Mary brought back all the men of this French village safely from the war

On November 11, 1918, at 11:00 a.m., all the bells of the 40,000 communes (civil townships) in France rang loudly. Everyone knew what it meant. For several days, the rumor had been going around that Germany had asked for an armistice. The pealing of bells was the long-awaited announcement that the armistice had been signed! The war was over!

The men would return home, and life would resume without the daily anguish of learning that a son, a husband, or a father had been killed in combat. The next year, it turned out that only a handful of those 40,000 communes - less than 10 in fact - had no casualties and no monument to the dead to build. These memorial monuments are so familiar to the French that they hardly take notice of them anymore…

One such village, Fresnes (Yonne department, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté in north-central France), was fortunate enough to have not lost any of its children: about thirty young men who had gone to war on August 3, 1914, the day the war was declared.

In Fresnes, from that first fateful day, the women went to the church every morning to pray to the Holy Virgin, "so that their men would come back from the war." They regularly received the ‘bulletin of the armies’ with the long list of fallen soldiers who had died for their country. Each time, they breathed a sigh of relief: none of "their men" was on the grim list.

At the beginning of 1919, the men were all back in the village! "Some soldiers had been wounded, but they all came back. One of them was rather seriously injured, but he lived to be an old man," testified one of the oldest villagers...

May God bless you, O Holy Mary, for having protected these men, for having answered the fervent prayer of these women who believed in your protection!

Philippe D.

Story sent to Mary of Nazareth on December 21, 2021