Start of the Battle of Le Linge

On 20 July 1915 at 2 p.m., after an artillery bombardment lasting many hours, French battalions of chasseurs alpins went in to storm the Linge ridge in the Vosges, between the Orbey and Munster valleys, west of Colmar. On the steep, wooded slopes they were met by German trenches, concrete shelters and thick wire, held by the Bavarian Landwehr. The first assault failed to take any of the ridge’s three summits: the Lingekopf, the Schratzmännele and the Barrenkopf. So began the Battle of Le Linge, one of the bloodiest battles on this sector of the front. It lasted until mid-October, and the French paid for a small scrap of mountain with several thousand dead. Le Linge entered their memory as the “tomb of the chasseurs”.

Why the Linge

From the autumn of 1914 the front in the Vosges ran along the mountain crests, close to the old Franco-German border. The French, who in August had briefly taken Mulhouse and approached Colmar, held on only to a scrap of southern Alsace and a few upper valleys. In the winter and spring of 1915 both sides fought over individual summits from which the Rhine plain could be seen, above all Hartmannswillerkopf. In February the Germans attacked in the valley of the Fecht, reached the slopes of the Linge ridge and then fortified it. In June the French 47th and 66th Divisions went over to a counter-offensive, advanced several kilometres up the valley and in the second half of June took Metzeral. Munster was not far off.

The Commander-in-Chief, General Joseph Joffre, did not, however, want to advance along the valley floor. He favoured outflanking the enemy “by the heights”, across the crests from which the roads in the valleys could be dominated. In line with this principle (“whoever holds the heights holds the low ground too”) he halted the advance in the Fecht valley and ordered the Linge ridge to be taken. From its summits the Germans observed and shelled the road from Orbey to Stosswihr, which linked the French positions in the two valleys. The commander of the 47th Division, General Gaston d’Armau de Pouydraguin, knew the German fortifications from reconnaissance and warned that the attack would be very risky. He advised continuing the advance in the valley. The commander of the Seventh Army, General Louis de Maud’huy, therefore entrusted the assault to General Charles Nollet’s newly formed 129th Division, reinforced by the experienced 3rd Chasseur Brigade from the 47th Division. The attack was planned for 8 July, then postponed to 12 and 18 July, until it was finally set for 20 July so that the 129th Division would have time to take up its positions.

A German fortress in the forest

The Linge ridge is a rampart roughly three kilometres long, with three high points. In the north rose the Lingekopf (about 986 metres); beyond the shallow Collet du Linge pass, the highest point of the massif, the Schratzmännele (about 1,045 metres); and south of the quarries and an open clearing, the Barrenkopf (about 980 metres). The German positions lay about 200 metres higher than the French jumping-off trenches, and to reach them the French had to cross a marshy, exposed hollow swept by fire from the flanks. The slopes themselves were steep, rocky and covered with dense forest, which hid the German fortifications from artillery observers.

The Germans had been building here since March. Under cover of the trees they dug several lines of trenches linked by communication trenches, built concrete shelters and machine-gun nests, which the French called blockhouses, and wrapped the slopes in wire, partly hidden in the undergrowth and in rocky gullies. Their supplies came up by a narrow-gauge railway from the direction of Trois-Épis, and only a few kilometres separated them from the Alsatian plain. The French first had to build more than 12 kilometres of mountain road across the Hautes-Chaumes, because only mule tracks led to their positions. The sector was defended by units of the Bavarian 6th Landwehr Division, part of General Hans Gaede’s German army group. These were regiments made up of older classes of reservists, but superbly dug in.

The assault of 20 July

According to a French description of the time, the bombardment lasted about ten hours, but in the forest no one could check what it had destroyed. At 2 p.m. the chasseurs advanced. On the right wing the 22nd Chasseur Alpin Battalion attacked the Barrenkopf and came under machine-gun fire from the German shelters. According to studies based on the battalion’s war diaries, it lost 192 killed and more than 400 wounded that day. On the left wing the battalions attacking the Lingekopf got stuck in the wire and under fire from the flanks. Only small groups reached the Collet du Linge pass, and some units had to fall back to their jumping-off trenches. The attack in the centre, on the quarries below the Schratzmännele, was according to some studies called off altogether. The battle’s museum, the Mémorial du Linge, estimates that within a few hours the chasseurs lost more than a third of their strength.

At the same time the 47th Division attacked the Reichackerkopf, south of the Fecht valley. There too the attack failed and, according to some studies, by the evening of 21 July had cost more than a thousand men.

A first reckoning

The French communiqué of 21 July spoke of the capture of part of the German fortifications and of an advance “to within a short distance of the Linge ridge”. In two days of fighting the French took 107 prisoners. The defenders, however, held all the summits. Alongside the Bavarian Landwehr men, elite German Jäger battalions fought here, including a Mecklenburg and a Guard battalion.

Instead of a broad offensive on a front of more than ten kilometres, the struggle shrank to a series of assaults on three objectives on a sector of about two kilometres: the Collet du Linge, the quarries below the Schratzmännele and the Barrenkopf. General Nollet ordered the attack to be renewed as early as 22 July. The Battle of Le Linge, often fought at grenade-throwing distance, lasted until mid-October and brought both sides heavy losses for small changes in the front line. In the following months the Germans used gas and flamethrowers on this sector, and on the ridge the front froze until the end of the war.