Military History | Mémorial aux Volontaires Polonais, La Targette — The Motto Cut the Other Way Round

On the morning of 9 May 1915, at the opening of the French offensive in Artois, the 2nd company of Battalion C, 2e régiment de marche du 1er étranger, went forward from this stretch of the Arras–Béthune road toward the Ouvrages Blancs and hill 140 on the Vimy ridge. The company was Polish. Its men had volunteered in France in the first weeks of the war and trained at Bayonne, which is why Polish accounts call them the Bajończycy, the Bayonnais. Imperial Russia, France's ally, objected to a Polish legion that might fight for Polish independence, so the volunteers wore French uniform inside the Foreign Legion instead. French and Polish accounts both put the company's losses that day at about three-quarters of its strength, and French accounts record the ground being retaken in a German counter-attack the following night. An attack at Souchez on 16 June accounted for most of what remained; Polish accounts have the company dissolved that summer. The cross standing here was paid for by the Polish community in France and cut to a design by the sculptor Maxime Real del Sarte. The stonework dates from 1929, the formal inauguration by Poland's ambassador from 21 May 1933. A bronze figure is set into the head of the cross, a Polish eagle below it, and a dying man in an arched relief in the plinth. Across the plinth runs the volunteers' motto in gilt letters, and not in the order most accounts print it. The stone reads ZA WASZĄ I NASZĄ WOLNOŚĆ — for your freedom and ours — yours before ours, which is not how the phrase is usually set down. A storm damaged the monument in 1967 and it was put back up, as it has been each time. Directly across the D937, the Czechoslovak volunteers who attacked the same ground on the same morning have a monument of their own, facing this one. 📸 Cover: Neuville Saint Vaast-Mémorial Polonais-20151231.jpg, Daniel Villafruela, 31 December 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.