The Low Countries

Viv enjoying her two-star lunch at Mosconi
Wiener Schnitzel in Aachen, Germany
Pancake in the Dutch countryside
Our hotel in Amsterdam

I started a new project three weeks ago now, which has taken me to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, a small country wedged between France, Germany, and Belgium which has used its low profile to somehow turn itself into a major European center for banking, mining, and media. The clients are easy going but we are not and so the work has been tough and have kept me from thinking, let alone writing, for weeks.

But this weekend, following a particularly brutal and mindless shift at the office, Vivian came to visit and joined me as we escaped the city-state for a road trip through the low countries. For the journey, I had procured an audio book of The Guns of August, that great classic of history which describes the few weeks 90 years ago at the dawn of the First World War, when the future of Europe and the world was juggled above a playing field made out of the same very lands I have been covering.

Our destination was Amsterdam, from where Vivian needed to catch her flight back to Boston, but we started out heading East, getting lost by the rail yard and then passing out of Luxembourg and driving twenty minutes to Trier, in Germany. We found out a few hours later that this was the very route which the Germans crossed (in reverse) when they invaded Luxembourg, the very first military action of the war, seizing that same rail junction, violating Luxembourg's precious neutrality.

On the return today, I drove a more direct route down the length of Holland and across Belgium by way of Liege, the great fortress that King Albert of the Belgians refused to abandon to the German war machine, making himself the only real hero of the war, and making his country its first martyr.

Of the landscape of the region is more varied that label "low countries" lead me to expect. There are a good deal of plains, and plenty of canals lined pretty towns alternating with industrial edifices in varying states of decay. There are fields, and occasional windmills, and as you get further south and east, there are the Ardennes, the fine set of rolling hills covered with farms and forest groves. The whole thing gives the impression of being some better presented version of Pennsylvania, and I imagine its roughly the same size.

Upon returning to Luxembourg , I was greeted, as I always am, in French by the bus driver on the way to my hotel. I tried to reply in kind, but stammered, and so she naturally switched to German. She would have spoken both of those languages quite fluently, as well as her own patois, Luxembourgish. The casual, pragmatic multilingualism is completely foreign to me as an American, and reminds me more than anything of the many African villagers who I have met who think nothing of the fact they speak not only their own mother tongue, but that of each of the surrounding villages. They may speak a little English too.

It all drives home the point that these great European wars were civil wars, and even the great massacres like the holocaust were simply internecine feuds no more or less banal than what we hear about to this day from Africa, that other ancient continent. I've often wondered how Germany could so quickly go back to being a functioning part of Europe after having started two horrible wars and committed unspeakable atrocities. It's neighbours collectively shrugged and moved on; they had to, they were neighbours.