Alsace France in World War One: 1914 to 1918There was only one objective in Alsace France in World War One...and France entered the Great War with only one thing on its mind... Get Alsace and Lorraine back! France had lost Alsace and Lorraine only 43 years ago in the Franco-Prussian War where the soon to be German state had given the French a lot of reasons to want revenge...
So France was looking for any good reason to do something about it... Of course, France had taken Alsace from the Holy Roman Empire in the late 1600s... Basically Alsace went back and forth between France and what would eventually become Germany a lot. If you want to know more about how World War One fits into the history of Alsace, click here. So when World War One broke out, they set everything up to make big pushes to the east to take back what had been taken from them not that long ago... So all along the French and German battles lines, they spent all of 1914 and 1915 pushing...
If you're wondering what it was like living in World War One trenches and want to see actual World War One pictures, click here. Back and forth they went... At Hartmannswillerkopf for example, one day they would advance, then within the next few days the Germans would recover their position... Until they finally started focusing more on the northern battlefields outside of Alsace. From about 1916 on, the battle lines in Alsace were relatively quiet... And by quiet I mean that they stopped trying to win more territory by charging the enemy. But they didn't stop shelling and bombing each other... Click here if you're wondering "How did they fight in World War One?" for more info on World War weapons. It was far from quiet in Alsace France in World War One... And far from safe... But along the battle lines in Alsace, they lived in their intricate network of trenches for the next two years without significant casualties... And left behind World War One trenches and tunnels built from concrete, stone, and even carved out of the mountain... Which means they're still there for you to wander through... Imagining what it was like... There are two main World War One memorial sites in Alsace:
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