Wreaths, officials, a Marseillaise sung a cappella in front of the children of the school. A priori the ceremony of November 11 in the small Ariège village of Aigues Vives, in the country of Olmes, will not have anything very singular compared to the thousands of other commemorations which will take place at the same time everywhere in France. A priori only. Because, 104 years after the end of the Great War, it will quite simply be the first celebration of its kind in the town of 700 souls. For the simple reason that it had so far never had a war memorial.
“There was just a plaque inside the church. You had to go into the building to see it and again, according to my research, there was a name missing, ”explains Jean-Luc Tardy, the mayor of Aigues-Vives. The famous monument to the dead was included in the program of the city councilor, elected in 2020. “I absolutely wanted us to be able to do our duty of memory”, he confides, admitting that this project is not the one which has most excited its municipal council, rather made up of thirty-somethings and forty-somethings. “But they told their parents and grandparents about it and the memories came back.”
A stone heavy with history
So why this anomaly? Why did Aigues-Vives, which lost 14 inhabitants on the battlefields of the First World War, and no others during the following conflicts, escape the great wave of construction in the 1920s and 1930s? “That, you should ask my predecessors,” jokes the mayor.
In any case, if the monument had been commissioned at the time, it would look like all the others chosen from the catalogue. While the one recently installed on the Place du 14-Juillet is almost “home”. It mixes the big and the small story. That in particular of this small hill, visible from the village, which two local brothers had decided to transform into a quarry. With their homemade explosives, they began to “take out stones”, “this mixture of sandstone, limestone and puddingstone for the surrounding houses”. Then the war came. The two Adreit brothers have packed their bags. “They never came back and nature reclaimed its rights on the hill,” says the mayor. Tools of the time were found under the brushwood. A flat stone too. It served for a long time as a table for the new owner of the land. Resized and covered with a Plexiglas plate, it is now used as a sober and belated monument to the dead of Aigues-Vives. With in the middle of twelve others, the names of two craftsmen.