Less than 20 minutes walk from our house sit, is this cemetery.

La Nécropole Nationale de Saulcy-sur-Merthe.

Here lies the remains of 2565 French men who died in this area while fighting during WWI. Over half of them have a cross with an individual name, and sometimes a date of death on them, while the remainder are buried in two ossuaries (large containers holding the remains of  the bodies of other soldiers – more than 1100).

As mentioned in previous posts, the Vosges mountains were a very important ‘battle ground’ in both WWI and WWII. In fact, it was in the Vosges that the only mountain fighting occurred in WWI.

In August 1914, the French army received the order to march on Alsace to seize the main towns and valleys (back from the Germans who had annexed the area following the Franco-Prussian War).

Fighting resulted in the area changing ‘ownership’ many times during the war. But more than that, it resulted in thousands of deaths. It is reported that the exact numbers will never be known but at least 30,000 soldiers perished.

In this particular cemetery also the lie remains of 11 Russians  and 1 Romanian. It was easy to find the headstone for the Romanian.

Of course, these remains were not always here. These bodies of soldiers and officers have been exhumed from ‘temporary’ graveyards, including in Mandray, the commune where Mick and I are staying at the moment.

There are many nécropoles like this in France.

These headstones (above) are different again. This part of the cemetery is where the bodies of  some German soldiers are laid

I’ve mentioned before (in a post last month) that in every French town or village we have visited there is a WWI memorial; around 176,000 memorials were erected between 1920 and 1930. I also mentioned that the loss of French lives during WWI was around 1.3 million, but in further research I found out that that number only reflects the soldiers, and that a further 300,000 civilians died during this period.

The number of French soldiers and officers who died during WWII was much fewer than the WWI losses. Mick and I have noticed that when we have looked at the WWI monuments, with names listed of the local men who died in WWI, often quite lengthy lists, that there are just a few names that have been added for those local men who lost their lives in WWII.

When I looked up the figures for WWII, I discovered that 210,000 French soldiers died and almost double that, 390,000 French civilians died during that period. In this area in particular, the Vosges, (as mentioned in a previous post) the war was played out very brutally.

Mick and I visited another museum, this time in Saint-Dié des-Vosges, that described what happened to that town in November 1944. I will write about that at another time.