Another Battlefield

Once again, while driving through the Vosges mountains, I stumbled across a battlefield. This one was known as Vieil Armand, or also as Hartmannswillerskopf. It was another of the trench confrontations that occurred during WWI in the ridiculous heights of the Vosges. The sign at the entry told me that 30,000 French and Germans lost their lives fighting over a hill top.

The opening photo shows the entrace to the crypt at the memorial. The flag in the background is for the cemetary behind the building, in which several thousand crosses are ranged in perfect rows. If you look real hard, you can see a white cross on the tree covered hill behind the flag. That marks the actual battlefield, on the top of that hill. You can hike up there from the memorial and still see the trenches.Inside the crypt is a single, common grave where they put the bones of 12,000 unidentified soldiers. The picture above shows the spot. People still leave flowers and mementos on the crypt some 90 years after the battles. Some of the notes are in French and some are in German.