Every little town in this country has one. Every little town. And they are both fascinating and heart-rending.

The memorials to the French dead in World War I. A conflagration that killed 1.4 million French soldiers, most of them in the prime of their lives, and wounded 4.3 million more.

World War II was more lethal than the “Great War” because millions of civilians died. But World War I is the bloodiest war European soldiers ever have waged, and they did it for more than four years, 1914-1918.

And the dead, the 1.4 million of them from a French male population of 20 million, in 1914 — are still recalled in the sad statues where the names of the dead are etched in stone.

Such as the statue (above) at the western entrance to the little Herault town of Nizas.

Some memorial statues are of angels. Some are Madonna-and-Child. Many show the simple poilu in battle dress, looking defiant, as does the memorial on the edge of Nizas (which, atypically, is not in the village center, outside city hall, and which is suffering stains on the arms and helmet from acid rain and bird droppings).

On the back side of the statue is a list (below) of those from Nizas who were killed. And it totals 21.

It is astonishing that this one small village, where the population has not exceeded 700 people in modern times, should list 21 native sons killed in combat. At least three are from the same family, one with a curious name. (Hot; pronounced “oat”.)

No great imagination is needed to extrapolate what a disaster the death of 21 young men must have meant to the town. Grieving relatives, families wrecked by the loss of their sons, widows bereft, a shortage of men to work the fields and feed their families. A generation of women for whom marriage was not at all the likelihood it would have been before the war.

It is interesting to note that the great majority of dead came from the first two years of the was, 1914 and 1915, when French generals were still attached to the concept of “attack” — even when machine guns and artillery made it suicidal.

The list of dead drops off significantly in 1917, when the French army essentially mutinied, refusing to go over to the attack.

It also is very interesting that the total Nizas war dead in World War II is … one. A name at the bottom of the statue. It reflects France’s quick capitulation to Nazi Germany during World War II, in 1940, a war the French were just not ready to fight, coming only two decades after the Great War.

The statue in Nizas declares the mortally wounded to be the “glorious dead”. It seems likely that anyone who knew the dead would imagine them happily trading “glory” for a long, quiet life in the countryside.

But, nearly 100 years later, they are still remembered in the statue. The names of those who led long lives but died 50 years ago … forgotten. But we can assume they all preferred the anonymity of living in a nation at peace to the fate of the 21 young men who went to the front and never came back to the vineyards of Languedoc.