Today, this national cemetery holds the bodies of 2 053 French soldiers, 2 037 of whom lie in individual graves. A collective grave brings together the remains of 16 soldiers. Alongside them lies one Russian, but also 201 Germans, including 31 in an ossuary. This cemetery comprises three plots: the 1914-1918 French plot, the 1914-1918 French Muslim plot, and the 1939-1945 French plot that contains 917 soldiers and resistance fighters from the Nord region and 14 Spaniards posted to workers' companies. A British military cemetery bringing together 177 bodies adjoins the Zuydcoote cemetery.

* A slice of history

Devoted to the regional Resistance, the Musée de la Résistance in Bondues aspires to pass on the intellectual and moral heritage of Resistance fighters in the Nord region, and to recall the universal scope of their struggle.

The permanent exhibition, devised by a team of former Resistance members and teachers, aims to be as educational as possible. Comprising five rooms, structured around the Resistance values of memory, refusal, courage, engagement and sacrifice,

it introduces visitors to the motives, methods and organisation of the regional Resistance in 1940-44.

The museum also offers specific activities and temporary exhibitions exploring other aspects of the Resistance and occupation (e.g. war caricatures, virtual exhibition on racial persecution, exhibition on resistance during the First World War).

* A duty of care

For museum staff, preserving and respecting the spirit of these Resistance fighters also means perceiving the resonances with the contemporary world.   This duty of care is all the more important because, ever since its founding, the Musée de la Résistance has worked in partnership with Lille education authority and carries out educational outreach work with schoolchildren across the region. In this context, each year the museum receives more than 3 000 pupils, 70% of them from middle schools (ages 11 to 15).

* A concern for scientific rigour

The partnership with the education department found concrete expression in 1998, with the setting up of an education service run by a history teacher, which was assigned the task of helping middle and high-school pupils prepare for the Concours National de la Résistance et de la Déportation competition. The museum also works regularly with the IRHiS (Institute of Historical Research of the North - University of Lille III), organising biennial symposia on an agreed theme: Representations and memories of the Resistance (2012), The purge following the Second World War (2014), Culture, occupation and resistance in Belgium and northern France (2016).

The museum collections

* The paper archives:

These comprise posters (Vichy propaganda and orders of the regional authorities, notices of execution and prohibition issued by the German authorities), magazines and publications, letters from the German command, underground newspapers and pamphlets, identity papers, family photographs and personal documents of Resistance members, letters and certificates of Resistance membership.

* The objects:

The preserved objects include German, British, American and French weapons from the two world wars, German uniforms, wirelesses, printing equipment for underground newspapers, armbands of Resistance groups, everyday objects belonging to deportees, medals and flags.

The archive collection is open by arrangement to students, researchers and any individual visitors wishing to view it.

The museum also has a documentary collection comprising video footage and memoirs of people who lived through the war, and books and historical research published after the war. It is expanded every year with new acquisitions.

A large part of our collections is promoted via the website www.memoire14-45.eu

Sources: ©Musée de la Résistance de Bondues

As part of Operation Dynamo, which was supposed to enable the British and French troops, driven back to the sea, to evacuate Dunkirk, battalions of British soldiers were deployed in the sector of La Plaine au Bois with the mission of delaying the German troops’ advance for a few hours. After 9 hours of heroic fighting known as the Battle of Wormhout, most of the British were wounded and out of ammunition and had to surrender to the enemy. Unfortunately for them, their adversaries were the brutal SS from the Führer’s personal guard who, in total disregard for the Geneva Conventions, herded them into a barn and executed them in cold blood by throwing grenades inside.

Source : Commune of Esquelbecq

Eighty British soldiers and one French soldier were thus slaughtered on 28 May 1940 at 5.30 pm.

Thirteen British soldiers survived and were rescued by the farmers who lived around the site until medical help arrived.

Source : Commune of Esquelbecq

This massacre had remained unknown for a long time until some of the survivors of this tragic episode, who were among the British veterans who had come to commemorate the anniversary of Operation Dynamo, went to look for this site of the massacre and told of what they had lived through. Based on these harrowing stories, a local amateur historian Guy Rommelaere, wrote his book titled "The Forgotten Massacre" (*).

