Military History | Pennsylvania Memorial, Varennes-en-Argonne — Bridges, Fountains and the Like
· 1926-3
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Military History | Pennsylvania Memorial, Varennes-en-Argonne — Bridges, Fountains and the Like
kevin
The American Battle Monuments Commission met on 29 March 1926 and spent the session on monuments it had not built. American memorials were already standing across France, raised by individual states, by veterans' associations and by private citizens, and the commission judged most of them unbecoming to America's character and reputation. It had already secured agreements with the French and Belgian governments to withhold consent for American memorials pending its own review. Its own programme, it believed, would be "complete in itself"; further memorials would "not help the general plan of commemoration, but only detract from it." So the meeting decided to prohibit all but a handful — those judged "useful" to the communities in which they were to be located, "such as civic buildings, bridges, fountains and the like."
A few designs already in hand were let through, among them Paul Philippe Cret's memorial for the State of Pennsylvania. The Commission of Fine Arts had found Cret's Pennsylvania work of "such exceptional merit" that it recommended him as the ABMC's own general advisor.
That memorial stands above the Aire at Varennes-en-Argonne: two peristyles of square columns facing each other across an esplanade, a bronze tripod basin between them, and the roofs and clock tower of the village below. The commission's 1938 guidebook records two more Pennsylvania memorials in France — a bridge over the Vesle at Fismes, and a fountain at Nantillois. Cut into the wall beneath the basin, five lines still sharp: IN HONOR OF HER TROOPS WHO SERVED IN THE GREAT WAR, AMONG WHOM WERE THE LIBERATORS OF VARENNES 1918, AND IN GRATEFUL APPRECIATION OF THEIR SERVICE, THIS MEMORIAL IS ERECTED BY THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1927.
📸 Cover: Ketounette, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the colonnade and the bronze tripod basin, with the roofs and clock tower of Varennes-en-Argonne behind. Second image: the American Battle Monuments Commission's own photograph of the memorial in 1927, from its guidebook American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (1938), public domain.
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