A Quiet Place

It stays light in the evening until about 10 pm. After spending the afternoon at Turckheim, we still had about 4 hours of daylight left...so we decided to just go driving. It's a good game. Follow the roadsigns and go to someplace you've never been.

Now, the roadsigns in France have a special symbol to mark historical destinations. About 15 minutes headed in no particular direction, we saw a sign that pointing toward someplace named "le Linge" with this historical designation.

So we followed the sign. The road took us winding up into the Vosges mountains toward the Valley of Munster. After about 20 more minutes of driving, we found "le Linge" and came to find out that it was a World War I battlefield. It is a quiet place. In deep woods on a mountain side. God only knows why this should have been a battlefield.

It really spoils a jolly mood when you find out your mystery destination is a preserved system of trenches on the top of a forsaken hill. Even worse when you find there are German and French cemetaries nearby, each with around 10,000 graves or so. These were the folks who walked these same trenches when they were hacked out of the rocks over 90 years ago.
Though over 90 years have passed, there are two things that prevent you from taking emotional shelter by treating this as ancient history. The first is that if you stray too far off of the approved trail, you run the risk of being blown up by unexploded shells that were fired in anger when my grandfathers were still children. The second is the crosses. As seasons pass, the rain and snow will occasionally expose human remains. The crosses mark the discovery of soldiers - white crosses for French and black crosses for Germans.- that seem to still happen to this day.

For the Alsatians, you can pick any color cross you want. In a cruel joke by history, they were on fighting on both sides. Officially they were part of the German empire. Historically, many young men had fled Alsace into France (and elsewhere) to avoid conscription...only to find themselves returning home in a French uniform when the war broke out.