Military History | 4th Division Monument, West of Fismes — Small Stone Obelisk

The Fourth Division held a convention at Neuenahr, in occupied Germany, on Sunday 29 June 1919, and among the things it voted on was its own commemoration. The division's history records what was decided: three monuments to the officers and men who had fallen, one on the Vesle, one at St. Mihiel, one in the Meuse-Argonne, "commemorating thus each major engagement in which the Division as a whole had participated in action." A party from the 4th Engineers was detailed to build them before the division left Germany, and the division began entraining for the coast on 9 July. The Vesle stone stands about a mile west of Fismes, on the north side of the Rouen-Reims road, on ground the division's history says the division owned. It is a pyramid-topped shaft on a triple base, sixteen feet high, with the divisional insignia sunk in bronze into the shaft and a tablet on the pedestal reading 4TH DIVISION / UNITED STATES ARMY / 1918. The fighting it marks ran from 3 to 12 August 1918, when the division tried to force crossings of the Vesle against German troops holding the north bank. The American Battle Monuments Commission's guidebook puts the division's losses in that fortnight at about 3,500. That commission did not exist when the vote was taken. Congress created it in 1923, and its 1925 annual report named three Fourth Division monuments among those it judged better than the rest. In March 1926 it resolved to build its own memorials and thereafter to approve only useful ones. Its 1938 guidebook tabulates these three under a heading for memorials erected by agencies other than the United States Government, on a page holding that further American monuments abroad "would not be in good taste and should be prohibited." The obelisk stands about eighteen metres north of the N 31 today, between Fismes and Bazoches-sur-Vesle, on the bank the division had fought to reach, with the traffic between Reims and Soissons going past it. 📸 Cover: "4th Division Monument Near Bazoches", plate on page 80 of the American Battle Monuments Commission's American Armies and Battlefields in Europe (1938). Second image: the commission's tabulation of American memorials erected by agencies other than the United States Government, page 523 of the same volume, whose first row is these three obelisks. Both are works of the United States Government, public domain, via the Internet Archive.