The Great War at Thann

An earlier post described a WWI battlefield, called Le Linge, that we stumbled across one week-end. It was a quiet, remote place on top of a mountain in the Vosges. Why anyone would fight over that ground, I could not understand.

While visiting Thann we got a few clues. I apologize in advance if this gets boring.

I mentioned before that Thann faces a flat strip of land that runs down toward the town of Belfort. This strip of land is about the only easy place for an army to march either to or from the heart of France. It is a passage between the mountains of the Vosges, and the Jura, and the Alps. It is known as the Belfort Gap.

The village of Belfort was heavily fortified by France to guard this opening. In 1870, the German army marched past Thann and then besiged Belfort and then marched on to Paris. Shortly after their victory, they drew some new borders for Germany and France. Thann was just inside the border of the new German territory of Alsace and Moselle. Belfort remained, just on the other side, at the Eastern edge of France.

On August 3, 1914, France and Germany and just about everyone else went to war. On August 7, 1914 the French marched out of the fortress of Belfort in hopes of reclaiming Alsace. Their first stop was Thann, which they liberated on that same day. The museum at Thann displays a flag made to commemorate the time.They next day, the French army marched into the city of Mulhouse and reclaimed the 2nd largest city in Alsace without a fight. It was looking to be a very short war. At least until the next day, when the Germans took Mulhouse back. At that point, the fighting settled into what became known as the Battle of the Frontiers. The Germans pushed the French back. The French pushed the Germans back. Then everyone dug trenches.

Thann ended up 3 kilometers inside the French lines. The good news was that it was liberated in 1914. The rest of Alsace would have to wait for 4 more years. This was not a happiest of situations, though. The village was shelled mercilessly. The museum told us that shelling occurred on 350 days during the 4 years of the war. Over 10,000 shells fell on the city and over 120 townspeople were killed. This included at least one poison gas shell which, in May 1918, killed 13 at one time.

Except for the flag, all photos in this posting come from the site http://www.firstworldwar.com/. I believe that all are in the public domain. All photos were taken in the Alsatian areas. I don't know what village the picture below comes from, but if that house is still there today then I'd bet it is covered with flower-filled window boxes. The intro picture shows a map from 1916 of the trench lines across the European front. If you double click to enlarge, you will see that the lines ran all the way from the North Sea down to Basel, in Switzerland. In Alsace, the lines ran over the tops of the Vosges through places such as Le Linge. They map also shows the 1870-defined borders and lists the Alsatian towns by their German spelling. (Strassburg, Kolmar, Mulhausen).

The picture below chills me to the bone. I don't know that it was taken at le Linge, but it was taken somewhere nearby in the Vosges. In this picture, the French troops are on the high ground and defending themselves from an assault from below. The guy standing, second from right, is so desperate that he is thowing rocks down the mountain to defend himself. The guy on the ground, at the extreme right, may well be under one of the thousands of crosses that to this day mark the graves in the mountains.