The Golden Madonna, Basilique, Albert

The Golden Madonna, Basilique, Albert. This church was surmounted by a 5-metre high Golden Madonna which was coated by 40,000 sheets of gold leaf. In January 1915 German shelling toppled the statue to a perilous-looking angle below the horizontal, but it didn't fall. Visible to soldiers for many miles around, and giving the bizarre impression that the Virgin was about to hurl the Baby Jesus into the rubble below, the statue give rise to two legends:
Bristish and French believed that the war would end on the day the statue fell.
German believes that whoever knocked down the statue would lose the war.
Neither prediction came to pass...
Source: Major & Mrs Holt's
Battlefield Guide to the Somme. Ed. Leo Cooper
Source: Sir Douglas Haig's
Great Push, the Battle of the Somme. Ed. London: Hutchinson & Co., Paternoster row

Return to World war commemorations in France, click here!