Battle of Le Linge

The Battle of Le Linge was the bloodiest clash in the Vosges in the summer of 1915. For almost three months French battalions of chasseurs alpins stormed the wooded Linge ridge in the Vosges, west of Colmar, which the Germans had turned into a fortress of trenches, concrete shelters and wire entanglements. The fighting took place on a sector two to three kilometres long, often at grenade-throwing distance. In July and August the French took part of the ridge and, briefly, several summits, and from the end of August the Germans counter-attacked with gas and flamethrowers. When the fighting died down in mid-October, the front line had barely moved, and both sides had lost thousands of killed and wounded. Le Linge entered French memory as the “tomb of the chasseurs”.

Name and dates

The French speak of the Battle of the Linge (bataille du Linge), the Germans of the fighting for the Lingekopf, after the northernmost summit of the ridge. All sources take the first French assault on 20 July 1915 as its beginning. The end is dated to 15 or 16 October. We use 16 October, when the last great German attack broke down. This is the date given by the history of the 47th Division and most French studies. The French offensive had already ended in late August; after that the initiative lay with the Germans.

Background

At the start of the war the French briefly took Mulhouse and approached Colmar, but at the end of August 1914 they had to fall back to the crests of the Vosges. They held on only to a scrap of southern Alsace and a few upper valleys. From then on the mountain front ran close to the old Franco-German border, and in the winter and spring of 1915 both sides fought over individual summits, above all Hartmannswillerkopf above the Rhine plain.

In February 1915 the Germans attacked in the valley of the Fecht, which leads to Munster and on to Colmar, and reached the slopes of the Linge ridge, which dominates the valley from the north. From March they built fortifications there. In June the French 47th and 66th Divisions went over to a counter-offensive and in the course of a week advanced several kilometres up the valley, taking Metzeral. The commander of the 47th Division, General Gaston d’Armau de Pouydraguin, wanted to push on along the valley floor towards Munster.

The Commander-in-Chief, General Joseph Joffre, preferred, however, an “outflanking by the heights”, across the crests from which the roads in the valleys could be dominated. Against the view of the commanders on the spot, he halted the advance in the valley and ordered the Linge ridge to be taken. From its summits the Germans observed the road from Orbey to Stosswihr, which linked the French positions in the Orbey valley and the Munster valley. Once the ridge was taken, it would be the French who had the German road through Trois-Épis to Colmar under fire. Pouydraguin, who knew the German fortifications from reconnaissance, considered the attack very risky. The commander of the Seventh Army, General Louis de Maud’huy, therefore entrusted it to General Charles Nollet’s newly formed 129th Division.

Terrain and forces

The Linge ridge is a rampart about three kilometres long, running north to south between the Orbey and Munster valleys. In the north rises the Lingekopf (about 986 metres); beyond the shallow Collet du Linge pass comes the highest point of the massif, the Schratzmännele (about 1,045 metres); and beyond the quarries and a broad, treeless clearing, the Barrenkopf (about 980 metres). The slopes are steep, rocky and covered with dense forest. The German positions lay about 200 metres higher than the French jumping-off trenches, and between them ran a marshy hollow swept by fire from both flanks.

The Germans held the ridge with the Bavarian 6th Landwehr Division, formed in February 1915 from Landwehr men, that is, older reservists, belonging to General Hans Gaede’s army group, which defended Upper Alsace. Under cover of the forest they dug several lines of trenches, built concrete shelters and machine-gun nests, which the French called blockhouses, and wrapped the slopes in wire. According to a French description of 1915, the shelter in the clearing below the Barrenkopf had concrete walls three metres thick and a roof of rails and logs. Supplies came up by a narrow-gauge railway from the direction of Trois-Épis, and the Alsatian plain lay just behind the defenders’ backs. In the course of the battle the Germans reinforced the Landwehr with elite Jäger battalions, including the Mecklenburg 14th Jäger Battalion and Guard battalions, and with Prussian infantry regiments.

The French first had to build more than 12 kilometres of mountain road across the high pastures of the Hautes-Chaumes, because only mule tracks led to their positions. The 129th Division was assigned to the attack. Its core was the 5th Chasseur Brigade, largely made up of young recruits of the class of 1915 who had not yet been in action. It was reinforced by the experienced 3rd Chasseur Brigade from the 47th Division, commanded by Colonel Georges Brissaud-Desmaillet. The Germans called the French chasseurs alpins, with their characteristic dark blue berets, the “blue devils”.

Course

The July assaults

The attack was planned for 8 July, but was postponed several times and finally set for 20 July. That day at 2 p.m., after a bombardment lasting many hours, the chasseurs advanced on all three summits. The assault failed. The 22nd Chasseur Alpin Battalion, attacking the Barrenkopf, came under machine-gun fire from the German shelters and, according to studies based on the war diaries, lost 192 killed and more than 400 wounded. The battalions attacking the Lingekopf got stuck in the wire and only a few reached the pass. At the same time the 47th Division attacked the Reichackerkopf on the other side of the valley without success. A new attack on 22 July, by the 5th Brigade against the Barrenkopf and the 3rd Brigade against the pass, again brought enormous losses for little progress.

