Headstones at La Nécropole Nationale de Pontavert. The cemetery contains the remains of 6,815 soldiers, 67 of them British, 54 Russian, and the remainder French. Of the total, 1,364 are entombed in the ossuary. © 2014 by John M. Shea
"— On the 27th May, on the bridges across the Aisne, for whose destruction no orders were ever issued, German and French soldiers were crossing over side by side. The fact was that the Germans had been ordered to reach their objectives without stopping to make prisoners.— The 4th. A shell from the super-gun fell in the Rue des Gravilliers on some children coming out of school.— The 4th. Clemenceau has secured the adjournment sine die of a question on the military situation. Difficult and stormy sitting. He was tired. He referred to Foch as falling asleep over his map. There were 370 votes against 110."
Entries for June 4, 1918 from the diary of Michel Corday, a senior civil servant in the French government writing in Paris. The German advance in Operation Michael in March 1918 put the French capital within range of 'the Paris gun,' a new weapon that could throw a shell into the stratosphere before its violent end. On May 27, the Germans launched the Aisne Offensive, which quickly crossed that river, and advanced on Paris, reaching the Marne River and within 50 miles of the city before being stopped. Some French politicians demanded the sacking of Allied Commander in Chief Ferdinand Foch and French Army Commander Henri Philippe Pétain, a move blocked by Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. By securing the adjournment sine die, Clemenceau had ensured there was no specification of when the subject of the command of the Army would again be addressed.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 351, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1918-06-04, 1918, June, Georges Clemenceau, Clemenceau, Ferdinand Foch, Foch, super-gun, Paris gun, Pontavert
