In the hills above the town, a memorial to the sacrifice of the French and allied troops who fought in the two battles of the Marne was erected between 1921 and 1931 thanks to the backing of Madame de la Rochefoucauld, the Cardinal of Reims, the Bishop of Châlons, the military authorities and many donors. With the Douaumont ossuary, the basilica of Notre-Dame de Lorette and the Hartmannswillerkopf memorial, this was one of four national monuments erected by subscription after the Great War. The Gothic construction is based around two commemorative chapels illustrated by patriotic stained-glass windows. Outside is a “lantern of the dead” recalling the sacrifice and losses of many families. An ossuary contains the remains of nearly 1,500 soldiers, mostly unidentified. In 2014, the Ministry of Defence decided to provide the Dormans municipal council, owner of the site, with support for the restoration of the entire memorial.

The area was further developed between December 1914 and May 1915 and reinforced with trenches, dugouts and shelters. In Spring 1915, the gunner Roland Dorgelès, author of the novel Croix de Bois, was stationed there, as was Lieutenant Charles de Gaulle.

In March 2016, the Germans took control of the wood. On 10 March, along the River Aisne, the enemy opened artillery fire on the French positions on the Chemin des Dames ridge from the hamlet of Troyon around 10 kilometres west of Craonne through to Berry-au-Bac. On 17 March 1916, during one of these battles, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire received a shrapnel wound to the head  and was evacuated and trepanned. Weakened by his injury and the operation, he died of Spanish flu in November 1918.

The soldiers buried at the cemetery include the body of Jules-Gérard Jordens, who died two days before his 31st birthday. Born in Nice in1885, this French poet was called up to the 246th Infantry Regiment (IR) as a stretcher bearer. He was moved to the Aisne and then to Artois and was killed at Bois-de-Buttes in 1916. The name of this man of letters figures in the Pantheon in Paris, along with those of the 560 writers who were officially awarded the ‘Died for France’ distinction. Moreover, Robert André Michel, a well-known archivist and palaeographer, died on 13 October 1914 at Crouy.

A dedicated square plot contains the graves of 67 British soldiers killed in October 1914 and from May to October 1918. These remains were exhumed from neighbouring French military cemeteries. At the end of the Marne counter-offensive, the British Expeditionary Force engaged between the French 5th Army and the French 6th Army, where it was deployed in the direction of Laon between Soissons and Craonne. However, due to enemy resistance and troop fatigue, the German forces could not be dislodged. At the end of these exhausting battles, the British, at the request of their command, moved to Flanders. In Spring 1918, a few contingents returned to this region.

At the end of the war, the village of Pontavert was in ruins. Commended in the Army Order on 17 October 1920, Pontvaert was aided by the Cantal region to rebuild its village.

In Spring 1940, war once again wreaked havoc on Pontavert.

Pursuing the defeated enemy on the Marne, the French and the English crossed the Aisne region on 13 September 1914. However, the Germans got a hold of the Chemin des Dames plateau very quickly. After heavy fighting, the enemy managed to remain the sole master of the plateau in November 1914. This progressively turned into a fortress that was only definitively liberated in October 1918 by French and Italian troops.

The Craonnelle National Cemetery was built during the war near an aid station. It includes the bodies of soldiers who died in battle for France along the Chemin des Dames from 1914 to 1918. After the war, the cemetery was developed to accommodate other soliders buried on the Plateau de Californie and the Plateau des Casemates, or those buried in temporary cemeteries at the aid stations of Flandres à Oulches, Vassogne, Jumigny, Craonne, Moulin Vauclair. This cemetery is home to nearly 4,000 French bodies nearly half of which are in two ossuaries. In addition, 24 British soldiers and two Belgian soldiers are also buried there.

The fighting at Crouy, 1914-15

From the very first weeks of the conflict until the end of the war in 1918, the limestone plateau of Chemin des Dames, which dominates the Aisne valley to the south and the Ailette valley to the north, was bitterly disputed. This natural observation point was a strategic position dominating both the Reims and Soissons plains. On 12 September 1914, pursuing the enemy after its defeat on the Marne, the Allies crossed the Aisne. By mid-October, General Maunoury’s 6th Army held the Soissons sector. On 30 October, the Germans occupied Vailly-sur-Aisne, which lay at the heart of the fighting. By November, the plateau was in the hands of the enemy, who progressively transformed it into a veritable fortress.

To relieve enemy pressure on Soissons and secure a position on the road to Laon, on 25 December 1914, amid the floodwater of the Aisne, the French attacked in the Crouy sector. On 1 January 1915, they bombarded the enemy positions. On the 8th, after a series of mine blasts, the attack was launched. Despite taking the first enemy lines on the plateau, the men of General Berthelot’s 55th Division were unable to capitalise on their success, because of the speed of their adversary’s reaction. On 12 January came a violent counter-attack, which drove the French back across to the south bank of the Aisne. Fierce fighting ensued on the slopes of Hill 132. Mine engineer Albert Tastu, an officer of the 289th Infantry Regiment, lost his life in the fighting. Surrounded with his men in the Grotte des Zouaves, Tastu resisted valiantly, but was killed by enemy fire. Paris seemed under threat once again. On 13 January, the French retreated further south and the front became entrenched on the outskirts of Soissons. Exhausted and poorly supplied due to the flooding of the Aisne, the French suffered major losses. In just six days, 12 000 men, including 1 800 of the 60th Infantry Regiment alone, were put hors de combat. This defeat shook public opinion and became known as “the Crouy affair”, as described by soldier and writer Henry Barbusse in his book Le Feu (English title: Under Fire), which won the 1916 Prix Goncourt. Barbusse had enlisted as a volunteer with the 231st Infantry Regiment and took part in the episode.  The press was censored and a number of generals, including Berthelot, were punished.

