Military History | Monument à la compagnie Nazdar, La Targette — The Signature Reads 1925

On 9 May 1915 the Czech company of Battalion C, 2e régiment de marche du 1er étranger, went forward from this ground toward the Vimy heights. Its volunteers had come out of the Paris branches of two Czech associations, the gymnastic society Sokol and the social-democratic club Rovnost, and had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion; in law they were still subjects of Austria-Hungary. The company was known by its greeting, Nazdar. Its standard-bearer, Karel Bezdíček, was killed on the first day. A monument was raised on the spot and unveiled on 31 May 1925; some accounts give 1 June. It was destroyed in 1940. The monument standing here now was designed by the architect Bernard Heger and the sculptor Marta Šumová and unveiled on 19 May 1968: interlocking triangles of pale stone, a seated soldier gathering a dying comrade onto his knees, both of them holding the flag. The relief is signed at its lower right, HRVŠKA J. FECIT 1925. V is cut for U throughout, as it is in the inscription on the flank: ICI LE 9 MAI 1915 LES VOLONTAIRES TCHÉCOSLOVAQVES ONT COMBATTV POVR LEVR PATRIE ET POUR LA FRANCE. Czechoslovakia would not exist for another three and a half years. What the initial J. stands for is disputed: Czech accounts give Josef Hruška, French ones Jaroslav. How a stone cut in 1925 came to stand in a monument raised in 1968, none of the sources read here explains. Behind it, 206 Czechoslovak dead lie in two squares of concrete crosses, gathered in the late 1950s from 73 cemeteries across 38 departments. Forty-eight metres across the D937, the Polish volunteers' cross faces this one. 📸 Cover: the Nazdar monument at the entrance to the Czechoslovak cemetery, La Targette, with the name wall beyond. Second image: the cemetery from the D937, area view. Both Daniel Villafruela, 31 December 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.