Our day came to an end. We returned to our hotel in Metz (Formule 1 - Metz-Actipole - very cheap!).
The next day our first appointment was for lunch at the beautiful Hotel L'Horizon in Thionville. On the way we stopped at the Abri de Bockange, adjacent to G.O. Anzeling. We were just in time for a tour.

The owner claimed to have spent 10,000 hours restoring the Abri and the work was evident — a magnificent job. The only distraction was a new coat of paint which made the air practically unbreatheable. The inside and outside looked like new.
For some reasom, I didn't take any photos inside — I don't know why.
We drove on from here to L'Horizon. The hotel is located on the Route de Crevecoeur on top of the hill to the west of Thionville, just below the magnificent Feste Guentringer, known today as the Fort de Guentrange.
The hotel is run by my friend, Jean Pascal Speck and his wife Anne Marie.

It offered a beautiful view of the city of Thionville.
The rooms were beautiful and the food was 5-star. JP has turned the hotel into a center for the study of fortifications. He has numerous publications available for public viewing and he will sit with you after hours with other fortifications enthusiasts (like Jean-Louis Goby and Pascal Lambert, both authors) and talk history. It was a beautiful day and evening.

At Guentrange, I had a great tour of the German-built fort. This was one of three "Feste Gruppen" forts built around Thionville (the others are Koenigsmaker and Illange) in the 1890s. The Feste Gruppen forts were more what you would find in the Maginot Line than the Sere de Rivieres system. The de Rivieres forts were sorrounded by a ditch and the guns were concentrated in the center. The guns were originally placed on a cavalier, on revetted crests, but when high-explosive shells came along, the forts were reinforced with concrete and the guns were placed in metal turrets. The Germans built a fort similar to the Brialmont design at Liege at Feste Kaiser Wilhelm II, the triangular shaped Fort Blotten. In the late 1890s German engineers decided to disperse their guns and began building gun batteries. The systems were still surrounded by a ditch, but its shape was irregular. Guentrange has a huge ditch protected by a series of casemates. It has two gun batteries and a huge central casemates (one of the largest concrete facades I've ever seen). It is fascinating to visit because you can see some of the elements that evolved into the forts of the 1930s. Martin, who had little interest in the earlier forts, claimed that he learned a great deal about the Maginot Line by visiting Guentrange.

Finally, I bid goodbye to Martin. We'd had a wonderful 4 days. I was headed from here to Verdun, then to the Maubeuge sector which I will discuss next.