by Jan Morris
4 The gate-tower of Trier
Not far behind the frontier, on the Mosel river, the Romans built their chief administrative capital in north-west Europe, Augusta Treverorum – Trier to the Germans, Trèves to the French. The northern gateway to this fortified city, which still stands, is the greatest surviving Roman building north of the Alps, and is a kind of paradigm of frontierness. The Porto Nigra looks out from its city walls in a posture of majestic suspicion, as though it is perpetually expecting the worst of any approaching travellers. Its twin watch-towers are semicircular, allowing sentries on three floors a field of view in all dangerous directions, and their windows are like sleepless, lidless eyes. It took me a long time to realize what these rounded towers of Trier reminded me of: they are like the rounded superstructures of old-fashioned New York tugboats. Writers have been describing the gate-towers of Trier for a thousand years and more, but I flatter myself that nobody before me has stumbled upon this simile.
5 A nasty legend
By medieval times mishmash had long set in. For centuries petty princes and ambitious ecclesiasts established frontiers of their own, their own limites with their own private Dôles. In those days ‘princes and princes’ mistresses’, as Hitler disapprovingly recalled, ‘haggled over State borders’. Many such piddling frontiers, as it happened, reached down to the banks of the Rhine, like the policies of strip-farms along the St Lawrence, and probably the most famous frontier posts in Europe are both German Rhine island-castles, where local potentates once collected their own customs dues from the passing shipping. One is the Pfalzgrafenstein – the Pfalz for short – a white hexagonal fortress near Kaub from which the officials of the Counts Palatine of the Rhine exerted their authority, and which has long provided a sort of logo for the Rhine tourist trade. The other is the little thirteenth-century castle called the Mäuseturm, the Mice Tower, which stands in a posture of ineffable authority, painted yellow, at the mouth of the Rhine gorges near Bingen. This used to collect traffic tolls for the archbishopric of Mainz, one of those diocesan sovereignties, and legend has long linked its name with the horrible death of a tenth-century incumbent. Archbishop Hatto, it used to be said, was a viciously oppressive landlord, and during a famine he ordered that some of his poor tenants should be burnt alive in a barn, accusing them of gobbling up precious corn ‘like so many field-mice’. The mice of his estate, incensed as much by the calumny as by the cruelty, swore revenge and chased him so mercilessly from cathedral to palace to country house, nibbling all the way, that he determined to retreat to his customs post in the middle of the river. As the English poet Robert Southey interpreted him, ‘“I’ll go to my tower on the Rhine,” he replied./‘Tis the safest place in Germany;/The walls are high and the shores are steep,/And the stream is strong and the water deep.”’ Not high, steep, strong or deep enough, though. Hundreds of thousands of mice swam across, climbed the tower and ate the archbishop – ‘They gnaw’d the flesh from every limb,/ For they were sent to do judgement on him!’ It is all lies. Archbishop Hatto was, by scholarly account, a kindly priest and generous landlord, the tower had not been built in his day, and probably ‘Mäuseturm’ should really be ‘Musterungturm’ – inspection tower.
6 Safe haven
Another customs place of unpleasant suggestion – another haven, too – is the sea-castle of Bourdzi, which stands on a reef on the Gulf of Argolis in southern Greece, and is linked to the town of Nauplia only by a causeway. It is an extravagantly pretty, picture-postcard castle, lying there in the blue of the sea with the Argolis mountains beyond. The Venetians built a fort here in the days when they ruled these parts, and when the Turks seized Nauplia in 1540 they too erected a castle on the site. All ships were obliged to stop there to pay their dues as they entered the harbour, but the fortress acquired a more baleful function too: casting around for a place of retirement for their superannuated executioners, not highly regarded as neighbours in Greece, the Turkish governors fixed them up with quarters inside the walls of Bourdzi.