Source : Commune of Esquelbecq

In 2000, after consolidation of the farmland, the pasture where the massacre occurred was nearly turned into ploughland. This was without reckoning with the desires of the elected officials in the three communes of Esquelbecq, Ledringhem and Wormhout, where the events of 28 May 1940 took place. A Franco-British association was set up with the goal of preserving, restoring and maintaining this site fraught with history. The association acquired the pasture and has since built a barn identical to the original, as well as a lookout with an orientation table to be able to locate the various elements of that tragic day and, more recently, a stele of peace and friendship among peoples was inaugurated for the 70th anniversary of Operation Dynamo.

Source : Commune of Esquelbecq

(*)All income from the sale of this book is donated to the association. It is available at the tourism offices of Esquelbecq and Wormhout for 20 euros.

Among these soldiers are buried General Janssen, commander of the 12th Motorized Infantry Division (DIM), killed on 2nd June 1940 during the aerial bombardments of the fort. There is a plaque at the entrance to Fort des Dunes, in remembrance of him and his men who fell alongside him during those first days of June 1940. A second plaque is dedicated “A la mémoire du Lieutenant Colonel Le Notre commandant les forces terrestres et aériennes de la première Armée des Officiers, Sous-officiers et soldats des F.T.A. tombés à leur poste de combat en ces lieux le 03 juin 1940 [To the memory of Our Lieutenant Colonel commanding the land and air forces of the first army of Officers, NCOs and soldiers of the FTA who fell at their battle stations at this place on 3rd June 1940].” In the fort, at the entrance to the Military Police building, a plaque honours the memory of the gendarmes of the Military Police of the 12th Motorized Infantry Division who died for France on 3rd June 1940. In the moat of the fort, there is a final plaque in memory of the eight resistant fighters who were shot dead on that very spot on 6th June 1944.

In the town cemetery nearby are two military plots containing 119 Belgian and 141 British soldiers and six military workers – five Egyptians and one Malagasy – who died as a result of their wounds in the same hospitals.

From the outset of operations in 1914, the civilian and military hospitals of Dunkirk and the surrounding area took in a great many wounded from the Yser front. Very soon, they were overwhelmed. Schools, care homes, even the Zuydcoote sanatorium and the Malo and Malo-Terminus casinos, were requisitioned to receive growing numbers of wounded.

The Battles of the Yser, 1914-18

After abandoning Antwerp and retreating from Flanders, the Belgian, French and British armies established a new front on the Yser, between the North Sea coast and Dixmude. Ten miles long, this sector was bitterly contested. To hold back the repeated attacks from the Germans, the Belgians resisted valiantly, using all the means at their disposal. In autumn, the dykes burst, flooding no man’s land and the enemy trenches. From 16 October, the naval fusiliers of Rear Admiral Ronarc’h’s brigade defended Dixmude inch by inch, alongside the 4th Moroccan Battalion, the 1st Algerian Battalion and the Belgian Army. 

After 25 days of uninterrupted fighting, on 10 November the enemy took Dixmude. Further south, at Ypres, from 31 October to 2 November, the enemy launched furious assaults that broke on the Franco-British lines. Neither adversary gave way. The first Battle of Ypres ended with no real result. The town remained at centre stage throughout the war, particularly in the spring of 1915, when a new weapon was tested: poison gas.

Throughout the conflict, ever more bloody operations were carried out in this sector, especially in spring 1915 and in summer 1917, when 240 000 British soldiers were killed.

Among these soldiers are buried the remains of two generals. Those of General Dame, commander of the 2nd North African Infantry Division (DINA) who died for France on 18th July 1940 during his captivity in the fortress of Königstein and those of General Mesny, commander of the 5th DINA. This general officer was executed on 19th January 1945 in retaliation for the death of the German General von Brodowsky on 28th October 1944.

178 graves also preserve the memory of Soviet prisoners of war or civilians arrested on the Eastern Front and deported to France to work in the mines or in the construction of the Atlantic Wall. Some antifascist Russian immigrants are also buried there.

The war cemetery also contains 21 graves of Russian soldiers who died during the First World War.

In 1915, the German army established, to the left of the communal cemetery, a military cemetery for burying the soldiers who died in combat or in the field hospitals. It contains 1,627 bodies, including 631 in a mass grave.

A castle was built here by the count of Hainaut in the 12th century. The entrance door and the sandstone cellars remain. The first strongholds, built by order of Charles Quint, date from 1528. After the city was taken by Turenne in 1657, Vauban began to modernise it in 1668. He created four pools with which to flood the ditches and remodelled the southern flank. The Saint-Martin and Gard strongholds are representative of Vauban's first system. In the 18th century, a large hornwork structure was erected to the east of Porte Fauroeulx.

