Military History | Basilique Notre-Dame de Brebières, Albert — When the Virgin Fell

At about half past three on the afternoon of 16 April 1918, at the third attempt, British artillery hit the tower of the basilica at Albert and the gilded Virgin came off it. The town was in German hands by then and the tower was an observation position; the guns were firing to deny it. The diocese of Amiens gives the hour and the three attempts, and the Imperial War Museum gives the same date.

She had been hanging over the square since January 1915. Edmond Duthoit's basilica was finished in 1897 and Albert Roze's Virgin went up on the tower that year, gilded — the tourist office of the Pays du Coquelicot counts forty thousand leaves of gold on her — holding the Child above her head at the full stretch of both arms. Then a shell struck her base and she went over to the horizontal and stayed there, secured, the Imperial War Museum records, by French engineers. Two French bodies date that to 15 January; other accounts give the 21st.

The basilica stood on the road the British and Dominion divisions took into the Somme, and what the soldiers said about her was that when the Virgin fell the war would end. The Pays du Coquelicot writes that the legend proved true. The Imperial War Museum records that it was dispelled: she came down on 16 April, and the Armistice was two hundred and nine days after that.

Louis Duthoit rebuilt his father's basilica to the same drawings. A tablet inside gives the years, RECONSTRUCTION DE LA BASILIQUE 1927-1929, where the ministry's register gives 1927 to 1931; the same tablet dates Edmond to 1837-1889, so he did not live to see the church finished, let alone rebuilt. It was classified a monument historique in May 2004. The Virgin is back on the dome. On a gable wall in the town, cracked and water-stained, somebody has painted her leaning.

📸 Cover: the painted gable in Albert, the tower and the gilded Virgin behind it. Wilson44691, 30 May 2017, CC0. Second image: the memorial tablet to Edmond and Louis Duthoit inside the basilica, among the walls of thanksgiving plaques. Raimond Spekking, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.