War memorials

France: Monument Aux Morts des Armées de Champagne, Ferme du Navarin

Architect: Bauer & Perrin
Location: Ferme du Navarin, Marne, France

A few miles to the north of Necropole Nationale de la Crouee is the Monument Aux Morts des Armées de Champagne at Ferme de Navarin. This structure is both a mausoleum and a memorial. Designed by Bauer & Perrin, it has a pyramidal base that contains both a chapel and a crypt, the latter containing the unidentified remains of some ten thousand soldiers of various nationalities who fell in the Champagne battles. Above, on a plinth, is a monumental sculptured group carved in Vosges sandstone. This is the work of the sculptor Maxime Réal del Sarte, who had been mutilated in the war. The three soldiers depicted are also portraits: in the centre is General Gouraud, who suggested the monument and who unveiled it in 1924; to his right is the sculptor’s brother, who died at the Chemin des Dames, and to his left Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest and favourite son of President Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot down in July 1918 while serving in France as a fighter pilot with the United States Army Air Service. Gouraud, who commanded the IVº Armée in the Champagne after 1916 was later, in 1946, at his request, buried in the crypt.

Gavin Stamp