Military History | 315th Infantry Memorial Building, Nantillois — Given to the Village as a Recreation Center
· 1930
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Military History | 315th Infantry Memorial Building, Nantillois — Given to the Village as a Recreation Center
kevin
In the American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 catalogue of American memorials in Europe, one row has nothing in its "Character" column about stone or bronze. Against the 315th Infantry of the 79th Division, at Nantillois in the Meuse, the column reads: "Building given to the village as a recreation center." The date entered is 1930, and the remark is "Erected by the regiment in memory of its dead."
Nantillois was almost entirely destroyed in the war. A panoramic photograph taken in 1918 looks across a field of broken masonry toward a gutted church and a wooden signpost, still upright at the fork, pointing the way to Cunel.
The commission photographed the finished building for the same volume: a single-storey hall, rendered pale, hipped tiled roof on bracketed eaves, three tall windows grouped to one side and a round-arched porch to the other, standing on bare earth nobody had planted yet. Its guidebook told motorists where to look. The building is "seen on the right, set back from the road, soon after entering town."
The unusual word in the entry is "given." Most of what the catalogue lists are objects to be looked at: obelisks, shafts, bronze tablets, stone markers, a fountain. This one was a room, with a door and a floor and a roof to keep up, and the men who paid for it handed all of that to the commune along with the memory it was meant to carry.
It is still there and still in use. Local accounts call it the salle des fêtes — the hall Nantillois books for its own occasions — and one of them notes a commemorative plaque on the building as the sign of what it is.
📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 525 — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive. Second image: "Nantillois, a town north of Montfaucon, captured by the American forces," 1918, Library of Congress Panoramic Photographs Collection, public domain.
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