Military History | Hôtel de ville de Péronne — The Board Left on the Pediment

Pierre Malicet, a magistrate at Péronne, wrote in his diary in March 1917 that "depuis deux jours, on détruit d'une façon systématique la ville de Péronne" — for two days the town had been systematically destroyed. It was not shellfire. Demolition parties were working through a town their army had held since the summer of 1914 and was about to leave.

That February the German command had begun Operation Alberich, a withdrawal from the Somme salient to the Siegfriedstellung, the Hindenburg Line in Allied usage, undertaken by its own account to shorten the front and free divisions for reserve. The ground being given up was prepared for whoever came into it. Among the work done, roads and railways were broken up, orchards felled, wells filled or fouled, church towers and houses brought down. Across the evacuated zone the able-bodied were taken away to work for the German war effort, and the old, the women and the children were left behind; published counts differ and none is printed here. The historian Philippe Nivet records that civilians under this occupation faced pillage, requisition and forced labour.

British troops entered on 18 March 1917; one French account of the town gives the twentieth. On what was left of the hôtel de ville they found a plank board four metres across, lettered in cursive on two lines: Nicht ärgern, nur wundern! The Imperial War Museum holds it as FEQ 380. Gerd Krumeich records that the British took the words for an invitation to admire the wreckage, that this was a mistranslation, and that the sense is rather do not be angry, only be amazed. Julian Walker records that interpretations vary.

Rebuilt to Jacques Debat-Ponsan's design between 1922 and 1927, the hôtel de ville carries a new pediment on the square. On its tympanum a woman reclines with a cornucopia between two children; a cross is cut at one end of the field and a star at the other. It is the working town hall, with the Musée Alfred-Danicourt upstairs.

📸 Cover: the rebuilt facade on the square, with the new pediment in place of the one the board hung from. DestinationHauteSomme, 25 May 2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.