Military History | V Corps Marker, Southeast of Mouzon — Small Marker Built of Field Stones

Almost every row in the American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 table of American memorials in Europe names a division, a regiment or a state. The first row names a corps, and it is the only one in the table. Its Character column reads "Small marker built of field stones," its Date erected column "Soon after the Armistice," and its Remarks column "Erected by members of unit to mark V Corps line at the Armistice." What that row commemorates is not a battle or a river crossing but a line — where a corps of two or more divisions happened to be standing when the firing stopped on 11 November 1918. The plate printed with it shows a low cairn of rough field stone with a row of shell ends set into the face, more shells lying across the top slab beside what looks like a helmet, and a pale inscribed panel below, too small in the photograph to read. It was built out of what was on the ground. The commission sent visitors here twice and did not put the spot in the same place. Its 1927 guide has the driver pass a 2d Division boulder at kilometre post 1.7 beyond Mouzon, then "STOP 2 kilometers farther on, just after emerging from woods, at V Corps monument." Its 1938 volume gives the location as "3 miles southeast of Mouzon (Ardennes) on the main road" — some eight hundred metres further along the same road. American War Memorials Overseas lists the 2d Division boulder on this road and nothing else along it; the Historical Marker Database has no entry in the commune at all. The ridge is open ground, Moulins in the valley to the east and Pouilly about three miles due south. 📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 301, the plate captioned "V Corps Marker, South of Mouzon" — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive and cropped to the plate. Second image: the commission's panorama drawn from this stop, "Panorama Looking South," page 302 of the same volume.