An EOD Officer Training Centre was organised at Thouars in 1940 to train, according to French rules, Polish officers gradually arriving in France from Romania and Hungary. The instructors at the Centre were officers who had already completed the training course at the French School of Engineering at Versailles. Initially, around 50 officers took part in the classes, which began in April 1940, but the number of participants increased to 80 over the course. Following the setbacks at the front, the order was given in June 1940 to evacuate the Centre to the area around Saints. For this purpose, a rail transport was ordered for 18.06.1940 at 5.30 a.m. from the local station. All officers lined up on the platform when suddenly an aerial bomb hit the edge of the platform killing 22 officers and injuring many others. The able-bodied were evacuated, while the 17 seriously injured were left in hospital in Thouars. Most were later loaded onto two lorries padded with straw and taken to the south of France, after which some were evacuated to England.Four officers died of their wounds the same day, and a sapper (or utility sergeant), Franciszek Karpinski, also died of his wounds. Two more officers died within three days of the explosion. Thirty of the dead were buried in the Magdeleine cemetery. Initially they were commemorated only provisionally - the coffins were placed in a common grave in one row next to each other, the resulting mass grave was framed by a kerb. At an undetermined time, a tall stone cross stood in the middle, with a plaque underneath with the names. According to reports, the board contained the details of 32 officers.Later, the bodies were exhumed and placed in a common grave in a central place in the cemetery. An obelisk was erected, in the form of a three-part wall, on which a plaque with 25 names and military ranks of the fallen was placed. In 1998, a storm caused the obelisk to collapse. On the initiative of the son of one of the deceased officers, Major Tadeusz Forys, who was listed on the plaque as 'Tadeusz Fogg', staff from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage carried out archive searches to verify the list of those buried and establish the correct recording of the data. The new plaque, which was placed on the monument by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in 2018 in place of the previous one, contains corrected details of the 30 Polish servicemen who lost their lives at Thouars. It is most likely that two or three of those commemorated rest elsewhere in the cemetery and that their families erected individual gravestones for them after the war. Such a situation is known to exist in the case of Capt Artur Oborski, who was exhumed and buried 20-30 m from the present memorial while still in the Second World War.The text on the new plaque is as follows: "To the memory of the Polish officers of the Sapper Training Centre / In Thouars - victims of the BOMBARDING of 18 JUNE 1940".Above the 30 names listed: "GUERRE 1939-1945", below the list of names: "MORTS POUR LA PATRIE".