Military History | 4th Division Monument, Brieulles-sur-Meuse — The Open Ground Was to Be Avoided

The plan for 4 October 1918 told the 4th Division to keep off this ground. Its task was to hold the northern edge of the Bois de Brieulles, push through the Bois de Fays and the Bois de Malaumont into the Bois de Forêt, then turn east and sweep that wood to the Meuse. The open fields between the woods and the river, the division's history records, "was to be avoided because of the perfect observation and annihilating fire that could be brought to bear on it by the Germans." At 5.25 that morning the 58th Infantry left its holes on the northwestern edge of the Bois de Brieulles behind a barrage, hidden by mist. The mist lifted, German artillery on the hills east of the Meuse swept the whole front, and the regiment fought its way to the southern edge of the Bois de Fays and held there, a foothold in the Hindenburg Line. The commission's 1938 guide gives the same reason for something that never happened here: no attacks were launched from this vicinity against the Bois de Forêt. The stone stands in that open ground. The division's history records that at a convention at Neuenahr on 29 June 1919 the division voted three monuments, one for each of its major engagements, and that a party from the 4th Engineers was detailed to build them before it left Germany. Materials were hard to come by: only this one, that history states, was made of granite, the other two being of very fine, durable, hard stone. The design is common to all three — a pyramid-topped shaft on a triple base pedestal, the ivy-leaf insignia in bronze sunk into the shaft, a tablet reading 4TH DIVISION / UNITED STATES ARMY / 1918. It stands on the crest of the D 164 about a kilometre southwest of Brieulles-sur-Meuse, inside a wire fence on a gravel apron, an interpretive panel beside it, the Bois de Fays on the hillside to the rear and the wooded ridge of the Bois de Forêt across the valley. 📸 Cover: the monument in 2023, photograph by Michiel Hendryckx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: "Ground Gained Vicinity Bois de Forêt, October 4-31, 1918", from the American Battle Monuments Commission's American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (1938), page 254 — the map the commission's own itinerary tells the visitor to consult at this stop. Public domain.