✚10930✚ German pre WW1 recruitment fit for service pin badge 3rd Lorraine Field

Original German pre WW1 army recruitment "fit for service" badge of the 3rd Lorraine Field Artillery Regiment No. 69 (3. Lothringisches Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr. 69) existed only for 19 years, from 1899 to 1918, THIS IS A VERY RARE BADGE OF AN ALOMOST FORGOTTEN MILITARY UNIT, IN GOOD WORN CONDITION, A FINE DETAILED LEAD BADGE, THE PIN IS MISSING AT THE BACK, SIZE: cca 68 x 62 mm, A GREAT EXAMPLE OF AN EXTREMELY RARE BADGE

HISTORY OF THE 3RD LORRAINE FIELD ARTILLERY REGIMENT:

The 3rd Lorraine Field Artillery Regiment No 69 was an artillery unit joined the Prussian army. The regiment was set up as field artillery regiment No. 69 in the course of the army increase with Cabinet Order (Allerhöchste Kabinettsorder) on March 25, 1899. It was formed from the II. And III. Division of the Field Artillery Regiment No. 33 and was stationed in Sankt Avold. Together with Field Artillery Regiment No. 34, it was subordinate to the 34th Field Artillery Brigade of the 34th Division. On January 27, 1902, Kaiser Wilhelm II issued the army order that the associations, which had previously been run without a rural designation, were given an extension of their name in order to better differentiate them and to develop tradition. From this point onwards, the unit was called the 3rd Lorraine Field Artillery Regiment No. 69. With the outbreak of World War I , the regiment mobilized on August 2, 1914 and was deployed in association with the 34th Division on the Western Front . There it took part in the following battles: Fort Longwy, the first French fortress to fall into German hands (Battle of Longwy) from August 22nd to 25th, 1914 Battle of the Meuse crossings (Dannevoux), early September 1914 Montfaucon (Battle of the Marne) from September 5 to 12, 1914, Argonnen, Battle of Verdun from February 21 to December 20, 1916, Battle of the Somme from July 1st to November 18th 1916, Arras, Champagne, St. Quentin, Attic, & Albert. During the war, the subordination changed on October 13, 1916 and the regiment was subordinate to the army field artillery from this point until after the end of the war on December 10, 1918. According to an ordinance of the War Ministry of January 26, 1917, the regiment was expanded and received a III. Department. In the First World War 23 officers, 45 NCOs and 172 men died. After the armistice of Compiègne , the remnants of the regiment could no longer reach the former garrison in St. Avold. Therefore, the association was demobilized in Roda on December 23, 1918. The volunteer battery "Wuppermann" was formed from parts, which was merged into the 49th Infantry Gun Battery when the Provisional Reichswehr was formed. The tradition took over in the Reichswehr by decree of the Chief of the Army Command General of the Infantry Hans von Seeckt from August 24th 1921 the 2nd battery of the 6th (Prussian) Artillery Regiment in Münster. In the Wehrmacht, the regimental staff and the 2nd division of Artillery Regiment 16 in Hamm continued the tradition. After the end of the First World War, a war memorial in memory of the field artillery regiment No. 69 was erected in the palace gardens of the Prince-Bishop's Palace in Münster. The "Lorraine Cross" made of stone was created by Albert Mazzotti and Wilhelm Wucherpfennig and is now a listed building. Alsace–Lorraine is a historical region, now called Alsace–Moselle, located in France. It was created in 1871 by the German Empire after seizing the region from the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War and Treaty of Frankfurt. Alsace–Lorraine was reverted to French ownership in 1918 as part of the Treaty of Versailles and Germany's defeat in World War I. When created in 1871, the region was named the Imperial Territory of Alsace–Lorraine (German: Reichsland Elsaß–Lothringen or Elsass–Lothringen; Alsatian: 's Rìchslànd Elsàss–Lothrìnga; Moselle Franconian/Luxembourgish: D'Räichland Elsass–Loutrengen) and as a new territory of the German Empire. The Empire annexed most of Alsace and the Moselle department of Lorraine, following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War. The Alsatian part lay in the Rhine Valley on the west bank of the Rhine River, east of the Vosges Mountains; the section originally in Lorraine was in the upper Moselle valley to the north of the Vosges. The territory encompassed almost all of Alsace (93%) and over a quarter of Lorraine (26%), while the rest of these regions remained parts of France. For historical reasons, specific legal dispositions are still applied in the territory in the form of a "local law in Alsace–Moselle". In relation to its special legal status, since reversion to France, the territory has been referred to administratively as Alsace–Moselle (Alsatian: 's Elsàss–Mosel).

