by Simon Winder
The Battle of the Bulge raged throughout the area but Stavelot was as far as the Germans got. They made it into the main square, massacred civilians and were in turn massacred by American troops as they tried to wade across the river. After the initial shock of the German attack the Americans realized that tanks on these narrow roads could be made helpless by using dynamite and artillery to bring down trees – each winding route becoming choked with trunks and each small bridge blown up. The original German plan was to punch through to Dinant, cross the Meuse and race through Brussels to Antwerp, splitting the Allied armies and then destroying them to the north and south at leisure. The plan was ludicrous and the Germans came nowhere near Antwerp, but it was a last frenzy of staggering violence. German casualties and loss of equipment were so huge that it made the rest of the Allied advance east relatively straightforward.
Hitler was obsessed with Antwerp. The enormous number of troops bottled up in Zeeland were there to prevent the port opening to supply the Allies. V-weapons rained down on the town. Some twelve thousand V-1s (cruise missiles) were fired from Holland and Germany into Belgium from October 1944 onwards, and sixteen hundred V-2s (rockets). Many of the former were shot down, but enough got through – enough to pointlessly kill a family in Saint-Hubert, for example. The worst disaster was when a rocket hit the Rex Cinema in Antwerp, during a Gary Cooper film, and killed 271 Belgians and 300 Allied soldiers.
This miserable, futile fighting against overwhelming Allied strength was, of course, happening in exactly the same place where everything had begun back in May 1940, a moral world away. The technological changes were great but the place was the same – and with the terrible thought that back then, more imaginative Allied planning could have just as easily destroyed the German tanks lumbering along these tiny roads through these same woods. But instead, the under-strength French reserve units had sat on the Meuse and awaited their fate. I have not been able to find out, but presumably there must have been a number of German officers and soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge who had been there also in 1940 and wondered if the fate of the world really was doomed to be repeatedly played out in these obscure valleys.
Once Hitler had killed himself and Germany surrendered, the Western Allies divided western Germany, still following the logic of where their armies had been positioned back at Normandy – so the British took the north, the Americans the south. Belgium quickly grabbed back Malmédy and Eupen, just to ensure that they remained a needlessly tri-lingual state. The French took back Alsace-Lorraine again and were given two great blocks of territory along the Rhine which happily revived Ludovican and Napoleonic fantasies, with Freiburg becoming a major French military base (the by now President de Gaulle would fly there when he panicked about his safety during the 1968 uprising). In a miracle of geographical obscurantism the tiny German enclave of Büsingen, a piece of land on the Rhine surrounded by the Swiss canton of Schaffhausen, fell under French control. Special arrangements had to be made to allow the transit of French troops through Swiss territory to Büsingen to give its handful of inhabitants a taste of firm Allied government. The French also indulged in an appealingly retro way in their traditional activity of trying to prise off the Saarland. Despite initial American support, this went nowhere for the traditional reason that the German-speaking inhabitants wanted to be part of Germany. This was part of a wider plan by Jean Monnet to restart the French economy by absorbing much of the left bank of the Rhine and the Ruhr, using a million or so German prisoners to do much of the work. As in 1918–20, but over an even wider area, large parts of Europe were simply an enormous mess of rubble, toxins and dislocation – it would take years just to make them safe and (where they still existed) to get their populations back in the right places. As late as August 2017, sixty thousand people were evacuated from Frankfurt when an unexploded RAF Blockbuster bomb was found at a building site.
I was once walking south of Dinant along the Meuse. It is impossible on such a walk not to think about this patch of land’s role in 1914 and in 1940 and in winter 1944 as, once Antwerp became clearly too far away, Dinant became the goal of the last German dash (it failed – and what would they have done when they reached it?). The Meuse has always been a grand river, but as a military obstacle just not very helpful. The high hills on either side were militarily ideal though, and it was possible to see on a map that once these hills were broken through the rolling farmland beyond was indefensible. To the north of where I was walking was the now tiny town of Bouvignes, with which Dinant had once had its ruinous feud in the late Middle Ages, as well as the fatal lock which allowed the Germans over in 1940. As I headed south though, leaving behind me the Charles de Gaulle Bridge (where he was shot and nearly killed in 1914), I was amazed to find a colossal motorway bridge soaring high over the Meuse canyon. Given the dozy, riverine atmosphere it seemed to have landed from a different movie. I felt I was staring witlessly at something I could not understand, like someone transported from an earlier century. One moment I was thinking of Patinir’s landscapes of Dinant and its medieval metalwork and unpleasant hard cookies, and then here I was gawping at this clean-lined fantasy in reinforced concrete. It turned out that it is called the Charlemagne Viaduct and is the highest in Belgium. The viaduct is strangely named as, if asked out of the blue, you would associate Charlemagne more with chopping up pagan Saxons or lying in a pile of Avar gold than with this engineering marvel, but in other ways, of course, it is an inspired name.
