The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  Still, the historians tell a gripping story. Setting out from southern Spain, which was then part of an extended empire ruled from Carthage (present-day Tunisia), Hannibal and his men marched northward with the intent of rounding the Mediterranean and invading the Romans in their homeland. Once past Barcelona—which may or may not derive its name from Hannibal’s lineage, the Barca dynasty—the Carthaginian general had a fight on his hands. The Iberian forebears of the Catalans were ferocious, and it was only after suffering substantial losses that the Carthaginians were able to subdue the hostile tribes and cross the Pyrenees.

  Things went better in what is now southern France. The Carthaginians and their Berber mercenaries—and the elephants—successfully forded the Rhône without being detected. Sensing that the coast was not clear on the way to Italy, Hannibal veered north through Savoy. But when his men got a good look at the Alps, their warrior panache flagged. In a famous passage, Livy puts the following words in Hannibal’s mouth as he harangues his men not to fail him after all they’ve been through together:

  What on earth do you think the Alps are except a collection of high mountains? Perhaps you think they are even higher than the Pyrenees? So what? Nothing on earth can ever reach the sky; no mountain is too high for man to conquer. People actually live in the Alps, for goodness’ sake! They till the ground; animals breed and grow fat there. If a small group of natives can cross them, so can an army. Look at these delegates [local allies]—they didn’t grow wings and fly here over the top. Even their ancestors were not born here; they came here as immigrant peasants from Italy; they crossed these selfsame Alps in huge migrating hordes, with all their women and children—and lived to tell the tale. What is so difficult then for an army, with nothing to carry but its own equipment?

  So off they went, either here at Mont Cenis or somewhere near here. They were guided by local warriors known as Centrones, who Hannibal suspected were up to no good. His instinct proved correct: At a narrowing of the route, more Centrones appeared on a slope above the armies and rolled boulders onto the Carthaginian forces, killing many pack animals. But Hannibal, having foreseen such treachery, had split his army in two, with elephants and pack animals at the front and the mass of armed soldiers in the rear. These latter were ordered to hold back, not to enter the pass. The Centrones were thus lured from their position on the heights to fill the gap between Hannibal’s forces. It was then that the hardened Carthaginian soldiery advanced and attacked the locals, engaging in a generalized massacre. By day’s end, there were no Centrones to be seen—they had either fled or died.

  Now nature took its turn. It was October and the snow began to fly. During the steep descent on the Italian side of the pass, the footing was icily treacherous and many beasts and men fell to their deaths. The debris from a recent landslide then blocked the way. Laboriously, the men worked in shifts to hew a mule track through the rubble. After a day, they had succeeded and made their way with the pack animals to the pastures below the tree line. But the great elephants were simply too big to follow. Another three days of track-widening construction ensued before the exhausted pachyderms could pick their way down the wintry slope. After a pause of several days to regroup, the army, which had been on the march for five months, at last made the descent into the valley of the River Po—and into the historical imagination for the next two thousand years.

  The tale of Hannibal’s daring crossing added to the allure of ancient Carthage down through the centuries. Gustave Flaubert, enamored of the empire and its customs, set his splendid historical novel, Salammbô, in the Carthaginian court of Hannibal’s boyhood. Virgil, who lived in the first century BCE and was arguably Rome’s greatest poet, opened his epic Aeneid with his hero, Aeneas, finding shelter in the Carthaginian court of Queen Dido. The lovely queen falls in love with him, only to commit suicide, heartbroken, when he leaves her city to become the ancestor of the Romans in Italy. The events described in the epic poem have been celebrated in Western culture down to the present day.

  Hannibal’s fifteen-year stay in Italy consisted of a string of brilliant victories on the fields of battle. His rout of the Romans at Cannae, in southern Italy, is still studied as one of history’s most brilliant examples of generalship. Ultimately, the challenge of waging war and occupying territory in the heartland of the Roman Republic, where its allies were thick on the ground and where enemy armies were repeatedly raised to fight him, proved too difficult, even for such a military genius. When the Romans invaded North Africa, he was forced to sail home, where he was uncharacteristically defeated at the Battle of Zama. The Second Punic War was over. It would take a third war, waged two generations later, for the recommendation of a Roman senator, Cato the Elder, to be thoroughly implemented. At the end of every speech in the Senate, whatever its subject, Cato would utter some version of the phrase Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). In the spring of 146 BCE, the victorious Romans annihilated the city of Carthage, setting fire to it in a blaze that lasted seventeen days and selling its entire population into slavery. Hence our term Carthaginian peace, for a victor who shows no mercy to the vanquished.