HISTORY OF RECRUITMENT DURING WW1:

Recruitment: conscripts and volunteers during World War One - The First World War was fought predominantly by conscript armies fielding millions of ‘citizen-soldiers’. The origins of this type of military lay in the levée en masse (mass mobilisation) organised by the French revolutionary regime at the end of the 18th century, the first modern force built on the idea that all male citizens had a duty to bear arms in defence of their nation. However, it was France’s rival Prussia which improved and systemised the military model, developing a new form of universal short-service peacetime conscription. After spectacular victories over Austria and France in 1866 and 1871, this provided the organisational template for other continental European armies. Austria-Hungary imitated it in 1868, France in 1872 and Russia in 1874. Britain and the United States, which relied primarily on their navies for security, were alone among the major powers in remaining with small professional armies. Short-service systems of conscription obliged healthy male citizens to undergo a relatively brief period of military training in their youth and then made them subject for much of the rest of their adult lives to call up for refresher courses or for service in an emergency. The exact terms of service varied from country to country but Germany’s system provides a good example. There, men were drafted at age 20 for two or three years of peacetime training in the active army. While all had an obligation to serve, financial limitations meant in practice that only a little over half of each male year group was conscripted. After training, men were released into civilian life but could be called back to the army until they reached the age of 45. In between, men passed through various reserve categories. Those who had most recently completed their training belonged to the first-line reserve for five years, where they could expect to be redrafted early in the event of crisis. Later, they were allocated for a decade to the second-line Landwehr. The third-line Landsturm was the oldest band of reservists, intended mainly for rear-line duties in a major war. The short-service conscript system offered two major advantages. First, it created a large pool of trained manpower that could quickly augment the standing army in an emergency. In August 1914, the German army needed just 12 days to expand from 808,280 to 3,502,700 soldiers. Second, in a long conflict, the system offered an organisational framework capable of deploying nearly the entire manpower of a state as soldiers. Conscript forces became true ‘nations in arms’ in 1914-18. 55% of male Italians and Bulgarians aged 18 to 50 were called to military service. Elsewhere the proportions were even higher: 63% of military-aged men in Serbia, 78% in Austro-Hungary and 81% of military-aged men in France and Germany served. While conscript armies proved indispensable, and even the British in 1916 and the Americans in 1917 began to draft men, significant numbers of volunteers also served in the First World War. Most famously, in Britain 2,675,149 men volunteered, the vast majority in the first half of hostilities. However, even countries with long traditions of conscription also had large volunteering movements. In Germany, around half a million men came forward. The great rush was at the start of the war: in the first 10 days 143,922 men enlisted in Prussian units alone. France’s voluntary enlistments were smaller but steadier, reaching 187,905 men by the end of hostilities. In multinational Austria-Hungary, men appear to have been less willing to volunteer for the Emperor’s army, although they promptly obeyed call up orders. Some nationalist movements did recruit successfully, however. The Polish Legionaries, the largest of these forces, had 21,000 volunteers by 1917. While volunteers tended to be disproportionately middle-class, their motives for joining the army may not have been so different from those of conscripts. Patriotic duty appears to have been a prime motivation for both groups, although coercion was also influential. Volunteers were not subject to the legal sanctions faced by conscripts who disobeyed drafting orders but they might be exposed to considerable social pressure to enlist. For small minorities, economic factors or lust for action and adventure were important. These recruits, whether conscripts or volunteers, were ‘citizen-soldiers’, whose attachment to their societies and stake in their states’ existence go far to explain the tremendous resilience of the armies of 1914-18..