To the north of Saint-Mihiel, on the Verdun road, is the French military cemetery of La Vaux-Racine. Opened in 1919, this graveyard is the last resting-place of 3,417 French soldiers who fell in the Saint-Mihiel Salient between 1914 and 1918.
The central monument is a replica of the Virgin Mary Swooning by the famous sculptor from Saint-Mihiel, Ligier Richier. The original is in the abbey church (Saint Michel).
A few miles from Saint-Mihiel, north of the road to Apremont la Forêt, is the German cemetery in Gobessart. The cemetery contains the graves of 6,046 German soldiers who lost their lives in this sector, mainly in 1914 and 1915. They were originally buried in a number of small graveyards within the Saint-Mihiel Salient but their bodies were all brought here after the war. The central monument, showing a man afflicted by the death of his comrades, comes from the former German cemetery in Woinville.
An application has been made to UNESCO to have the location listed as one of the “Landscapes and Sites of Remembrance of the Great War”.
