A small car park at the side of the busy Arras-Béthune road is directly adjacent to the intimate memorial site, fenced by chains stretched over posts (with bilingual inscriptions on them: "In tribute to the Polish volunteers killed on 9 May 1915 at La Targette"). The monument proper consists of a cross elevated on a platform and a cubic pedestal, to which two allegorical bronze reliefs are attached.

Nearby are numerous World War I memorials, opposite the Polish Czechoslovakian one, a few kilometres away the French one and the largest, the Canadian one in Vimy. In the hills of La Targette, a heroic attack on 9 May 1915 was carried out by the 2nd Company of the 1st Regiment of the French Foreign Legion, composed of Polish volunteers trained in Bayonne (hence called the Bayonne Legion). Most of the unit's soldiers were killed, including its French commander and Polish deputy. The battles of the Bayonians were depicted in several paintings by Jan Styka. The monument was erected on the initiative of Polish émigrés living in the Pas-de-Calais region, thanks to contributions collected by them. Initially, there was a plaster design by the well-known sculptor Stanisław Ostrowski, drawn up in his Paris atelier in 1928, but ultimately unsuccessful (known from several fragmentary photographs). Real del Sarte, a Parisian sculptor and invalid of war, wounded at Verdun, realised many monuments related to the First World War. Forgotten today, he was a renowned artist and active right-wing activist between the wars. His two signed plaques on the monument, in flat relief, depict an allegorical female figure in a flowing dress-shroud (the upper one, inscribed in the shape of a cross) and a bust of a helmeted soldier holding a banner (the smaller lower one, on a plinth).

It is not clear today whether the commission for the Polish monument del Sarte received from the French side or from the Poles, the initiators of the idea. The monument was inaugurated in 1933 by the Polish ambassador to France, Alfred Chłapowski. In 1937, General Edward Śmigły-Rydz paid tribute to the fallen here. The monument was severely damaged in a hurricane in 1967; it underwent extensive conservation work in 1994, including the replacement of the granite facings.