Military History | Basilique Notre-Dame-de-Lorette — Six Windows Sent From England

By late August 1925 the lantern tower on the Lorette spur had been inaugurated and the chapel beside it was still a cage of scaffolding. Frédéric Gadmer photographed it that month for the Albert-Kahn archive, and had photographed the same ground in June 1924, when the walls were timber shuttering and bundles of reinforcing bar lay in the grass. Louis-Marie Cordonnier and his son Jacques designed both structures. The Pas-de-Calais departmental archives describe the chapel as a Latin cross of 46 by 14 metres, faced in reconstituted Givet stone, with a dome 34 metres above the crossing, and record that Mgr Eugène Julien, bishop of Arras, blessed it on 26 May 1927; the French defence ministry gives September 1927 instead. Both agree on the consecration, 5 September 1937. The glass arrived from two directions. The master glassmaker Lorin executed the windows to designs by the painter Henri Pinta, and the two men gave the Saint-Louis window themselves, in memory of their sons killed in the war. Six windows of the transept came from Britain. The Imperial War Graves Commission gave them, Henry Payne made them in England, and the British war minister handed them to Mgr Julien on a Sunday, 4 August. No year appears on the archive page; British records date Payne's Lorette commission to 1929, and 4 August fell on a Sunday that year. A British architectural-heritage body, the Twentieth Century Society, records the gift as thanks for the ground France had granted for British war cemeteries. Inside, the walls are lined floor to ceiling with small private memorial plaques. Over the door the lintel carries David's lament in the Vulgate's Latin: CONSIDERA ISRAEL PRO HIS QUI MORTUI SUNT SUPER EXCELSA TUA VULNERATI. 📸 Cover: the basilica interior from the main entrance, Antoine Rex, CC0 — the transept lights show at left and right; the photograph does not identify individual windows. Also: the west front and its lintel, MatteoNL97, CC BY 4.0; the chapel in scaffolding, 22 August 1925, and in shuttering, 21 June 1924, Frédéric Gadmer, Albert-Kahn archive, CC BY-SA 4.0.