Information given in the magazine "Fine Arts",1931, no. 7, p. 284 concerning the formation of a committee to build a monument to Poles killed in France during the First World War. The fallen were soldiers of the 1st Regiment of the French Legion, commonly known as the Bayonne Legion. The monument was unveiled in 1933 in the village of La Targette.

A modernised reading of the text

Monument to Poles killed in France.

In France, a committee was formed to build a memorial to the Poles who fell on the field of glory in France between 1914 and 1918. Some 3,000 Poles died on the Western Front in the World War. It was not only as volunteers in the French army and as soldiers in the autonomous Polish army that Poles died. They also served in the ranks of the Belgian army, several hundred soldiers of the Canadian army bore Polish surnames, and finally the American army had tens of thousands of Poles in its ranks, and the first soldier of this army to die on the French front bore a Polish surname.

On 9 May 1925, on the initiative of the Association of Former Polish Military Officers in France, a cross was erected between the villages of Carency, La Targette and Neuville-Saint-Vast, as the 10th anniversary of the battle in which Polish volunteers from the Second Marching Regiment of the Foreign Legion received their baptism of fire between these villages. The Poles who fell on this field rest in close proximity to the coalfield, which is now home to a quarter of a million Poles.

The committee for the construction of a memorial to the Poles who fell on the field of glory in France between 1914 and 1918 initiated the collection of contributions, appealing to the generosity of Poles living in France and further to the Motherland.

In this connection, a message in a whole series of Polish periodicals read the following: "The French government has acquired for the Luxembourg Museum a bust of Chopin in bronze by Stanislaw Ostrowski. This bust was on display at the Polish exhibition in the halls of the 'Jeu de Paume', organised on the occasion of the centenary of Polish Romanticism, and attracted universal attention there.

Mr Stanislaw Ostrowski, who lived in Paris before the war with his wife the late Bronislawa, a well-known poet, was president of the Society of Polish Artists in Paris for a number of years. After the war, he settled in the country, where, among other works, he made the mausoleum of the Unknown Soldier, and was the initiator of the restoration of the polychrome of the market square in the Old Town. For some years now, Mr St Ostrowski has returned to Paris, where he is developing his artistic activities.

Recently, the committee for the construction of a monument in honour of Poles killed in France during the Great War commissioned him to create a monument. The monument is to be erected in the village of 'La Targette', near the town of Arras, where part of a company of the so-called Bayonne fell in battle on 9 May 1915.

The technical and artistic commission, composed of architects, sculptors and critics, as well as members of the main committee for the construction of the monument, visited Mr St Ostrowski's studio in recent days, and with great appreciation accepted his design as expressing in the most appropriate manner the essential ideas and tendencies of the monument in question. The committee also considered that, from an architectural and sculptural point of view, the design met the requirements.