Military History | Missouri State Memorial, Cheppy — Stone Shaft Surmounted by a Bronze Figure

The State of Missouri put its monument up in 1922, three years before anyone in Washington settled what American memorials in France ought to look like. It stands on a terrace above the D19, about 700 metres south of Cheppy in the Meuse: a stone shaft carrying a bronze woman, her right arm raised with a laurel wreath, an olive branch in her left hand. The American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 guidebook enters it in seven words — "Stone shaft surmounted by a bronze figure" — erected 1922, at the road junction south of the town. The sculptor was Nancy Coonsman Hahn of St. Louis, trained at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art files the work under the title Victory. Its English face records that Missouri raised it for her sons who died in France for humanity during the Great War, 1917-1918. Missourians had filled much of the 35th Division, which took Cheppy on 26 September 1918, the opening morning of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, and reorganised in the village before attacking again at half past three. Then the rule arrived. The commission toured the battlefields in 1924 and reported that existing American monuments, whatever their emotional appeal, reflected poorly on the country. Its 1925 annual report nonetheless named a few it judged better than the rest, and the Missouri monument at Cheppy headed that list. By 1926 it had moved to bar new American memorials in Europe, then to approve only those "useful" to the villages housing them: civic buildings, bridges, fountains and the like. Nothing the commission approved after that is a statue. Steps still climb from the roadside verge to the terrace, past a Great Seal of the United States cut into the retaining wall. 📸 Cover: "Cheppy, monument américain Missouri" by Dominique S., CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons; second view "Monument of Missouri" by Labattblueboy, CC BY-SA 3.0.