7 Waiting
Beloved of guidebooks are those places where a national frontier runs absurdly down the main street of a village, or divides a city. Constance, for instance, is split in this way between the German Konstanz and the Swiss Kreuzlingen. The frontier post is in the middle of a city street, making for traffic jams, and during the Second World War if an escaping prisoner from a German camp could find his way to Konstanz he had then only to cross the road to be safe in neutral Kreuzlingen. Equally memorable, to my mind, are frontier posts that seem to have sprung up in a purely theoretical way nowhere in particular. Halfway across empty wastes you find them, on little-used highways in the rain, with their officials lounging about in a hut lonely miles from the nearest café, and a vehicle arriving only every half-hour or so. Then I like to imagine the diplomatic negotiators of long ago, in wigs perhaps, crouched over a mahogany table like pious Jews over the Torah, with their silver protractors and unrolled parchment maps, marking the hypothetical line across marsh or mountain, wheat-plain or tundra, which would satisfy the dignities of their respective masters – honoured so wanly now, on drizzly afternoons a couple of centuries later, by those poor bored functionaries, feet up beside their television sets waiting for the next car.
8 Frontiers in the imagination
Some frontiers are only in the imagination. Prince Metternich used to say the frontier of Asia was at the Landstrasse, the street which ran away towards Hungary from Vienna’s city walls, and it is possible to feel the same even today, if you ever drive out from the city into the back-country of Hungary or Slovakia, where people speak in unknown tongues. They say that Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany after the Second World War, cherished similar feelings about the Land of Prussia. He was a Rhinelander, and whenever his train crossed the Elbe, on its way eastward to Berlin, he too would groan, ‘Hier beginnt Asien,’ and pull the blinds down. The English, in their jingo days, meant the same when they said that wogs began at Calais.
9 Special trains
In an aesthetic sense the definitive frontier is surely the Brenner Pass, in the Alps, which separates not only Austria from Italy, but the German world from the Latin world. The Romans knew it well, there has been a carriage road through it since the eighteenth century, a railway since 1867, a motorway since the 1970s. The way to the Brenner from the south sweeps magnificently through a spectacular mountain setting, ornamented in a painterly way with castles and churches and trim ancient villages – all deep blues, vivid greens and the white of the high snows. The frontier stands at about 5,000 feet, and in the course of a few hours you can speed from the dusty heat of the Po valley to the celestial cool of the Alps, from the Mediterranean to Mitteleuropa. In 1940 Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini held a fateful meeting at the Brenner, each going there in his special train, and I cannot cross the pass myself without seeing the two dictators primping themselves for the meeting as they approached each other from north and south along the tracks. In those days the Führer was still respectful of the Duce, as his senior in the hierarchy of dictators, but who can doubt that Mussolini too wanted to be seen at his best? Imagine the last-minute cleaning and polishing of their respective trains! Imagine the engines so competitively burnished, the crews in their newly pressed uniforms, the flags flying, the gilded fasces and the gleaming black swastikas! As they steam through the mountains, doubtless Duce and Führer both, summoning their valets, stand before their mirrors to prepare themselves, swaying a little with the movement of their carriages, occasionally stumbling with a lurch, the one combing his small black moustache, the other adjusting his Sam Browne belt to fit his pouter-pigeon chest: a last flick of the valet’s clothes-brush, a last practice of the pose, and when the two trains reach the frontier (the Führer’s was late, in fact) out into the snowy sunshine step the two autocrats, all smiles, salutes and speculative inspections, like a pair of ruthless beauties meeting at a charity ball.
