THE MORNING LIST
During the centenary of the Great War, the Haute-France region, now joined by the Grand Est region, took the initiative to create “peace gardens” at the sites of the fighting. Along with the necropolises and ossuaries, landscapers from the leading countries (French, German, English, Canadian, Moroccan, etc.) have created spaces conducive to meditation or reflection. These creations should form a “road of peace” of about forty gardens that would link Belgium with Alsace, along the old front line.
A Franco-German garden near Compiègne
The Clairière de l’Armistice, in the Compiègne forest (Oise), is a prominent place in the history of the First World War: it was in a railway carriage of the International Sleeping Car Company that the text was signed putting an end of the fighting on the Western Front. It was in this same carriage that the 1940 armistice was imposed, a humiliation desired by Hitler himself, who had it displayed in Berlin before it was destroyed by fire in 1945. The carriage that can be seen today is from the same series than the original and has been remodeled identically.
The Franco-German peace garden leads visitors through a well-defined undergrowth towards the clearing and the museum. The artistic team (a German landscape designer, a French artist and an Italian architect) made the aesthetically sound decision to evoke the impacts of projectiles in the form of circles of vegetation that stand out against the gravel. The long, narrow bench that crosses the place, ideal for resting, evokes the linearity of the rails and draws a peaceful suspended link.
Franco-German Peace Garden, “The Garden of the Third Train” (2018), near the Armistice Glade, Soissons route, Compiègne (Oise).
A Chinese garden in Noyelles-sur-Mer
This garden borders the wall of a surprising cemetery: that of the coolies of the former Nolette camp, in Noyelles-sur-Mer (Somme), a gull’s flight from the Somme estuary. These Chinese indentured workers mostly died after the Armistice, often as a result of the Spanish flu epidemic. The cemetery itself belongs to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which has maintained the graves of soldiers and auxiliaries of what was then the British Empire on French soil since 1917.
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