In the spring of 2015 (when Mons was one of Europe’s Capitals of Culture) the town opened its Memorial Museum (MMM), displaying about 5,000 artefacts from the two World Wars, many of them donated by veterans and Belgian citizens.
The museum aims to personalise the war experience, focusing as much on the men who wielded the weapons as the weapons themselves. There are pieces of a soldier’s bread ration, preserved in a bottle; Field Marshall Montgomery’s beret, which he presented to Mons when he was proclaimed a Citizen of Honour in 1946; and a German one-tonne bomb – the first in the world, manufactured in 1917.
More intimately, there are numerous recorded interviews with veterans, and a large collection of their diaries, postcards and letters to sweethearts back home.