Only on 26 July at 6 p.m., after three days of bad weather, did the 14th and 30th Battalions of the 3rd Brigade break onto the summit of the Lingekopf with all its shelters and seize the Collet du Linge pass. Among those killed was Second Lieutenant Jules Dupin of the 30th Battalion, a poet whose name was later inscribed in the Panthéon in Paris among the writers who fell in the war. The next day the Germans, after a bombardment with heavy 150 mm and 210 mm guns, counter-attacked several times. The strongest counter-attack, made by the Mecklenburg Jäger, the French repulsed with the bayonet, taking several dozen prisoners. On 28 July a French communiqué announced the capture of a “very strongly organised position” on a two-kilometre front. In reality the Schratzmännele and Barrenkopf summits remained in German hands. On 29 July the 5th Chasseur Battalion attacked the Schratzmännele from the direction of the pass. Sources differ about the outcome, but the ridge could not be taken in its entirety.

August

That same evening, 28 July, Joffre decided not to reinforce the Seventh Army and ordered it to go over to the defensive in the Vosges from 20 August. Until then the French were to make one more attempt to take the whole ridge. On 1 and 2 August their attacks on the Schratzmännele and Barrenkopf broke against the shelters on the summits. On 4 August the Germans replied with the heaviest bombardment of the whole battle. According to French estimates, some 40,000 shells fell on three kilometres of front. In the afternoon the German infantry struck at the Lingekopf and the pass. It took back some of the trenches on the Lingekopf summit from the French, but the pass remained in French hands after a counter-attack. Only handfuls of men were left of the 14th and 30th Battalions. The fighting went on over the following days, with both sides alternately losing and regaining individual trenches.

Before the planned relief of the 129th Division, the command demanded one last effort. On 18 August the chasseurs briefly retook the Lingekopf summit but could not hold it. On 22 August they took the Schratzmännele summit, while on the Barrenkopf, according to some studies, they held on only until a German night counter-attack. General Maud’huy, with the consent of the army group commander, General Auguste Dubail, judged the task at least partly accomplished and halted the offensive. On 26 August the 129th Division handed over the sector to General Pouydraguin’s 47th Division.

German counter-attacks

The Germans did not accept the loss of their positions. On 31 August, after a bombardment lasting many hours in which they also used tear-gas and asphyxiating shells, their infantry attacked the French lines from the Lingekopf to the Barrenkopf. It took about 200 metres of trenches near the pass, and further progress was stopped by French counter-attacks in which the chasseur battalions bled themselves white. On 9 September the Germans used flamethrowers for the first time on this sector and briefly occupied the Schratzmännele summit. On 12 October, after a heavy bombardment and again with flamethrowers, they broke into the French front line between the pass and the Schratzmännele summit and held it despite counter-attacks. The last great German attack, on 16 October, failed. Winter came, and both sides began to fortify their positions for a long defence.

Losses

The loss figures vary greatly. According to tables based on the war diaries, the 129th Division alone lost 8,867 men between 20 July and 25 August: 1,157 killed, 7,611 wounded and 99 missing. Other calculations give more than 9,600 men for the same period. For the whole battle the Mémorial du Linge, the museum on the battlefield, estimates French losses at about 3,600 killed and 8,500 wounded, and German losses, harder to establish because some of the archives were destroyed, at about 2,500 killed and 6,000 wounded. About a thousand men on both sides were listed as missing. Guidebooks and memorial plaques repeat the figure of 17,000 killed, and also of about 10,000–11,000 French dead. These seem to be total losses rather than numbers of killed alone.

Significance

The battle brought neither side any strategic advantage. The French took a strip of the slopes and some of the summits, but the Germans held their positions on the Lingekopf summit, and from then on their trenches lay less than 20 metres from the French ones. As early as the end of July Joffre concluded that outflanking the Germans across the crests of the Vosges was impossible, and he gave the Seventh Army no reinforcements. Many French studies call Le Linge “the battlefield of absurdity” and regard the decision to halt the successful advance in the Fecht valley in favour of an assault on the ridge as a mistake. After October 1915 there were no more great battles at Le Linge, but shelling and raids continued until November 1918. According to the Mémorial du Linge, an average of five men a day died here from then on.

The battlefield on the Lingekopf summit is one of the few on the Western Front that was not filled in and reforested after the war. In 1921 it was listed as a historic monument. The trenches and shelters have survived to this day, and the Mémorial du Linge museum stands by the pass. The French dead lie in the military cemetery on the Wettstein pass, and the Germans in the cemetery at Hohrod-Bärenstall.