German troops attacked the city on 5 August, believing they would achieve an easy victory, but the Belgian defenders, though greatly outnumbered, held out heroically for 11 days, inflicting heavy losses on the invading forces.

In 1925, after the war, FIDAC (Inter-Allied Federation of Ex-Combatants) decided to build a monument dedicated to the memory of all those who lost their lives fighting on the side of the Allied forces.

The committee searched for a suitable site for the monument and finally combined the project with that of a local association that wanted to build a church to commemorate the victims of the war.

[4] Its dome was made of 13 tons of copper sheet from Katanga, at that time a province of the Belgian Congo colony, then rolled in the "Cuivre et Zinc" factories in Chênée.

The Belgian State, which became the owner of the tower in 1949, carried out restoration work from 1962 onwards, especially as the whole memorial had been damaged by aerial bombardment during World War II.

[5][6] The church was desecrated in 2010, and its owner, the parish association "Monument régional du Sacré Cœur", which no longer has the funds to maintain and rehabilitate it, has announced that it is looking for a buyer.

[8][9] In 2014, to mask the state of the building during the ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the Prime Minister's Chancellery commissioned a work by French graffiti artist Bonom (Vincent Glowinski), who painted a mural on the walls of the church depicting 100 doves of peace.

[2] The Cointe site is unique in Belgium, both in that it associates the secular and the religious within the same memorial, and in that it is a symbol of the collective homage paid to the country by the Allies in the First World War.