In 1881, the fort was further strengthened.

The well-preserved enclosure has the shape of an irregular octagon. It is defended by eight bastions and has been fully restored. There are two walking circuits open to the public:

- The ramparts: hiking card available from the Conseil Général du Nord.

- Discovery of the trees on the ramparts of Le Quesnoy: Circuit designed by the Parc Naturel Régional de L'Avesnois.

As you walk around the fortifications, stopping to read the educational panels, you can admire the eight bastions and seventeen outwork constructions in the ditches. Worthy of mention are the 18th century gunpowder store, the medieval tower of Count Baudouin, the Porte Fauroeulx, the Fauroeulx hornwork from the 18th century and five bastions: royal, imperial, green, Gard and Saint-Martin. Outside, the Pont-Rouge pool which was used to fill the ditches is now a watersport site.

Every year during the Heritage Days, a military encampment of the revolutionary armies, animates the fortified site for two days, with over 400 participants. An association called "Le Cercle Historique Quercitain" is researching the past of Le Quesnoy and its two cantons. It has premises in the Cernay centre, or the Château Marguerite de Bourgogne, where it welcomes groups to look around two exhibition rooms covering the history of the fortification. Since 1987, the fortified cities have had a regional day on the last Sunday of April, and some citadels, which are now military barracks, regularly open their doors to the public. Lastly, the route of fortified cities, launched in 1993, gives the public the chance to discover these cities, armed with a map and explanation cards available from the Association des villes fortifiées and in the tourist offices of Ambleteuse, Arras, Avesnes-sur-Helpe, Bergues, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Calais, Cambrai, Condé-sur-Escaut, Gravelines, Le Quesnoy, Lille, Maubeuge, Montreuil-sur-Mer and Saint-Omer.

This war memorial commemorates the victory of the New Zealand Rifle Brigade, which liberated Le Quesnoy on 4 November 1918 from the German garrison which had occupied the town for four years. The New Zealanders climbed the fortifications with ladders, just like in the Middle Ages.

In 1999, Le Quesnoy opened the "Centre de documentation relatif à la libération de la ville en 1918", a documentation centre concerning the town's liberation in 1918. Le Quesnoy has become the main site for World War 1 commemorations for New Zealand in France, with a ceremony organised by the ambassador of New Zealand in Paris, the local authorities and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. During these ceremonies, a parade including the mayor and local authorities, war veterans, visitors and people from the region crosses the town up to the ramparts and the New Zealand war memorial of 1923 to lay a wreath. The procession then moves towards the French war memorial to lay another wreath. The ceremony ends at the town hall, where a tribal sculpture "teko teko maori" perpetuates the memory.

New Zealand is still officially represented at Le Quesnoy during commemorations for the Armistice, on 11 November. New Zealand parliament officials and other groups, such as the New Zealand rugby team, have been to this town several times. Le Quesnoy and Cambridge in New Zealand were twinned in 1999.

Association des villes fortifiées

Hôtel de Ville Rue Maréchal Joffre 59530 Le Quesnoy

Tel.: +33 3.27.47.55.54
 

Le Quesnoy Tourist Information Office

Tel.: +33 3.27.20.54.70

e-mail : OTSI.le.quesnoy@wanadoo.fr

Quizz : Forts and citadels

Situated at the Belgian border and facing England, the port town of Dunkirk has been a historic strategic position through the centuries. The first fortifications were erected around the city in the 10th century. Over the centuries, the town changed hands several times before Louis XIV bought it back from the English in 1662 and asked Colbert to turn it into a fortified town. Between 1818 and 1848, a series of structures was built to establish a bastioned wall surrounding the town. The system was improved between 1869 and 1879. It was during this series of renovations that the bunkers and curtain walls of Bastion 32 were constructed, in 1874. The law of 8 March 1921 decommissioned Dunkirk’s fortifications and the majority of the ramparts were destroyed in 1930. However, the fortifications looking out to sea were preserved.

