Le Monument des Morts

Built into the side of the chateau hill is Nice's War Monument. I remember the first time I stumbled onto it my first year here - stopped me in my tracks. It's around the corner from the "bay" side of the city, and the extension of the famous Promenade des Anglais (Nice's celebrated seaside walk) from the bay to the Port (where we live) has brought much more recognition to this monument because people walk, run, ride or blade past now. Quite nestled and set back from the humming tourism that surrounds it - it is amazingly calm and solemn, and, as you can see, larger than life.
It has hommages to WWI, WWII, Indochina and all the branches of the military who fought, as well as the beloved Resistance.
One day in July we puttered around it with Estelle and I must admit it was a bit like being at the Vietnam Wall in DC. So many names.

Thomas took this photo of Estelle and I sitting down to try and give some perspective as to the size of this monument. He was not even "backed up" all the way to the Promenade when he took it.

If you look closely at these wide "steps", you will see something carved into the face of them in the center. It is the longhand wording for each year of World War One. Example "Mille Neuf Cent Quatorze" (for 1914), etc. Thus the steps were a choice, each step representing one year of the war, leading up to all the names of the lifes taken.
What looks like just the cut of the rocks is actually names. Look carefully at these photos and you'll see.

Some striking sculptures hovering over all those names.

"Outremer" is the French word for "overseas". As France has/had colonies all over the world, these are now referred to as "Les DOM-TOMS". This means "Departement Outre-Mer and Territoire Outre-Mer". I think this means places like La Reunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc. I could go on and on listing them because the tentacles of France are/were long and tenacious!

This is the view towards the sea, looking out from the monument.

One section dedicated to the Resistance. It says "The time of Oppression came, and Freedom found here on our soil, men and women who, so that she (=Freedom) could live, would accept torture and death"

All a bit humbling on a Sunday afternoon. I did think of all the families of all those dead men, and wondered how they all made it through their grief. The French thankfully are not dying in Iraq, like my own unfortunate countrymen and the countless others.