The Four Cities
Photo by Guy Crenn
Belfort, France
During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) the people of Belfort, in north-eastern France, defended the city against a much larger force of Prussians. To commemorate the event, the city decided to build a memorial. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a sculptor, who’d been a soldier in the war (better known in America for designing and building the Statue of Liberty) thought something a little more grand was called for. The lion, carved out of limestone, ended up being 72 x 36 feet. Germany protested the original design of the lion facing them to the north and so it was rearranged to face south.
Photo/The Great War Podcast / Painting by James Kerr Lawson (1864-1939)
Ypres, Belgium
This is Cloth Hall, a building in the middle of the city of Ypres, Belgium that has housed the commercial cloth industries warehouses and market since medieval times. Though no one’s exactly sure why, up until the 1800s, people threw cats out of the belfry tower. It was either to cast out devils or witches (which people thought cats had some connection with) or simply because there were too many cats keeping the mice under control in the cloth warehouses.
The Well of Souls
Dijon, France
This is a sculpture called “the Well of Moses” by the Dutch artist Claus Sluter (1340-1405/6). It represents the six prophets who were said to have foreseen the death of Christ on the Cross: David, Jeremiah, Zachariah, Daniel, Isaiah and Moses. It was built for Phillip the Duke of Burgundy in the middle of the cloisters in a Carthusian monastery outside of Dijon, France. The duke wanted to be buried in the monastery so he would benefit from the constant prayer. Originally the figures were the base for a tall crucifix, but the thing got banged about during the French Revolution and this is the part still intact.
Burning of the Jews" from the Nuremberg Chronicle.
Strasbourg, France
In 1349, on February 14th (Valentine’s Day) the Jewish population of Strasbourg was burned to death by their Christian neighbors. Estimates of the death toll range from a few hundred to several thousand--some of the Jewish population was ‘allowed' to convert to Christianity. There were many convoluted social and financial reasons for the city to eliminate the Jews and steal their property, but the cretinous belief that the Jews were spreading the plague (the Black Death) by poisoning wells, had a lot to do with it.
The Train
The Allies after the signing of the armistice, November 11, 1918
This train car shows up twice in Silent, at the end of the story.
It had been a dining car before it was employed as Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s office-on-wheels for the last few months of World War One. On November 11th, 1918 it was parked in the forest of Compiègne, north of Paris. Here, early, on a cold, drizzly morning, the Germans arrived and signed an armistice with the Allied Forces, ending the war.
The railway tracks where the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918.
After a few years on display in Paris the train car was taken back to Compiègne and placed in a little museum commemorating the end of the war.
Cut to: nearly twenty two years later. June 22nd, 1940. After the Germans crushed the French Army in the first months of World War Two, Adolf Hitler forced the French to sign their surrender in the very same train car. Knocking the wall of the museum down he had the car moved to the exact spot it had been on the morning of November 11th, 1918.
June 22, 1940. Glade of the Armistice