Musing on Monuments

I have often wondered about the monuments which are to be found all around the area, and thought they were World War linked. But there seem to be two classes of crosses with lots of different origins.

Town Monuments

Every town or village seems to have a central monument erected to recognise the dead of the two world wars. In fact Salornay sur Guy has two monuments honouring First World War victims.

photo by ChigyTweet
(Creative Commons Some Limitations License)

That on the left is in the town square and has the names of the casualties of the second world war recorded on the tombstones to the left and right on the central monument. The monument at the cemetery has all the names listed on the monument in the town but there are several that are not in the names in the cemetery - maybe there's a story in that?

More interesting to me is the nearby grave next to the monument in the cemetery of one of the people recorded, on the two monuments. The monuments record Claude Petits as having died on 12 October 1908. While his gravestone

photo by ChigyTweet
(Creative Commons Some Limitations License)

records his death on 20 October 1918 "for France". The explanation that maybe it was another person with the same first and family names is very unlikely and in any case the Claude Petit buried in the cemetery, should anyway have appeared on the monuments because he died "for France".

So there is another question, I like to see this as a shortsighted, hassled stone mason making a mistake and not being willing to correct it.

Roadside Monuments

I had thought that all the other monuments alongside roads were also linked to the World Wars which were obviously a very hard time for the rural population of France and wondered about the background stories. This conjured up pictures of night time ambushes, parachute drops and sabotage which made me think of the possibility of some kind of book explaining the times through the monuments! So on this visit I resolved to start having a look at the monuments I came across!

Here are the first three roadside crosses I documented.

photo by ChigyTweet
(Creative Commons Some Limitations License)

That might be a start, but not much progress! Two of them clearly have nothing to do with the World Wars as they are dated 1958 & 1851, while the third has no markings. So maybe next would be to extract the GPS co-ordinates form iPhone photos and see if that correlates to anything.

Anyway the collecting photographs and co-ordinates is a pleasure and its all very interesting, so I will continue and see what develops. Watch this blog for more monuments,