10 Beuno’s frontier
At anoth
er extreme of significance, the border between Wales and England is mostly unmarked, and visitors often do not know which country they are in. This was not always so. In the days when the pagan Saxons were kept out of Wales by the Celtic Christians of the place, the Welsh language provided a metaphysical frontier of its own. The seventh-century Celtic divine Beuno was walking once upon the banks of the River Severn, meditating no doubt upon the Celticity of Christ, when he heard from across the stream the sound of brutal syllables. Merciful Heaven, they were the sound of the English language! and instantly St Beuno knew that the heathen were at the frontiers of Wales. I think of him when I drive through the border village of Llanymynech, in the same Severn valley, because this is indeed one of those guidebook places where a political line runs clean through a community, bisecting in this case the long bar of the White Swan, and actually dividing graves in the village churchyard, so that some parishioners lie there with their heads in England, their feet in Wales. The language in Llanymynech nowadays is an only moderately Welshified sort of English, and St Beuno might not be very happy there: for even metaphysical frontiers are not inviolate, though they certainly last longer than most.
11 Gun-frontiers
For three centuries, for example, the empire of the Habsburgs was bounded by an intangible demarcation called the Military Frontier, a 750-mile autonomous zone, mostly along the Danube, which did not depend upon fortifications. It was deliberately peopled with wild and warlike folk of many races, who owed their loyalty only to the Emperor himself, and for generations successfully held off the predatory Turks. Its southern anchor was the fortress of Senj, on the Dalmatian coast, which acted as base for a terrifying but officially encouraged clan of pirates called the Uskoks, and it re-entered history in the 1990s when, as Vojna Krajina, it had also become a frontier between Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and a cockpit of the Yugoslav wars.
Europe is creased, though, with the remains of more orthodox military barricades, and they have nearly all been failures. Did the Limes keep the barbarians out? Often on the frontiers of France, in the Ardennes mountains, in the Jura, away in the Alps facing Italy, even on the French island of Corsica, I have come across remnants of the Maginot Line, the chain of fortresses, tunnels, blockhouses and military roads, built in the 1930s, by which the French fondly hoped to keep themselves permanently secure. It was named for its creator, André Maginot the Minister of War, included the highest motor-road in Europe (over the Col du Galibier, above Besançon at 10,636 feet), and was said in my youth to be the biggest man-made work since the Great Wall of China. Often there is little more than a tumbled pillbox to be seen now, half-hidden by brambles; but sometimes I discover deep in woodland, or below the crest of a ridge, a brown steel dome like a helmet, with blank gun-slits in it, and casements all around. The fortifications look beautifully made to me, craftsmen’s work, with finely sculpted shapes, textured concrete walling, steel doors that exquisitely fit their frames. They speak to me paradoxically not only of heroic memories, and of humiliations too (the Germans simply circumvented them when they overran the frontier in 1940), but also of things subtle and graceful in France. There seems nothing brutal to them, and in fact the Maginot Line was the last in a great heritage of a particularly French art: the art of fortification, which had reached a climax with the glorious fortresses and castellations of Marshal de Vauban in the seventeenth century. Only one of the Line’s hundreds of forts ever fell to the Germans, and none at all to the invading Italians at the other end of it, but it made no difference anyway, and Maginot’s name has become synonymous with defensive complacency. ‘From the Great Wall of China to the Maginot Line,’ declared the gung-ho American general George Patton, ‘nothing anywhere has ever been successfully defended.’
12 Frontier styles
My family and I lived for a time near the Swiss frontier in France, in the mountains of Haute-Savoie east of Geneva. If we wanted to go seriously shopping we had to cross out of one country into the other, and this was like a demonstration of national characteristics. On the French side the gendarmes were jolly, careless, and often had wine on their breaths. On the Swiss side the police were cool, diligent, courteous and unsmiling. My car in those days was an elderly Rolls-Royce, grand, decorative and sufficiently previously-owned to raise an indulgent smile in a Marxist, and it incited mixed responses in those officials. The French were delightedly amused by it, and sometimes asked permission to sit at the wheel or try the squashy grey leather seats behind. The reaction of the Swiss was different. To them a Rolls-Royce was an image of wealth – there were more Rollses in Geneva than in any other city of the continent – and a quaint middle-aged example like mine, not old enough to be a valuable antique, certainly not new enough to be a status symbol, confused their responses. They habitually greeted us with a mixture of respect and condescension, covering all contingencies.