This refreshed and overhauled symbolism around Charlemagne came together in the early 1950s. It turned out that the future did not lie in France trying to pinch places like the Saarland, but in the pooling of resources and sovereignty. Rather than thinking punitively again, Monnet and others decided that, starting with steel and coal, there was a potentially serious gain from progressively crossing out the ways in which countries had always been nationally aggressive. It helped to be operating under a combination of the fairly benign aegis of the US and of the very malign threat of the USSR. It will not be a surprise to the reader that I think of this in terms of Lotharingia. The six Lotharingian or part-Lotharingian successor states – the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany and Italy – having been beaten to the ground by the horrors of nationalism and ideology decided to stop any further enmity by joining together. They would go on to make three core Lotharingian cities into their capitals: Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. In addition the Charlemagne Prize was set up by the City of Aachen to be awarded to whoever its judges viewed as contributing most to the promotion of unity in Europe. And that is probably as good a place as any to end.
Postscript
More than with any of my previous books I have felt constrained by format – Lotharingia could both have been twice the length and, indeed, made the opposite arguments to the ones made here, and still I would not have used up the material in my ever more incoherent heaps of notes. I wanted to write a lot more on the Emperors and the ‘sacred landscape’ of the Rhine; on the wonderful Clara Peeters, a great Antwerp painter of still-lifes from the early seventeenth century, who fell victim to the whole book already ballooning helplessly in its coverage of that period; I had assumed that at the centre of the book would sit Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hans Holbein the Younger, both of whom I have venerated ever since I can remember, but about whom in both cases it turned out, to my own horror, I had nothing of any originality to say. The Dreyfus Affair, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, abortive English invasions, nothing really about Namur despite loving the town, the drift of gamelan into the West, Lorelei, the statue in Heidelberg showing Prometheus and the Eagle in a clearly and uniquely erotic context, Alpinism, how Freddie Mercury and Vladimir Nabokov just missed each other in Montreux: it’s hopeless really.
I most regret failing to give space (because the twentieth century was already stuffed to the ceiling) to the four great Belgians who have at different times influenced me and who were all born within a few years of one another at the turn of the
century: Henri Michaux, Georges Simenon, René Magritte and Georges Remi (Hergé). Michaux and Simenon simply frighten me – in their very different ways their obsession with isolation and fear seems (to me at any rate) entangled in Belgian neutralism, occupation and terror. Simenon grew up in Liège and once, somewhat feverish, I came to realize that his books somehow expressed the spirit of the anomalous old Prince-Bishopric of Liège. With his characters all oddly isolated and free-floating and doing the most nihilistic things, I cannot read his novels without thinking of the strange, crushed broken-up shape of the bishopric on old maps. Aside from his more famous Maigret novels, Simenon also managed to write perhaps the greatest novels both of the Exodus of 1940 (The Train) and of the Occupation (The Snow is Dirty). Michaux is one of the most alarming figures of the twentieth century – equally brilliant as a poet and painter, he wanted to create in both mediums ‘a nervous projection screen’: ‘I wish I could paint man when out of himself, paint his space’. He could also be funny about Belgium in a ranting, Thomas Bernhard sort of way: ‘This sad, over-peopled land … muddy countryside squelching underfoot, terrain for frogs … no wildness. What is wild in this country? Wherever you thrust your hand you come upon beets or potatoes, or a turnip, or a rutabaga … A few dirty, sluggish, devastated rivers with no place to go.’ Having spent so long hypnotized by and over-reliant on him, it was a little confusing to take the pilgrimage to his birthplace in Namur and find it was now a branch of the Spanish clothing chain Mango.
Magritte was easy to miss out as I don’t understand now why I used to think he was a good painter. Hergé though is a quite different story, with the Tintin books deeply entangled in every stage of my life and my relationship with my father and with my own sons – indeed I have written this paragraph just after spending a happy afternoon with one adult son discussing the respective merits of The Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Red Sea Sharks, the latest instalment in a critical process which has for me been fairly continuous over half a century. In our household these books are something like sacred texts, with that famous crux lurking in The Black Island where Tintin hops on a ferry to get to England. To notice this was, for all young readers in the United Kingdom, a faith-crisis of a kind familiar to any number of Rhineland sects over the centuries, forcing a haggard reassessment of their lives, as the boy journalist blows his universalism: in a single frame revealing himself not to be a plucky, if oddly dressed, British youth but a mere, dubious Continental.
I was reading The Crab with the Golden Claws to our eldest child when he was so small he had difficulty sitting upright, or even looking in the right direction. I had always wanted to write an entire book about Tintin and the essential Belgianness crucial to his work, only to find that Tom McCarthy and Michael Parr had written such excellent books about him that mine would have been filled merely with limp paraphrases of their work. His publisher, Casterman, being based in Tournai was my own key recent realization, making Hergé and Tintin (and Snowy) perhaps Lotharingia’s leading honorary citizens.
* * *
I ended the writing of Lotharingia under a variety of glum circumstances, with two uncles – idols of my childhood and beyond – dying in quick succession, followed by my father, who died after a long and debilitating illness. These events – combined with children leaving home who, when I started writing this trilogy many years ago, used to hop up and down in their pyjamas to mark my return from some far-flung bit of Swabia – have put me in a somewhat introspective mood. The preoccupation in this book with the instability of dynastic change turns out to be the universal human experience: with everyone going through the same dismay as the seemingly permanent protective familial roofs and walls are randomly dismantled.
