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Note Courrières is a commune near the Belgian border of France. The first coal shaft was sunk there in 1849 and a mining concession was granted in 1852. In 1906, an explosion killed 1,099 miners. On that occasion, German workers came to help rescue their French comrades – the basis for G.W. Pabst’s classic film Kameradschaft (1931). On 28 May, 1940, an SS division set fire to the village and shot forty-five hostages.
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PATH TO COURIÈRES An 1854 oil sketch by Jules Breton The gleaner in her shawl, the rough linen sling at her waist, figured against the evening sky as she returns to her village, is absent here; it is the painter himself who trudges home in the receiving dusk, his harvest done. The place of the woman is held by the tallest elm, its crown drawing a scatter of silent rooks. The path leads the eye peacefully round to the low houses, brick-red and white, and to the church tower and beyond. No hint of surveyors, trial drillings already there at the time as exploitable veins were opened and spoil heaps begun. Not yet the coaldust explosion, the Kameradschaft, the burning church, the massacred hostages. Time has scumbled all that history. I come into the gallery out of the Sheffield rain, put down my shopping bag next to a bucket catching the skylight drips. There it is, its frame a little brighter gold than the corn. I let my eye be led again by the curve of the path to Courrières, past the verge of poppies, the everlasting elm, the wheat as permanent as Ruth. The rooks, chipped into the paint, may never settle again. 3

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Courrières is a commune near the Belgian border of France. The first coal shaft was sunk there in 1849 and a mining concession was granted in 1852. In 1906, an explosion killed 1,099 miners. On that occasion, German workers came to help rescue their French comrades – the basis for G.W. Pabst’s classic film Kameradschaft (1931). On 28 May, 1940, an SS division set fire to the village and shot forty-five hostages.

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