These regions are home to the many sites that bear the scars of two world wars. The sites commemorate the selfless sacrifice of those who took part and now, thanks to the regional Remembrance Trails, you can discover them at your leisure along local cycling and hiking routes. Each route develops a specific theme and is accompanied by an illustrated guide. Consult the guide on your mobile (or download it) to discover the human side of these conflicts and learn about the region and its history in an original and compelling way.
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In October 1914 the front line stabilized and nearby Armentières, just 2 km distant, became a target for the fury of the German guns. Situated a good dozen miles south of Ypres, the main theatre of operations, Armentières gained the nickname ‘The Nursery’ because it was a quiet sector where newly-arrived soldiers of the British Imperial Army were sent to familiarize themselves with trench warfare.
Factories in the town continued to produce for another two years until the increasing shelling and the use of poison gas forced the inhabitants to gradually abandon the town. The remaining civilians were evacuated on 13 August 1917, during the Third Battle of Ypres.
On 9 April 1918 the German Army launched Operation Georgette, also known as the Battle of the Lys, in an attempt to take control of the ports used by the British on the north coast of France. The Germans entered Armentières on 11 April. During their subsequent retreat on 2 October they destroyed everything in the town that could be of use to the Allies. They even blew up the belfry which, after four years of war, had come to symbolize the town’s resistance.
By the end of the war three-quarters of Armentières was in ruins: 4,800 houses had been totally destroyed, another 2,400 severely damaged, and all the churches and public buildings were rubble and dust.
Architect Louis-Marie Cordonnier was selected to supervise reconstruction. He drew up plans for the town hall, Saint Vedast Church and the covered market (today the cultural venue Le Vivat). These buildings border the town square, or Grand’ Place, where stands the war memorial. In choosing for his designs a regional approach, characterized by red brickwork and high gables, Cordonnier sparked a ‘Flemish Renaissance’ in Armentières. He had a similar influence in neighbouring Bailleul, Comines, Merville and Laventie.
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Modern town planning in France was bornin the reconstruction of the towns and cities destroyed in the war. A law passed in 1919 required all councils responsible for more than 10,000 inhabitants to draw up plans describing the layout, decoration and enlargement of their town with particular attention to be paid to main routes, water supply and the sewer system.
With the return of the townsfolk, who had had to leave their homes because of the fighting, reconstruction was not only urgent
it was also highly symbolic. People returned to Armentières at the rate of about 1,000 a month and were willing to invest their energy
in the revival of the town.
For private buildings the new town planning law required owners to adhere to the pre-war layout (if this had not been modified for the purpose of modernizing the town), but no such restrictions were placed on architectural style and owners were free to choose according to their taste. Heavily influenced by the traditional styles of the region, the architects who worked on the reconstruction of Rue de Lille showed immense creativity in the design of the houses and the result is striking. Red brick is perhaps a familiar construction material, but the shape of the gables, the stone ornamentation, the wrought iron work, and the door and window frames make each façade a unique creation.
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Born in 1877, Ernest Deceuninck was a sales representative based in La Chapelled’Armentières when war broke out. He soon left for occupied Lille and there he joined the resistance group known as the Comité Jacquet. Alongside Eugène Jacquet, Georges Maertens and Sylvère Verhulst, Deceuninck was one of the organizers of the group which helped Allied soldiers fallen behind enemy lines to
escape.
On 11 March 1915 British airman Lieutenant Mapplebeck was shot down near Lille. He avoided falling into the clutches of the Germans thanks to the Comité Jacquet. A few months later he again flew over Lille to drop pamphlets mocking the governor General Von
Heinrich. In the following days 200 members of the Comité Jacquet were exposed by an informer and arrested. On 21 September 1915 Jacquet, Maertens, Deceuninck and Verhulst were sentenced to death. They were executed three days later at dawn in the ditch surrounding Lille Citadel.
Deceuninck’s body was transferred, in accordance with his final wish, to Armentières on 22 March 1930 and reburied under the war memorial in the town cemetery. This memorial to Ernest Deceuninck was unveiled the following Armistice Day. On it, he is shown a few moments before being shot, his back to the wall, his chest bare, in proud defiance. At the entrance to Lille Citadel stands a memorial to the Lille Resistance which also pays tribute to the leaders of the Comité Jacquet. It shows them in a similar posture with, lying at their feet, the young Léon Trulin, another figure of the resistance in the occupied zone during WWI.
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This memorial stands in the courtyard of a building known locally as ‘La Goutte de Lait’ (The Drop of Milk). Situated on the site of the former townhouse belonging to the Mahieu family, who were the owners of several textile factories in Armentières in 1914, the current house was given to a child protection charity by Madame Mahieu whose two sons, depicted on the monument, were killed in World War I.
Born in 1887, Auguste Mahieu was posted to the 56th French Battalion of Light Infantry which was, from early 1916, given the job of defending Caures Wood in the Meuse. On 22 February, the
second day of the French offensive at Verdun, Auguste Mahieu was killed by a shell. Today his name can be seen in the
gallery of Douaumont Ossuary.
His brother Michel, born in 1891, was a flying enthusiast who, in 1911, made a name for himself by breaking the world altitude record with a passenger in a biplane. At the head of a squadron nicknamed ‘The Owls’, Captain Michel Mahieu was one of French aviation’s ‘flying aces’ during the Great War. He was shot in the Somme after crashing behind enemy lines in the night of 2 March 1918.