My father’s death took me back to many things, not least the family Alsatian holiday with which the first of these books, Germania, started – a trip on a barge down a murky, vermin-filled canal which was meant to take us to Strasbourg, but which ended prematurely at a tunnel blocked up with ancient planking and rather Scooby-Doo warning signs. The journey managed to be a trial for us all, with my mother finally reduced to a truly frightening silence by my father’s various planning failures. But in the end it was fascinating, and I always date my own serious interest in history and art to at last getting to Strasbourg, the car retrieved, the barge abandoned. These family holidays, to Brittany, to Normandy, to Alsace, were always brilliantly stage-managed (albeit with setbacks), with my mother responsible for choosing the books we read and the food we ate and both parents collaborating in a series of historical coups (spooky castles, grand palaces, funny-smelling old streets) which have formed the basis for my entire adult life.
One small story about my father on this Alsatian trip: one of the highlights was a visit to the Maginot Line. Only one section was then open to the public and only with a guide and with written permission from the military. My father, an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve, was in ecstasies about this process. He found the name of the relevant French colonel and the combination of military protocol and the opportunity of writing in ‘official’ French over several drafts made him a pig in clover. I remember his reading out various versions in an exaggerated French accent. Mon colonel? – Mon cher colonel? – Je vous prie d’agréer, monsieur le colonel, mes salutations distinguées? – Ils ne passeront pas, Christopher Winder, lieutenant de vaisseau? 1 The process of writing the letter drew on my father’s interest in military matters, protocol, foreign customs and his happy ability both to respect such things and lampoon them at the same time. My father may only have been in the Reserve but, after all, a French officer charged with answering letters from tourists would be no Joffre. My parents had a lifelong enthusiasm for France which was, as so often for the English, mixed in with incredulity and scepticism and I can still remember their cheerful laughter at receiving the official letter back from the colonel’s office, which had a formal camp floridity they had not dared to dream of.
The Maginot fort was predictably macabre – an underground railway, the smell of cold damp and mossy concrete, rust, the empty gun emplacements, a mess hall decorated at some point with now fading paintings of Disney cartoon characters. But, as with the centre of Strasbourg, it was for me a great gift: a lifetime’s supply of things to think about loaded up in a couple of hours.
* * *
During the protracted period leading to my father’s death, I felt for the first time a wish to wander around the part of south London I had spent the first five years of my life, in Norwood Junction. I was able always to point to an exact time I had left as I never went to school there and we must therefore have moved just before this unwelcome innovation in my circumstances. Walking around Norwood now it was all strangely unchanged, particularly the silhouettes of the streets around our old house, where the relationship between different towers, fences and roofs were exactly fitted to my memory. I was even able to notice that the huge cross on a Methodist Church which had been neon when we were there, blazing down into the valley, had been carried over into a replacement building but in more discreet stone. I came to Norwood now with more cultural knowledge than I had then access to. It was exciting to walk again to Crystal Palace to see the great Victorian dinosaur sculptures, no less peculiar and inspiring than then. Clearly my lifelong love affair with ichthyosaurs was already cemented at a tiny age. At the time I could not, of course, fully appreciate just how Lotharingian a spot Norwood Junction was: with the exiled Zola living just up the road, Apollinaire zooming through in pursuit of an English girl and Pissarro escaping there from the Franco-Prussian War, improbably immortalizing Norwood in a sequence of understandably slightly boring paintings.
I had a recurring image of the hill from Norwood Junction station to our house as being long and arduous, but of course this was only in relation to my then much smaller legs. I also remembered the library, which must then have been brand new, and which is still there, in the street between the railway line and our own flat. Part of this memory of labouring up the hill was
a clear image of holding a library copy of Tintin in Tibet. I wondered about false memory – why did I think I had a copy of Tintin in Tibet when I had not gone to school yet and so could not read it? But, of course, I realized with a sudden, happy lift, my father had read it to me.
Notes
Introduction
1. This oddly named Lotharingian territory (Pfalz in German, and surviving still in the name of the province of Rheinland-Pfalz) shows the importance of its ruler as one of the Seven Electors – ‘Palatinate’ in the sense of ‘of the palace’. But it also indicated territory with special, defensive connotations, as in the County Palatine of Chester keeping the Welsh at bay or the County Palatine of Durham doing the same for the Scots. The French word ‘paladin’ has the same root.
Chapter Two
1. Including those of the first of them, Conrad II, the rest of whose body travelled down the Rhine via Cologne, Mainz and Worms in a great cortège that must have been the wonder of the age and in fulfilment of his wish to establish a great cultic and dynastic space at Speyer. All the stuff about bowels and hearts is fun because it is so odd that it shocks us all into seeing that European humans are in practice impossible to differentiate in their hopes, fears and strange habits from those of ‘tribes’ in other parts of the world beloved of anthropologists.
Chapter Three
