On 5 January 1675 a French army under Marshal Turenne defeated the Imperial and Brandenburg armies wintering in Upper Alsace at Turckheim, west of Colmar. It crowned a winter march behind the Vosges that took the allies by surprise. They retreated the same night and soon recrossed the Rhine, leaving Alsace.
The war on the Rhine
The war that Louis XIV of France began against the Dutch Republic in 1672 spread to the Rhine, where Turenne faced the armies of the Holy Roman Empire, Lorraine and their German allies, among them Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg.1
In June 1674 he won at Sinsheim, and in October he fought the allies at Entzheim, near Strasbourg. Entzheim ended the allied offensive but did not drive the enemy back across the Rhine. The allied armies took up winter quarters in Alsace, and Turenne withdrew along the western side of the Vosges.2
The winter march
Armies of the period normally rested in winter. Instead, in December 1674 Turenne marched his army south through the snow along the far side of the Vosges, by way of Remiremont, and came into Upper Alsace through Belfort at the end of the month.3
On 29 December 1674 the French beat an allied force near Mulhouse, in a fight that the Alsace atlas names after the neighboring village of Brunstatt. The allied commanders, caught off balance, pulled their forces together near Colmar.4
The battle
The allies, under the Imperial general Bournonville and the Elector of Brandenburg, took up a position behind the Logelbach stream between Colmar and Turckheim. They left Turckheim itself, at the foot of the Vosges on their right, barely defended.5
On 5 January 1675 Turenne attacked the allied front while his left wing marched by a valley through the hills and seized Turckheim, on the allied flank. Pinned by the frontal attack, the allies could not stop the move. That night they gave up the field and retreated north. The French general Émile Legrand-Girarde, writing in 1910, concluded that the allies' own orders show they knew they had been beaten.6
After Turckheim
The allied armies abandoned Alsace and recrossed the Rhine. Weygand calls the campaign the one in which Turenne rose to the greatest heights.7
Turenne did not survive the year. On 27 July 1675, near Sasbach on the right bank of the Rhine, he was killed by a cannon shot while reconnoitering the enemy position. He is counted among the greatest commanders France has produced.8
