Military History | Pennsylvania Memorial Fountain, Nantillois — Medium-Size Stone Fountain

Nantillois sits in a valley on the road north from Montfaucon, and in 1918 that made it a road centre worth taking. The American Battle Monuments Commission's own guidebook records that the village was entered but not held by the 4th Division on 27 September, taken by the 79th Division the next day, and then shelled heavily by German artillery because of those roads. The 80th Division fought above the village that October, attacking the Bois des Ogons on the 4th and reaching the far edge of the wood only at dark, then gaining nothing on the 5th until around six in the evening. Nantillois had been behind the German lines for four years by then, and a wartime photograph in the same guide is captioned as a view toward its ruins. The church was rebuilt in 1920. By the time Pennsylvania came to mark any of this, the rules had changed. The commission's 1926 review moved to prohibit further American memorials in Europe, then settled on approving only those it judged "useful" to the communities where they stood — "such as civic buildings, bridges, fountains and the like." Pennsylvania built the village a fountain. Veterans of the 315th Infantry, from the 79th Division, gave Nantillois a building for a recreation centre in 1930; it serves as the community hall. The fountain is a white stone front set into a red sandstone retaining wall at the junction in the middle of the village, the state arms above the panel and the text cut plainly beneath: THIS MONUMENT HAS BEEN ERECTED BY THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA AS A TRIBUTE TO THE HEROIC SERVICE AND NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE EIGHTIETH DIVISION AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCES. The commission's 1938 catalogue enters it as a "medium-size stone fountain," erected 1927; French local accounts date it to 1925. People drew water here. The semicircular basin at its foot holds none now, and rust from the old outlet has run down the stone below the niche. 📸 Cover: Michiel Hendryckx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the fountain in 2023, basin dry. Second image: U.S. Army photo, public domain, 24 September 2018 — a wreath laid at the monument during the centennial, officers of the 80th Training Command present.