glimpse of history through family pics

[BULM5]

My old aunt gave me a bunch of family pics now that I am ''old enough'' to be trusted with them...on one of them there is my great grand dad, he was from Alsace (occupied by Prussia from 1871 to 1918) he was therefore German at the time, and posted somwhere in German East Africa (presently Burundi, Tanzania & Rwanda) probably as a professional soldier, he is holding a Gewehr 98, and next to him there is my grand dad who was a kid at the time...My great grand dad came back from Africa when released from duty only to die shortly afterwards from some tropical disease he got there. I also got a pic of my grand dad who was a French soldier in WW2 (since Alsace was then French again)...witnesses of a tumultuous history...After the war my grand dad worked all his life as a potash miner. After his retirement, I spent a lot of time with him when I was a kid, he used german ''liberated'' boots to do his garden, and manufactured a shovel out of a german stahlhelm for manure duty...