Website: www.dynamo-dunkerque.com

Mémorial du Souvenir

Bastion No. 6, known as "Bastion Saint-Jean", is situated in the commune of Avesnes-sur-Helpe, in the North of France, in the region called Nord-Pas-de-Calais. This fortified city clinging to the side of a rocky cliff was founded by Wédric Le Barbu in the 11th century. Philippa de Hainaut, future queen of England who persuaded King Edward to spare the lives of the Burghers of Calais, was born into the family of Avesnes.

The edifice was established on the south-eastern boundary of the town, against a rocky outcrop, opposite the high grounds of Malassise and Guersignies to the south; it dominates the Helpe valley. The first elements of the motte-and-bailey castle were built in the 11th century; two ramparts circled the town in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the second half of the 16th century, the town of Avesnes was the site of Franco-Spanish rivalry to take control of the Netherlands. Avesnes had six bastions built according to the plans of Devanter and Guichardin.

Reference is made to a "Bastion in front of the tower of Saint Jean" in written sources dating to 1559. It has the form of an "arrow-head" and the odd characteristic of a truncated salient. When it became too small to meet the needs of the growing artillery, Bastion Saint-Jean was extended in 1650 with a new polygonal shape on two levels and was doubled in size. This configuration can still be seen. The firing chambers and the countermine shafts soon became obsolete as they were too far from the new installations.

The upper part of the bastion, to the south, occupies two-thirds of the area, and rises over 20 metres above the valley. The lower part, which is smaller, controlled the sluice bridge – the Pont des Dames –, which controlled flooding of the eastern-side approaches of the town and flanked the curtain wall. The two levels are separated by a covered way, the purpose of which was to prevent ricochet shootings and enfilade firing of the firing step on the left side from the southern high ground. A ramp to the left connects the two levels. Nine years later, Avesnes became part of the kingdom of France. Vauban modified the bastion from 1690 to 1723 by adding a cavalier in the gorge of the bastion to dominate the whole structure and at the same time provide surveillance for its southern and eastern approaches. The two levels were decorated with formal French gardens in the 18th century.

In 1831-1832, the building, now small and out-of-date, was renovated and modernised, but it was finally decommissioned in 1867. The bastion and its land were sold.

The Bastion Saint Jean was registered on the French supplementary inventory of historic monuments in 1995 and was restored between June 1999 and September 2001.

bastion Saint-Jean

Avesnes-sur-Helpe Tourist Information Office

41, place du Général Leclerc BP 208 - 59363 Avesnes-sur-Helpe

Tel./Fax: +33 3.27.56.57.20

E-mail : ot.avesnes@wanadoo.fr

Quizz : Forts et citadels

Fort de Leveau is part of a fortification system dating back to 1874. It is just one of the structures erected around Maubeuge to protect it.

It is a "cavalier and high battery" structure, surrounded with masonry ditches with a scarp and counterscarp. These were defended with two caponiers (covered passages), with the entrance and the gorge protected with two flanking casemates.

Before World War 1 began, a concrete gun turret for two 75mm guns was added. The fort was bombarded and evacuated on 7 September 1914. According to sources, between 80 and 120 people lost their lives and the building was seriously damaged.

It was refurbished in the 1930s and observation posts were constructed. The fort fell on 19 May 1940. During the Liberation, it was the backdrop of combats between the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) and German troops.

Today, the fort belongs to the town of Feignies and is preserved as a place for reflection and strolling, steeped in history. Since 1993, the Association de Sauvegarde du Fort de Leveau has been looking after the site.

The main living quarters and defences of the fort can be visited: barracks, caponiers, concrete structure, central tunnel, trenches. Inside, a museum is dedicated to the two world wars. All objects and documents concerning the fort or Maubeuge are displayed in the gunpowder room, while the artillery store and the central corridor display uniforms, documents and apparatus from the Great War. Visitors can also discover a room decorated with furniture of the time. Lastly, the museum has a room dedicated to the Second World War.

Exhumations were carried out at the request of families of soldiers who died on 7 September 1914. In 1998, after two years of painstaking work, the bodies of nine buried soldiers were exhumed. They were able to be identified thanks to their identification tags and thus emerged from an 84-year oblivion. Nearly all of the families were found and invited to the funerals of their grandfather or great-grandfather. A moving ceremony took place at the fort and a commemorative plaque was unveiled, followed by another ceremony at the Assevent cemetery to bury the bodies.

Fort de Leveau

Association de sauvegarde du fort de Leveau

BP 68 59750 Feignies

Tel./Fax: +33 (0)3 27 62 37 07

Quizz : Forts and citadels