If architecture is frozen music (and I think it is), then fortifications are congealed violence. That is to say they are the best sort of violence, silent, thoughtful, passive, only to be unleashed by an aggressive enemy. I rather like them. They are, in a way, a form of just war. There is much to be learned from them. The astounding defensive works of Sebastien le Prestre, Marquis of Vauban, are often rather haunting in their simple message, elegantly expressed. You may find them all along France’s long frontiers. Some of my favorites are in that loveliest of border cities, Strasbourg. Louis XIV’s great defensive engineer wished to inform potential enemies of France that they would be wise not to attack at all. Amid his elaborate ravelins and bastions, they would undoubtedly die in despair, enfiladed and exposed to cruel fire. So go home instead, and cultivate your garden.
His twentieth-century successors, the designers of the much-derided Maginot Line, hoped to convey a similar message. Yes, we all know that, in the end, the Germans found a way round the line in 1940. But parts of the fortification carried on fighting, and senior officers had to be sent into the great casemates to order their defenders to stop fighting—long after all other guns in France had grown cold. I do not think they did as badly as is often claimed. The line was named after a brave, honorable, and serious man, Sergeant Andre Maginot, magnificently moustached, nobly wounded in the Great War, and touchingly devoted to saving the lives of soldiers like himself. He had seen enough of his contemporaries die. Its builders’ only failing was that they did not finish the monstrous thing, largely thanks to Belgium suddenly declaring neutrality and so creating a large new strategic gap when the money was running out. In 1810, the Duke of Wellington had shown, at the lines of Torres Vedras outside Lisbon, that a complete defensive work is highly effective. In fact, the success of this scheme may well have led to the ultimate defeat of Napoleon. Large and rather impressive chunks of it can still be seen. Alas, unlike Vauban and Wellington, the builders of the Maginot Line were forced to use re-inforced concrete, as stone and brick could not withstand the appalling weapons of the modern age, especially the monstrous, hideous Krupp siege guns revealed to the world in August 1914 at Liege and marvelously described by Barbara Tuchman in her book The Guns of August. The surviving remnants give off a strong sense of power, but they can hardly be called beautiful even in decay and grown up, as they now are, with grass and trees.
But in my sea-defended homeland, we have very few such things. There is a piffling show of tiny pillbox forts, the G.H.Q. Line, still sometimes visible to the north of the railway between London and Bristol. These were built in a panic in 1940 and might have delayed the Germans by ten minutes or so, had they managed to get ashore. It is hard to see what use they would have been. They look like a response to one of those edicts that “something must be done.” The frowning mediaeval castles used by William the Conqueror to overawe his new Saxon subjects have become picturesque ruins, overgrown with ivy, or containing pleasant tea-rooms and educational museums. There are a few Martello towers (the derivation of the name, which sounds like an elaborate pudding, is too complex to be worth recording). These were thrown up on the English South Coast to oppose a Napoleonic landing. They look a little like enormous sandcastles of the sort I use to make on the beach with my bucket and spade. Cunningly, they were much stronger and more thickly-built on the seaward side, in case the enemy captured them. The weaker landward side would, in theory, have been vulnerable to cannon fire.
But this was not tested, as the defeat of the French Navy at Trafalgar put an end to the invasion scare. Well, it did for a little while. But by the 1850s, the French Navy had grown large and fierce again, and there was a new Bonaparte on the Imperial Throne in Paris, Napoleon III. The result was an amazing series of buildings which, as a child, I found completely captivating and even romantic. To look at them, crouching on the coast, or on the top of lovely Portsdown Hill, or out at sea, was to hear the distant rumble of war, and to feel a mixed shiver of delight and fear.
I knew, as everyone in the city of Portsmouth did, that the giant forts which surrounded it (some of them were actually planted in the sea) were obsolete and useless. They are known there as “Palmerston’s Follies” because they were Lord Palmerston’s idea and were built in the 1860s, mostly of glaring red brick but with a little stone too. But the fear they embodied, and the strength of the power they were built to resist, were thrilling. One of them, though I did not know it at the time, was considered so secure and secluded that it is to this day the training school for the British Secret Intelligence Service—the original, if you like, for John le Carre’s fictional Sarratt. Take a stroll nearby and you will sometimes see lean, fit men emerging, no doubt to take part in taxing night exercises in which they sandbag each other in the pitch darkness. But several fell into bad neglect, while others have become museums, national monuments, or various sorts of secret establishment. One was called Fort Gilkicker, a name I thought would be perfect for an ennobled newspaper magnate in one of the novels I failed to finish. In fact “Lord Gilkicker” is such a fine title that I might take it for myself when, like almost half the people I know, I am finally raised to the peerage.
Another, which I won’t name in case it still gets someone into trouble, was not so secure. In fact my late brother and I, as schoolboys in short trousers, managed to penetrate its giant walls and venture (in my case very nervously) into the great man-made caverns where the ammunition had once been stored. It sits on a chalk hill, and its galleries deep underground were hewn by Welsh coalminers imported for the purpose. The marks of their pickaxes can still be clearly seen, fresh and sharp as if they had just been made, which I found moving. The thickness and height of the walls, the huge semicircles in which the great guns had once stood, were genuinely awesome, in the proper use of the word. What a battle it would have been, had they ever been attacked. Several of these modern castles faced inland, apparently madly. But in fact they were designed to prevent a surprise attack further down the coast, which might then have taken the city in the rear. One of the forts built on the seabed, and still standing, solitary and grim, battered by waves and tide, not far from the coast, was briefly a hotel. Perhaps it was too isolated for its intended clientele. I do not think I would have cared to spend the night, or dine sumptuously, in something with such a ferocious purpose. What will they do with it, in the end? These wild, extravagant piles of masonry had barely been finished by the time Napoleon III was swept away by Otto von Bismarck’s new united Germany, so creating a completely different national danger.
Since then, I have seen what happens to fortifications when they are attacked with modern weapons. Syrian blockhouses on the road up to the Golan heights, captured by Israeli forces in 1973 in a remarkable uphill assault, have great holes blasted in them, as if they were as soft as cheese. And in the giant nineteenth-century Tsarist fortress of Brest-Litovsk, the blood-colored bricks have in many places been blasted away by artillery bombardment or gouged and scarred by bullets. When you see the damage, you grow readier to accept the bad art and furiously sincere emotion of the great stone sculpture which the U.S.S.R. placed there, of an enormous soldier’s face frowning at the enemy. This place was one of the few which put up much of a fight against Hitler when he invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and it shows. It is also the scene of one of the greatest and most widely forgotten events of modern history, the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated and signed within those ravaged crimson walls. Here Leon Trotsky walked and argued and speechified. Here Russia surrendered to Imperial Germany under conditions so terrible that it is hard to believe anyone would ever have accepted them. The treaty was reversed a few years later, but now many of its provisions have quietly re-emerged from the silt of the past. And not far from here, just across the quiet-flowing River Bug, a joint Nazi-Soviet victory parade was held in 1939. This is one of those places which, as the Edwardian short story writer Saki once said, produces more history than it can consume locally. Yet as I wandered round its shattered, mutilated walls, I was reminded of Portsmouth and was, once again, very glad that my home lay on the far side of the never-resting sea, though it is increasingly unclear who now controls it.