While we were living there, in 1956, war broke out in the Middle East, and the British were involved with the French and the Israelis in fighting against the Egyptians. I was commissioned by the Manchester Guardian to go out and report the war, so I piled into the old Rolls and drove down to Geneva to catch a flight to Tel Aviv. How cock-a-hoop the Swiss were when they discovered where I was off to – their centuries of neutrality were paying off once more! Gently commiserating were the French, who did not laugh at the car at all now, but grasped my shoulder and wished me luck.
13 A haunted frontier
One of the saddest European frontiers, for much of my half-century, has been the line dividing the six counties of British Northern Ireland, the fief of those bowler-hatted gentry and wild drummer-boys of page 48, from the independent Republic of Ireland. Guerrilla war plagued the region – the unofficial Catholic Irish Republican Army on one side, the British and diverse Protestant paramilitary groups on the other – but in some parts the border was altogether unguarded, and there was nothing but a road sign to warn you that you had reached the end of one State and the start of another. Often this occurred in remote rural lanes. The silence was complete among those backwaters of Derry or Armagh, the damp green of the fields seemed stealthily absorbent, as if all manner of secret things were concealed beneath the turf, and I used to creep over the line with a chill running down my spine. Who was watching me, through high-powered binoculars out of sight? What bad men were lurking in those ditches?
Every Irishman knew the unmanned frontier places, and they were conduits for a shadowy traffic of drugs, arms and miscellaneous contraband. I once asked a woman in Clones, County Monaghan, why some crossings were marked on my map with flags. ‘That’s the places,’ she said, ‘you’re not allowed to smuggle things through.’ The ones with the flags were eerie in a different way. Often it was only when you were well over the border into Northern Ireland that you found your road suddenly masked by a blank mass of concrete and sandbags, rather like a spirit wall keeping devils out of a Chinese courtyard. A traffic-light summoned you on, and behind the barrier stood a couple of young soldiers, helmeted in camouflage suits, the one pointing an automatic weapon directly at you, the other shouting the number of your car to an unseen colleague – a moment or two of distinct discomfort, until after a few perfunctory questions, and a brief search of the car with the gun more or less at your head, those young toughs of the frontier gestured you through the barricade.
It was a haunted frontier then. Some of its spectres you could never see, priming their bombs in farmhouse armouries, or under cover drinking stout in pubs. Others you could: through the gun-slits of high ugly blockhouses, built of drab brown concrete and surrounded by rolls of barbed wire, often you could make out silent figures staring at you, over their gun-barrels no doubt. In the desolate border village of Crossmaglen in Armagh, where crude hand-scrawled posters gave notice that somebody or other was a Traitor to Ireland, and one of those awful fortresses loomed over the village and all its life, I stood in the deserted square to copy an inscription, in Irish and in English, in honour of local republican patriots.
‘Glory to you all,’ it said, ‘praised and humble heroes, who have willingly suffered for your unselfish and passionate love of Irish freedom.’ I stood there for a moment thinking about the pity of it all: and when I turned to go, from a slit in the blockhouse a hand sadly waved me goodbye.
14 Modern times
In the worst times of the troubles Belfast itself, the Northern Ireland capital, was like a frontier city, rigidly divided between its Protestant and its Catholic communities, and patrolled constantly by British soldiers. In the very centre of the city I once saw a patrol of five or six infantrymen moving cautiously and watchfully through the streets in the prescribed mode – guns cocked, helmeted heads constantly turning right and left, lead man well in front, rearguard walking backwards with his finger on the trigger. As they passed an office of the National Westminster Bank, one of them peeled away while the others paused and crouched there covering his back, ready for instant fire. He put his card in the bank’s automatic cash dispenser, he tucked his money away in a pocket of his camouflage suit, and they proceeded grimly on their prowl.
15 Another kind of frontier