Voie de la Liberté Milestone

This stone is a faithful copy of one of the most quietly moving monuments in Europe. The original belongs to the Voie de la Liberté, the Way of Liberty, a chain of markers planted at every kilometer along the route that General George Patton's Third United States Army drove after the D-Day landings of June nineteen forty-four. A French officer attached to Patton proposed the idea, and the sculptor François Cogné created the design, a pale stone roughly four feet tall topped with a torch and stars.

More than eleven hundred of them run from Sainte-Mère-Église in Normandy all the way to Bastogne, near the border of Luxembourg, tracing the long fight that freed France, Belgium, and Luxembourg from German occupation. Luxembourg City itself was liberated on the tenth of September, nineteen forty-four. This replica was set here so that an American town could share in the memory carried by every one of those roadside stones overseas.