Last Memento

In the Forest of Compiegne Joan of Arc surrendered to the Duke of Burgundy, Louis XVI received his Queen Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon met his bride, Marie-Louise of Austria. In a railway car in the Forest of Compiegne, 22 years ago last Nov. 11, a delegation of Germans signed an armistice dictated by France's Marshal Ferdinand Foch. In that same railway car, 2419D, at 6: 50 p.m. last June 22, a delegation of Frenchmen signed an armistice dictated by Germany's Colonel General Wilhelm Keitel.

In the years between the two armistices France made a national shrine of that spot in the Forest of Compiegne. Trees were felled, the clearing carpeted with soft grass. A monument was erected--a sword thrust into a limp German eagle--and on the base of the monument was chiseled this inscription: To the Heroic Soldiers of France, Defenders of the Country and of Right, Glorious Liberators of Alsace-Lorraine. At the spot where the car had stood a great granite block bore the words: Here on the Eleventh of November Succumbed the Criminal Pride of the German Empire, Vanquished by the Free Peoples Which it Tried to Enslave. For Car 2419D an American built a concrete hall. And at one end of the clearing, commanding its whole expanse, was erected a 17-foot marble statue of Marshal Foch.

Since June 22, German workmen have been busy in the clearing. Car 2419D was removed to Berlin. The Alsace-Lorraine monument, the concrete hall, the big granite block and a smaller one marking the spot where the German plenipotentiaries alighted--all were blasted to bits with dynamite while German newsreels ground.

Last week a photograph in Adolf Hitler's newspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter, showed the clearing as it is today, with nothing but bare patches in the shriveled winter grass to indicate where the car, the hall, the granite blocks and the monument had stood.

Only one thing was left in the clearing: the statue of Marshal Foch. Perhaps, because the Marshal was a soldier, the Nazis meant to leave him there and let the forest grow up around him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.