A quick Survey

Having travelled in France a bit the past 2 years, and having seen many moving things:

What are your favourite/most moving war memorials?

I have 2:

The Pidgeoniers Memorial in Lille uk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rainham_mob/detail…

I know it isnt the main reason for war memorials, but this makes me smile......

Oradour Sur Glanes near Limoges

uk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rainham_mob/detail…

Unlike the pidgeoneers memorial, I fill up just thinking the name Oradour.

Once I (eventually) move to France, this will be my main photo project.

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I have seen Oradour sur Glane and honestly it was a bit strange... That day I went there with my father in his in germany registred car... After we had informed ourselves and visited everything we went for a drink and the welcoming was not really warm... We discovered that the commander of this section of the SS %26quot;das Reich%26quot; came from düsseldorf, where the car was registred... Anyway that%26#39;s for the story.

My favourite memorial was in Elsass, it is called le Col du Linge and you can visit the trenches that have been left intact and it has a good musuem.

Also in London the imperial War museum has an interresting section on WW1.

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Oradour Sur Glanes is at the top of the list by 1,000 percent. The emotions are overwhelming. I couldnt even take a picture.

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Hi,

We were in Soissons a few years ago, and I think, if memory serves me right we were walking around the L%26#39;Hotel de Ville, when we read the memorials on the wall to French resistance fighters, beneath which we saw the bullet marks in the wall from the firing squads.

Awful, upsetting, and inspiring.

Best wishes

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It has to be Oradour-sur-Glane for me too. I think we barely spoke for a couple of hours walking the village, and not much at lunch or for a few hours afterwards. It%26#39;s hard to even type this much, and I certainly wouldn%26#39;t attempt to describe either the place or the experience.

The memorial to the deportees on the Ile St. Louis is another that moves me every time I go there - which I try to remember to do whenever I am in Paris.

I am always amazed and sometimes moved by the often rather simple WW1 memorials in just about every French village. You see the long lists of names and look around and estimate the population of the village. It gives me pause, and a clue as to the impact of the %26quot;war to end all wars%26quot; which wiped out most of a generation of French men.

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In a small town called Valréas in the Vaucluse, there is a monument to 53 resistance fighters shot on 12th June 1944. The story I heard was that there had been attacks, so hostages were taken at random and lined up against a wall. The mayor asked for the hostages to be freed and offered himself instead, but he was told there were no orders to shoot the mayor, just the hostages.

It came to mind as you were asking about %26#39;moving%26#39; - I worked in the town for a while and the same mayor showed me round.

While I was there, I always intended to go to the Vercors and see the memorial http://www.memorial-vercors.fr/index2.html

Several years ago, we stayed nearby in the Ardèche and I was struck by the number of roadside memorials dedicated to youngsters who had been executed during the war years at the spot where the memorial had been placed.

WW1 places which have made an impact are Verdun and Douaumont (which silenced everyone in the car as we realised the enormity of it all), the Clairière de l%26#39;Armistice near Compiègne (the son who loves computer shoot-%26#39;em-ups left the exhibition in tears) and virtually any back road in North-Eastern France with little cemetaries of all nationalities.

There are really no words, are there?

Good luck with your project ....

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Bumping this for more suggestions :)

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I%26#39;d have to check my books at home but an interesting point is that war memorials from the Great War tend to be very open rather than enclosed, a configuration of pillers for example. This was to symbolize the huge number of soldiers who did not return, whose remaind were never found whose names were never known. The open areas which comprised the memorial represented the blanks that the men had become.

Pjk

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I agree with Oradoyur-sur-Glane, but am surprised no-one has mentioned Vimy Ridge.