Military History | Fontaine Américaine, Seicheprey — Small Granite Fountain (No Water)
· 1923
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Military History | Fontaine Américaine, Seicheprey — Small Granite Fountain (No Water)
kevin
"Early on the morning of April 20 Seicheprey was the scene of a German raid against the 26th Division," the American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 guide records. A box barrage sealed off the village and the Bois de Remières, fog covered the ground, and "about 1,200 picked German assault troops" overran the American front line and entered the town. They destroyed the dugouts, the battalion first-aid station and the kitchen, took "a considerable number of prisoners," and held the American forward trenches most of the day before withdrawing.
Little of that arithmetic has settled. The National Archives puts roughly 1,800 shock troops in the assault and about 3,300 German soldiers committed in all, against 950 Americans in Seicheprey and the Bois de Remières, and gives the captures as five officers and 178 men. Published counts of Americans taken prisoner run from about a hundred to nearly two hundred, and of the wounded from about 400 to 650. American accounts agree on 81 dead.
The fountain was subscribed in Connecticut, the state that raised the 102d Infantry, and given to the village in 1923. Its bronze is addressed to the place rather than to the dead. TO THE COMMVNE OF SEICHEPREY, it opens, then commemorates the service of "A REGIMENT OF THE AMERICAN ARMY RECRVITED FROM CITIZENS OF CONNECTICVT DEFENDERS OF SEICHEPREY APRIL 20 1918," in the belief that the friendship "SEALED IN THIS PLACE IN BATTLE SHALL SERVE THE CAVSE OF PEACE AMONG ALL NATIONS." No figure appears on it, and no outcome.
The commission's catalogue entered it in 1938 as a "small granite fountain (no water)" and printed a picture of it standing on bare gravel. It stands now on grass a few paces from Église Saint-Pierre, next to the village playground, in a commune of about a hundred people; the departmental tourism office lists it as the fountain the Americans raised in thanks for the welcome given them. Connecticut returned on 22 April 2023 to rededicate it.
📸 Cover: the fountain at Seicheprey, photograph by Aimelaime, 14 March 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 128, the plate captioned "Fountain at Seicheprey / Erected by Inhabitants of Connecticut" — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive, cropped to the plate.
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