Cemeteries and memorials

     Vintage motion pictures online show an American army cemetery outside Cheppy and burials there.  The bodies were later exhumed and moved to what is now Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery.  It is the largest American military cemetery in Europe with some 14,000 graves from WWI.  A 100-year commemoration ceremony was scheduled for Sunday, September 22.  Mayor Lamorlette of Cheppy said he planned to attend.  An American we met in Reims was going to lay candles for a luminaria and read names of 39 of the dead.  However, violent thunderstorms hit the region that day with 70 mph winds.  A hundred miles away in Trier, Germany, where I was, the same storm put Kansas thunderstorms to shame and lasted for hours.  Much of the ceremony was cancelled.  A few days later, I visited the cemetery. The flags were still there, and I left a copy of my book on Dad with the superintendent, Bruce C. Malone, Jr.  I signed it, but postdated it by a day so it read September 26, 2018.

American Argonne Cemetery

     German dead are interred in a cemetery outside Cheppy that is shown in an earlier post in which I noted some of the dead were Jewish.  I saw one cross with the name Acker on it.  Dad's maternal grandmother was named Acker.  It is a common German surname, but it raises the remote possibility that Dad might have shot, or shot at, a distant cousin.  I once asked him if he had killed anyone in the war.  He answered, "I don't know.  I never saw the people we were firing at."

     I saw no memorials to Americans in WWI in Paris.  There was this memorial to the

sons of France in WWI under the Arch de Triumphe.

      A Frenchman from Brest, France, that I met in Reims, said his port city has a large monument to the Americans.  About 700,000 American soldiers went through there in WWI.

       Washington D.C. has not had a WWI memorial although one is planned.  On one visit to Washington, I took Dad to the Second Division monument on the ellipse.  It honors that division's service in WWI.  Dad liked it and said it was enough.  We didn't know that the First Division, the Big Red One that took over from Dad's 35th, has a larger monument just a block away.

Second Division Monument

       In Kansas City, Missouri, where Dad worked when I was growing up, there is the Liberty Memorial for WWI.  The city claims that it is home to the only legitimate memorial to WWI.  It is a good claim since Kansas City started raising funds in 1919.  And, as motion pictures on the memorial's website show, commanders from the United States, France, Britain, and Belgium came to the dedication a few years later.  In more recent times, the memorial acquired and installed a large commemorative mural in its museum.  The painting depicts a celebratory parade in Paris at the end of the war and shows the same four commanders.  But the mural isn't original to the Liberty Memorial.  Instead, it was painted for the walls of a restaurant in New Jersey (as I recall) and was only moved to Kansas City when the restaurant closed.  After it was installed in the museum, city-pride took over and the face of Captain Harry Truman was added by painting his face into the crowd behind the commanders.  The memorial itself consists of a large museum building and a tall column with a perpetual flame (steam lit by a red light at night) and flanked by two large "Assyrian sphinxes"  The sphinxes perplexed me when I visited several years ago, but visiting the British Museum in London on my recent trip, I saw what I believe to be their model.  I don't know if, or why, a WWI memorial in Kansas City was inspired by an exhibit in London.  Maybe someday I'll find an answer.

Assyrian sphinx in the British Museum