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Born in 1878 in Armentières, Maurice Debosque took over the family building business from his father in 1909. He was one of the first men to return to Armentières after the signing of the Armistice. Swiftly putting together a team of workers to clear up the rubble of the ruined town, he went on to organize the construction of numerous public buildings such as the town hall, Saint Vedast Church and the war memorial.
Given the sobriquet ‘Château Debosque’ (Debosque Castle), his home was a vast Anglo- Norman house built from brick and stone and old-style roofing tiles. The interiors were also a veritable exhibition of local craftsmanship. From 1972 to 2007 it housed the town library, and since then it has been used by various departments of the council.
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In recognition of the sacrifice soldiers made on the field of honour, the French state passed on 29 December 1915 a law giving those who ‘died for France’ the right to an individual and permanent grave in the many military cemeteries on its territory. The bodies of soldiers killed in action were not returned to their families immediately because their considerable number would have diverted logistical resources away from the very pressing need to supply the army with men and materials.
In response to the many clandestine exhumations, the French state agreed in 1920 to return the body of a soldier to his family
if the latter requested it. The mortal remains of approximately 250,000 soldiers were moved under the supervision of the Service de Restitution des Corps, a government department set up specifically for the purpose. Of the 1,085 soldiers of Armentières killed between 1914 and 1918, the bodies of 158 of them were thus transferred to a special military plot situated on the left side of the
cemetery. At the centre of the cemetery stands a war memorial dedicated to the victims of the First World War. Beneath it lie the remains of Ernest Deceuninck, a leading figure of the French resistance during the German occupation. His body was moved there from Lille in 1930.
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Founded in 1882, Gustave Eiffel School was originally a training college and the British Army made good use of its facilities during the Great War. In the spring of 1915 the school’s workshops were used to manufacture Pippin hand grenades, grenade launchers and periscope rifles. Night and day 300 civilians and about thirty British soldiers worked under the supervision of Captain Newton and the school’s instructors. The dormitories and classrooms were turned into a makeshift hospital, while the laboratories and the experiment rooms were used for medical tests. Maps for the general staff were produced in the technical drawing rooms.
Every month two to three hundred thousand rations were prepared in the school kitchens to feed the population of Armentières.
In August 1915 German shelling started to increase and by March 1916 the entire establishment had to be evacuated. Of the students who were called up, 122 were killed in the war. Others made a name for themselves, such as Charles Nungesser who became a hero of French aviation.
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When the British Army arrived in Armentières, in October 1914, a cemetery was established to take the patients from the nearby military hospital and various ambulance stations in the town who died from their war wounds. It was located beside a housing estate known as ‘Cité Bonjean’, whose construction had been funded in 1909 by distinguished local Judge Georges Bonjean to provide homes for workers in the town.
More than 2,100 British soldiers were buried in the Cité Bonjean Military Cemetery, alongside 500 German soldiers, most of whom were killed in the Battle of the Lys in the spring of 1918.
The site is also home to the Cité Bonjean New Zealand Memorial. This memorial bears a sculpted ferleaf and pays tribute to the forty-eight New Zealand officers and ordinary soldiers who fell in the sector of Armentières but have no known grave. It is one of seven memorials which pay tribute to the Kiwis who died on the Western Front, both in Belgium and in France.
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On 2 August 1914 the hospital in Armentières had roughly 1,300 patients and the medical staff comprised 3 doctors, 3 interns and 74 carers. One of the first things the British did upon arriving in the town was to set up gun batteries in the hospital’s kitchen garden because it was on the outskirts of town and not far from the front line. Subsequently, heavy German shelling led to the evacuation of the patients on 31 October 1914. After travelling by road to Nieppe train station, the sick were then transferred by train to Rouen, Tours, Bordeaux and finally Cadillac.
Its proximity to the war zone led to the total destruction of the hospital in 1918. Works to rebuild the establishment in the Flemish style began in 1921. Numerous dwellings were erected in a large woodland park and near to them were built common areas and facilities, such as the baths, the events hall, the workshops and even a small farm which provided food for the hospital. The establishment has provided hospital services since its founding in 1615 and, today, is called the Établissement Public de Santé Mentale (EPSM) Lille-Métropole.
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During the Great War many charities, most of them religious, opened their doors to soldiers who were in desperate need of support, providing kind words, games and prayer. In Armentières, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) ran two centres in 1915, one in the Gustave Eiffel School and the other at the hospital.
Most of the staff in these centres were volunteers. In 1917 one of the volunteers at the YMCA centre in the Eiffel School was Australian Franck Beaurepaire, a champion swimmer who had won six Olympic medals and broken fourteen world records, and who would be Melbourne’s mayor in 1940.
At the nearby crossroads with Boulevard Faidherbe, the YMCA also ran a hostel for the parents of grievously-wounded soldiers. This establishment continued its work into the 1920s, accommodating the families of soldiers who were buried in the sector of Armentières.
Rebuilt in the same period, Rue Sadi-Carnot is lined with several townhouses which belonged to industrialists operating in the town. Under the influence of architects such as Charles Bourgeois and Jean-Baptiste Maillard, these buildings display a mixture of art nouveau, art deco and regional styles to give the street a pleasantly eclectic feel.
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