Spinges War Memorial

War Memorial just outside Springes above Mühlbach.

The stone monument with the granite cross at the entrance to the village commemorates the 57 Tyroleans who died here in the Battle of Spinges. On April 2, 1797, the French troops under General Jaubert wanted to advance through Tyrol towards Vienna, but were stopped here by Tyrolean riflemen and defeated in a costly battle. The next day the French came back in overwhelming numbers, collected their dead, brought them into the Erschbaumerhof barn and cremated the dead - it was said that there were several hundred corpses - and the farm was destroyed. (credit: salto.bz/de/article/02032017/auf-das-hochplateau-von-spinges)
P.S. The view of the Brixen basin and the surrounding mountains is impressive.

12 years before the Tyrolean freedom fights in 1809 under the leadership of Andreas Hofer, on April 2, 1797, in the Battle of Spinges near Mühlbach at the entrance to the South Tyrolean Puster Valley, there was a battle against a division of the Napoleonic army, in which the maid Katarina Lanz was Hero girl from Spinges has gone down in Tyrolean history.

When the French first invaded South Tyrol in 1797, there was a bloody melee in the Spinges cemetery on April 3rd. Katarina Lanz took part alongside a rifle squad from the Inn Valley. Armed only with a pitchfork, she pushed the charging Frenchmen off the cemetery wall.
With this heroic deed, this farmer's maid soon became a symbolic figure for the Tyrolean will to freedom, and she was called "the girl from Spinges".