The Chemin des Dames offensive, April 1917

Despite the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line in March 1917, General Nivelle maintained his attack on the Chemin des Dames in April. To carry the offensive, he deployed 49 Infantry Divisions and five Colonial Infantry Divisions, supported by 5 310 guns and, for the first time, 128 tanks. Altogether, more than a million men took part in the operation.

On 2 April, the artillery pounded the German positions, partly destroying them. Thus, on the morning of 16 April, the first waves came up against barbed wire and were mown down by machine-gun fire. The French nevertheless managed to get a foothold on the ridge. Despite the losses and difficult weather conditions, the attacks continued the next day. Nivelle’s authority crumbled. From 16 to 30 April, 147 000 men were put hors de combat, 40 000 of them dead. Each division lost on average 2 600 men on the Chemin des Dames.

On the verge of collapse, the French held on. During the summer of 1917, a series of operations and counter-attacks were launched for control over the Chemin des Dames’ key positions, from Craonne to Laffaux.

The infantrymen on both sides bore the most extreme hardships. In October 1917, the Battle of Malmaison took place, whose objective was to capture the old fort of La Malmaison, to the west of the Chemin des Dames. Having taken the plateau on 23 October, the Germans retreated to the north of the Ailette valley.

In October 1920, the ruins of Crouy, which had been the scene of bitter fighting in 1915 and suffered the hardships of occupation, received an army citation.

The combatants include several soldiers from the combined Pacific battalion. These men from French Polynesia died during the fighting to take Vesles, Caumont and the farm of Le Petit Caumont on the Marlois plain in the Aisne.

Built in 1918, this cemetery was developed from 1921 to 1934 to include bodies exhumed from temporary cemeteries in the department and again from 1941 to 1951 to rebury the bodies of soldiers who died during WWII. Nearly 2,600 bodies are buried there, including over 2,500 French soldiers in two ossuaries. In WWI, 56 British soldiers were buried there and in WWII, 41 French soldiers were buried in individual graves.

The Battles of the Oise, 1914-18

In August 1914, as set out in the Schlieffen Plan, German troops entered Belgium and marched on Paris. They crossed the Oise and the Aisne before being stopped by the French counter-offensive on the Marne. The two armies then established a front from Verdun to Dunkirk; the right bank of the Oise was occupied by the Germans, while fierce fighting took place on the left bank, with the zouave regiments particularly distinguishing themselves.

For three years, from September 1914 to March 1917, the front didn’t budge. Noyon came under one of the strictest occupations, and the Oise saw no major military operations; it was a “quiet” sector. The French and German troops consolidated their positions, occupying underground quarries, which they decorated and carved.

At the end of 1916, the German command wanted to strengthen the front, and therefore decided to abandon the Noyon sector. Applying a scorched earth policy, the Germans retreated to the Hindenburg Line, which they had just established, thereby limiting the effects of an Allied offensive in this sector. By mid-March 1917, the area was liberated, but in ruins: the houses had been dynamited, the fields flooded, and the bridges and junctions destroyed.

However, the respite was short-lived. Less than a year later, 27 German divisions broke through the British front across 80 km and swept towards Noyon which, on 25 March 1918, found itself occupied once again. Entrenched on Mont Renaud, overlooking the town, the French drove back 23 German attacks, and for over a month shelled the enemy positions. Spared up until now, Noyon was completely destroyed.

On 9 June 1918, the German command ordered a fresh offensive. The Oise then became the scene of a bitter struggle, known as the Battle of Matz, during which the two enemy armies employed heavy artillery and tanks without reserve. Over the first few days, the German army made rapid progress. But due to major losses, their advance was halted at Compiègne. Led by General Mangin, the French army regained the initiative, liberating the Thiescourt massif and crossing the River Divette. On 30 August, Noyon was liberated for good.

The first department on the front line to come back under French control, the Oise has preserved the memory of that bitter fighting and, with the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 in the forest of Rethondes, it became one of the symbols of the Great War.

Catenoy, military hospital no 36

For the duration of the war, the village of Catenoy was a key site for the stationing of troops by the French Army. The writers Roland Dorgelès and Charles Péguy stayed here before going to the front. 

However, in January 1918, the 3rd Army, which had its command in Clermont and the headquarters of its medical service in Nointel, decided to install a military hospital there.  Ever increasing numbers of wounded were arriving each day, and required triage, treatment and evacuation to more appropriate care facilities. From 8 April 1918, the village was home to a military hospital with 1 500 beds (900 for the wounded, 400 for the gassed and sick, and 200 for the lame). The proximity of the N31 road and the Beauvais-Compiègne railway line made for the efficient treatment and rapid evacuation of the wounded who flooded in from the front. By the end of May, the hospital was up and running. Within less than ten days, it had received some 2 500 sick and wounded men, and contributed to 15 ambulance trains.

During the Battle of Matz, from 9 to 14 June, Catenoy hospital, with its 12 surgical teams, received a continuous stream of ambulances from the battlefield. Stretchers piled up in the triage shelters. Surgical staff worked tirelessly, attending to each of the wounded in turn and carrying out more than 700 serious operations in the two operating wings. Over 5 000 soldiers passed through the hospital, which was the 3rd Army’s largest. Owing to the dedication of chaplain Père Fonteny, some of the soldiers who did not survive their wounds are laid to rest in Catenoy National Cemetery.