#war

They say this shows Czech Legion troops marching into Vladivostok in 1918, deep in the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Luks was usually known for gritty city scenes, not history painting on this scale.

A village war memorial from a few years after the occupation ended, with the local dead listed alongside. I couldn't find who pushed for it or how it got paid for. Plenty of Dutch towns raised theirs by public collection in those years, but I don't know that this one was.

It's for three men who were shot in the dunes at Waalsdorpervlakte in March 1945, a couple of months before it was all over. They say it went up two years after that, in the stretch when towns across the country were commissioning memorials about as fast as anyone could carve them.

The plaque reads 'Rückkehr in die Heimat' — return to the homeland. From what I can find it's a memorial to the prisoners of war who made it back after the Second World War, put up decades after the fact. Beyond that, the internet gave me almost nothing.