "Ordre d' Armée" is also in the frame.
On 27 September 1915 Joffre called Louise a "War Heroine", and added another high decoration: "Chevalier de la Légion d' Honneur. (Also displayed under glass.)
The Honour Guard's goal is to keep alive the memory of the "Dead of France". It's 3,000 members represent the families of war victims. Each day, from 15 March to 11 November, several of its members mount a permanent silent guard to the ossuary. Outside the tower the guards are willing to answer questions of visitors .
The entrance to the tower. Inside the tower there is a "Chapelle Ardente".
Continue to the next chapter:"Loos".
Dutch Readers, Lees elders hier meer details over "Louise de Bettignies-Queen of English Spies".
Inleiding: Franz Von Papen & Werner Horn; schaker en pion
Onlangs stuitte ik in een oud boek (1) van 1919 op een opmerkelijk verhaal over een Duitse Luitenant, die in begin februari 1915 een half geslaagde bomaanslag pleegt op een spoorbrug over een grensrivier tussen de Verenigde Staten en Canada. Ook al staat de bekentenis van de dader, Werner Horn, deels in het boek te lezen, de naam van zijn opdrachtgever zal Horn blijven verzwijgen. Na wat verder zoeken vond ik ook de naam van Horn’s opdrachtgever, Franz von Papen, een van de aangeklaagden van het latere Neurenberg Proces in 1946.
In een Grote Oorlog als de Eerste Wereldoorlog is Horn’s aanslag op de brug uiteraard slechts een bescheiden wapenfeit. Toch vermoed ik dat dit relatief onbekende verhaal, dat de geschiedenis is ingegaan als de “ Vanceboro International Bridge Bombing ”, nog interessante kanten kent. Het is onder andere een spionageverhaal over hoe in een groter plan een sluwe schaker zijn naïeve pion offert.
Beknopte situatieschets Canada en de Verenigde Staten in 1915
This trip we start at the Léomont near Vitrimont and we will with some exceptions concentrate on the Battle of Lorraine of August-September 1914 in the area, called, the “Trouée de Charmes”, the Gap of Charmes.
After the Léomont battlefield we continue our explorations to Friscati hill and its Nécropole Nationale. Next we pay a visit to the battlefield of la Tombe to go on to the Château de Lunéville. There we cross the Vezouze to move on southward to the Bayon Nécropole Nationale. At Bayon we cross the Moselle to pass Charmes for the panorama over the battlefield from the Haut du Mont. North-west of Charmes we will visit the British Military Cemetery containing 1918 war victims. From Charmes we go northward to the battlefield of the First French Victory of the Great War, the Battle of Rozelieures of 25 August 1914. North of Rozelieures we will visit the village of Gerbéviller. From there we make a jump northward to visit the ruins of Fort de Manonviller to finish with an interesting French Dressing Station bunker, west of Domjevin.
During this visit, we try to focus on the day that the momentum of the battle switched from the French side to the advantage of the Bavarian side: the day of 20 August 1914, when the Bavarians rapidly re-conquered the territory around Morhange , being also the day of the start of their rather successful “Schlacht in Lothringen”.
We will visit beautiful landscapes of the "Parc Naturel Régional de Lorraine", memorials, ossuaries, and cemeteries. Sometimes we will divert to other periods of the Great War, honouring Russian and Romanian soldiers, who died in this sector. We start our route at the border village of Manhoué, and via Frémery, Oron, Chicourt, Morhange, Riche, Conthil, Lidrezing, Dieuze, Vergaville, Bidestroff, Cutting, Bisping we will finish in Nomeny and Mailly-sur-Seille, where the Germans halted their advance on 20 August 1914, and where they constructed from 1915 some interesting bunkers.
