Monument to the citizens of Crouy-sur-Ourcq who died for France during the Great War.
Text:
Front: La Ville de Crouy-sur-Ourcq a ses enfants morts pour la patrie
Back: 1914-1918, Ourcq, Marne, Yser Champagne, Verdun, Somme, Artois, Orient, Bataille de France
The dead for each year

Monument to the children of Crouy-sur-Ourcq who died for France during the Great War.

Text:

Front: La Ville de Crouy-sur-Ourcq a ses enfants morts pour la patrie

Back: 1914-1918, Ourcq, Marne, Yser Champagne, Verdun, Somme, Artois, Orient, Bataille de France

The dead for each year.

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Sunday, March 25, 1917

"All this accursed month of March [1917], the weather was terrible, bitterly cold, with fog, rain, and snow squalls. But that didn't stop the firefights or the violent bombardments which rained down upon Maisons-Champagne, to take and retake a few stretches of broken-down trench line.

It wasn't that the possession of those trenches had any capital importance for one adversary or the other. It came from a sense of prestige, of conceit, of glory for the generals responsible, both French and German.

The sufferings and deaths of hundreds and thousands of soldiers counted for little in relation to all that."

Quotation Context

Excerpt from the notebooks of French Infantry Corporal Louis Barthas then stationed in Massiges, between Rheims and Verdun, at the 'Main de Massiges' 'formed by six hills extending from a little plateau.'

Source

Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918 by Louis Barthas, page 305, copyright © 2014 by Yale University, publisher: Yale University Press, publication date: 2014

Tags

1917-03-25, 1917, March, dead French soldier, Crouy-sur-Ourcq