Military History | Borne de Cornouiller, Sivry-sur-Meuse — Difficult of Access

Two rows in the American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 catalogue of American memorials in Europe carry a warning inside the Location column. One is a granite monument in a field south of Ardeuil. The other is on page 527, and its columns run: unit or event commemorated, "Achievements of American troops who fought in the vicinity of Sivry-sur-Meuse"; number, 1; location, "On the Borne de Cornouiller near Sivry-sur-Meuse. (Difficult of access.)"; character, "Stone obelisk"; date erected, 1925; remarks, in full, "See picture, page 524." Every other row on that page names who paid for the memorial. This one offers a photograph.

The stone gives a different account of itself. One face reads ERIGÉ EN 1928, to the memory of the officers and men of the 316th Regiment of Infantry, 79th Division of the American Army, fallen in 1918 in the Verdun sector. The face beside it tracks the regiment from Camp Meade in August 1917 through Sector 304, Montfaucon, the Troyon sector and La Borne de Cornouiller, Hill 378, to muster-out in June 1919, then sets two figures under the heading CASUALTIES: officers, 78; men, 3,128. Surveys of the monument in French and in English describe those numbers as the regiment's dead.

The commission's road tour passed the hill at kilometre 109.3 and had motorists look at it across the valley: a bald-topped hill marked by a small monument, nicknamed "Cornwilly Hill" by the American soldiers who fought on that front, its summit taken by the 79th Division on 7 November after several days in which parts of it changed hands. "No road runs near it."

A sign now points off the lane east of Sivry towards La Grande Montagne, and a path climbs through planted pines to a mown enclosure and a car park. France's national mapping agency uses the monument's own axis as a geodetic point, last recorded as seen in place in 2003.

📸 Cover: the 316th Infantry monument on the Borne de Cornouiller, Sivry-sur-Meuse, photograph by TitTornade, 6 July 2008, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; the French and English faces are legible in it. Second image: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 524, the plate captioned "Monument on the Borne de Cornouiller to American Troops Who Fought Near By", cropped to the plate and its caption — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive.