Military History | 2d Division Marker, Lucy-le-Bocage — Concrete Boulder About Three Feet in Diameter

The American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 catalogue of American memorials in Europe has a column headed "Number," and almost every row fills it with a single object in a single place. The row for the 2d Division reads 22. Where the other rows name a village, this one says: "On all of the battlefields where the division had fighting." What is catalogued there is not a monument but a series. The Character column describes one unit of it — "Concrete boulder about 3 feet in diameter, with 2d Div. insignia in bronze upon it" — the date column says only "Soon after the Armistice," and the remark says they were erected by men from the division. No architect, no subscription committee, no state. The commission's note on what its table leaves out includes "markers now falling to pieces," so 22 counts the ones still standing in the 1930s. American War Memorials Overseas, which has surveyed them since, counts 23. Each boulder carries a date, and it is not the date of the casting. The one on the D28 southeast of Xammes reads SEP-12-1918. The one here is recorded as June 1, 1918 — the day the division came up by truck from Meaux and put its line across the road to Paris with its centre in this village. What the stone fixes is a position and a day, not a result. The commission's road guide records Lucy-le-Bocage as "completely destroyed by German shellfire during the fighting near by," and tells the driver to look for the marker on the left "just before reaching the church." It is still there, in the small triangle where the Route de Marigny meets the Route de Torcy, forty metres short of the church of Saint-Remi. 📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 520 — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive; the plate is captioned "Typical 2d Division Battlefield Marker" and is representative, not the Lucy-le-Bocage stone. Second image: "The town of Lucy le Bocage, showing in the center over the house tops, Belleau Woods, captured by the American forces," 1918, Library of Congress Panoramic Photographs Collection, public domain.