Military History | 5th Division Marker, Cunel — At Point 10.0-84.6
· 1919
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Military History | 5th Division Marker, Cunel — At Point 10.0-84.6
kevin
The Society of the Fifth Division published the division's official history in 1919, and near the back it printed a list of the battlefield monuments the division had put up in France. The entries give no addresses. They give map references: "On Cunel-Nantillois road at point 10.0-84.6." Twenty-eight in all, three in the St. Mihiel sector, one at Frapelle, twenty-four across the Meuse-Argonne, each listed with the text carried on it.
Point 10.0-84.6 carries two lines, and neither commemorates anyone. "Left flank 9th Infantry Brigade, 5th U. S. Division, after relieving 80th Division and left Battalion 4th Division, October 11-12, 1918," reads the first. The second: "Right flank jumping-off trench for 5th U. S. Division, October 14, 1918." No dead are named, no ground is claimed, no outcome is given. What the concrete fixes is a seam — where this division's frontage ended and the next began, on two dates three days apart. The division printed the texts in English; the survey that catalogues the stone today gives them in French.
Who raised these, and when, is unsettled. The American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 table counts twenty-eight, calls each a "small obelisk of concrete," notes that "inscriptions give details of fighting," dates them "soon after the Armistice" and credits "men of the division." Le Souvenir Français, whose Dun-sur-Meuse committee restored the ones in the Meuse, describes ten concrete obelisks raised by the division's veterans' association between 1920 and 1930. The 1919 book had already printed all twenty-eight.
The marker stands on the west verge of the D15 south of Cunel, a commune of about twenty people. It has been cleaned and repainted, work credited to Le Souvenir Français and its partners.
📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 525, the plate captioned "Typical 5th Division Battlefield Marker" — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive, cropped to the plate. Representative of the series, not the Cunel stone; a field piece stands beside it on the slab. Second image: the same volume, page 254, the map "Ground Gained Vicinity Bois de Forêt, October 4-31, 1918," which draws the dated divisional boundaries this marker records.
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