Military History | Mondement Churchyard — Where the Two Old Adversaries Met

Nine men lie under one stone against the wall of the churchyard at Mondement-Montgivroux, where the communal cemetery surrounds the old church on a ridge at 180 metres above the Champagne plain. Cut into the stele are a cross, the words BATAILLE DE LA MARNE and ICI REPOSENT, nine names, and MORTS POUR LA FRANCE. The French state's heritage file for the site breaks the nine down by unit and the stone agrees exactly: five of the 77e régiment d'infanterie, three of the 3e zouaves, one of the 2e tirailleurs algériens, all killed on 9 September 1914. An officer's sketch of 29 October 1914, recorded in the same file, marks where the provisional graves lay and who was in each, with a table of French and German burials beside it.

Two of the plaques flanking the grave are dated by that file to 9 September 1964, the fiftieth anniversary. One carries the 77th's citation. The other is dated on its own face LE 9 SEPTEMBRE 1914 - 1964 and records that "les deux anciens adversaires" — le 77ème R.I. de Cholet and le 4ème hanovrien régiment d'infanterie Nr 164 — had met at the grave in memory of their dead and their comrades. In its own army's style the German unit was 4. Hannoversches Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 164, garrisoned at Hameln on the Weser. According to the association that keeps the site, its then president invited the regiment's survivors after the Élysée Treaty of January 1963, describing them as the men who had taken Mondement on 9 September 1914, and that invitation began a ceremony held here each September since.

In 2023 the cemetery was inscribed among 139 component parts of a Franco-Belgian World Heritage listing of the war's funerary and memorial sites. The graves around the plot are still the village's own.

📸 Cover: the collective grave stele and the 77th's plaque against the churchyard wall, the plain behind. Fab5669, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the plot along the wall with its four inscriptions, the 1964 plaque at the right. G.Garitan, CC BY-SA 4.0.