Mont Cornillet
The Mont Cornillet is a limestone mountain about 15 kilometers east of Reims in the Marne department . During the First World War , Mont Cornillet was in the front line between the German and French armies.
location
The Mont Cornillet is part of a chain of five mountains northeast of Reims. They separate the Chalons plain from the Moronvilliers massif. The northern town of Nauroy was completely destroyed in the First World War and is one of the "villages disparus". Prosnes is located south of Mont Cornillet .
The Cornillet tragedy in World War I
The northern slope of the Cornillet had been on the German front since autumn 1914. The front line ran on the southern slope. On the German north side, three tunnels led into the Cornillet. On May 20, 1917, the French side attacked the Cornillet. The entrances and the ventilation of the tunnels were targeted with extremely heavy 40 cm guns . The grenades weigh 900 kg and their explosive power tears craters from the depths of a family home. Around 600 German soldiers of the Württemberg Infantry Regiment 476 and a few wounded French were lying in the tunnels at that time.
The 10 to 17 meter thick ceiling collapsed at all tunnel entrances during the day. The ventilation system, which was previously insufficiently efficient, was largely destroyed. At 4:00 p.m., an officer allowed soldiers to leave the tunnel. Two soldiers managed to do this. At 5 p.m. the last exit broke in. Anyone who did not die from exploding grenades on May 20, 1917, or was buried and suffocated, died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Nobody survived in the tunnel.
After the French conquered the mountain, two doctors first penetrated the tunnels. At the entrances the corpses of the Germans, almost all young men, lie about five layers high. Some of the dead stayed upright, a gruesome sight. It looks bad in the tunnel called “first aid station”. Soldiers lie motionless on mattresses, on the floor and on stretchers. Some soldiers tried to escape through an air shaft. They choked on the poisonous gases from the impacting grenades. The doctors have to leave the mountain as they came in: climbing over a mountain of corpses.
The French only buried some of the dead, they buried the rest in the mountain. In 1974 the tunnel was opened and 330 bodies were reburied. They rest today in the Warmériville cemetery.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ [1] Openstreetmap website, accessed October 14, 2019
- ↑ The History of the Württemberg Infantry Regiment No. 476 in World War I , Ch.Belser Verlag, Stuttgart 1921, page 21 ff. Website of the Württemberg State Library Stuttgart, accessed on October 14, 2019
- ↑ Half of the soldiers in the regiment are 18 or 19 years old, see above, page 2
- ↑ Excerpts from the translation of a French description, see above, page 26
- ↑ List view of war cemeteries: Warmériville website of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge eV, accessed on October 14, 2019
Coordinates: 49 ° 13 ' N , 4 ° 16' E