  A less-well-known crossing of Mont Cenis had far greater repercussions than had Hannibal’s, for the subsequent actions of the general permanently altered the course of European and subsequent world culture. Despite warnings from his soothsayers, Constantine, the co-emperor of the Roman Empire in charge of Britain, Gaul, and Spain, decided to march on Italy. The year was 312 CE, a time of considerable confusion over who had ultimate authority over the vast empire. Rival factions flourished, civil war loomed. In Constantine’s case, this meant going to war against another co-emperor, Maxentius, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Constantine and his legions crossed the Mont Cenis Pass, handily won a couple of battles in northern Italy, then proceeded on to Rome. Maxentius drew up his legions at Milvio, where a bridge spans the Tiber just north of the city.* On the night prior to the battle, Constantine is said to have seen either a cross in the sky (or in a dream) or the Greek initials Χ (chi) and Ρ (rho)—the monogram of Christ. This was taken as a sign that the god of the Christians was on his side. Constantine won, Maxentius drowned, and soon the grateful emperor, alone at the top now, ended the persecution of Christians in the empire and legalized the practice of the faith everywhere. Christianity would henceforth flourish under Rome, outlive the empire, and eventually spread around the globe. Perhaps the militantly secular French would have felt queasy memorializing Constantine’s epochal crossing of Mont Cenis alongside the safer, faith-free commemorations of Hannibal, Napoleon, and the Tour de France.

  In truth, so many armies and conquerors have passed this way—the list also includes Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, Charles the Bald—that Mont Cenis would look more like a scrapyard were every one of its transient generals and troops given their own purple metallic plaque. A small, bidirectional marker hints at the historic centrality of the role of the pass in history: One arrow reads ROME 724 KM.; the other, pointing in the opposite direction, reads PARIS 724 KM. It is sometimes thought that Europe’s single-minded devotion to war prior to the founding of the EU usually pits the French against the Germans, or perhaps against the English. What tends to be forgotten is France’s long-standing tradition of invading what would become Italy, a national sport of sorts played down the centuries by leaders royal, revolutionary, and imperial. The proliferation of street signs in Paris bearing Italian names owes nothing to an admiration of Italy; rather, they are the names of battle locales, and to reach such places French armies almost invariably took Mont Cenis. Napoleon in particular, his imperial ambition boundless and emulation of old Rome shameless, made Italy his sanguinary playground of choice. His nephew, Napoleon III, took a similar interest in the Italian peninsula, this time to battle a geopolitical rival, the Austrians, who controlled much of Lombardy and the Veneto. His armies crossed Mont Cenis in 1858 and, in the subsequent year, fought the Battle of Solferino in Lombardy, an affair involving a quarter-m
illion soldiers with such a gruesome outcome that a Swiss observer of the agonies of the dying hurried back to his hometown to write the first Geneva Conventions and eventually found the International Red Cross.

  It wasn’t all bad.

  I’VE HAD ENOUGH martial musings for the day and take myself to a weather-beaten café fronting Napoleon’s roadway. A bratwurst of German bikers, quaffing dumpster-size steins of lager, occupies most of the outdoor terrace. Their leader nods affably, his resemblance to Gérard Depardieu in his better days uncanny. The others, all very big men, could pass for Hannibal’s elephantine companions. I notice that, unlike the tulip at the Iseran Pass, the bratwurst at the Mont Cenis has had the manners to park its hogs far away from any Snapchat-worthy landmarks.

  I settle down in the sunshine and feel the gentle breeze in my hair. The day is beautiful. I try to imagine just what this pass has witnessed. The waitress, a smiling elderly woman in a blue polkadot dress, takes my order. When she comes back with my double espresso and Evian water and spies the French newspaper in my lap, she takes this as a spur to indulge in her country’s national sport: complaint.

  “We get days in winter that are nicer than this,” she says with a sigh. “The skiers come and suntan on the terrace.”

  I say nothing. The day is so hot that I have remembered to apply sunblock to my insta-burn Irish skin.

  “This wind is enough to make you want to cry,” she continues. “It’s been like this all week.”

  I remain silent. I have no idea what she’s talking about. The weather has been glorious as of late. Just to be polite, I nod. This seems to satisfy her.

  A short time later, when she comes to collect the euro coins I have laid on the table, she smiles and asks me where I am headed.

  “Susa,” I reply. That is the Italian town at the other side of the Mont Cenis.

  “Where?”

  “Susa,” I repeat, gesturing with my hand toward Italy. This does not improve matters.

  “What?”

  “Susa.”

  She stares at me blankly. My face must mirror hers.

  Then I remember the road signs.

  “Suse,” I say, giving the French name for the town.

  “Ah, Suse!” she exclaims, relieved that our relationship has been revived. “Such a lovely town. When my husband was alive, we used to go there often.”

  At this, she cheerfully scoops up cup, bottle, and glass and returns inside—but not before wishing me “bonne route.”

  I get up to go. A loud roar to my right stops me from crossing the roadway. A line of bright red vintage sports cars comes into view, their drivers leaning on the horns as they pass the marker for the pass. Their license plates show almost all of them to be from the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. As my knowledge of that locale is limited to its reputation as a former capital of absinthe production, I look to see if any of the convertibles are weaving dangerously. But no, the drivers are all smiling men in their sixties, accompanied by windblown wives letting their scarves trail behind them and waving to the bratwurst and me. We wave back. There must be at least two dozen of them, a remarkable sight.

  When the rowdy retirees disappear, I venture across the now-silent road and make my way to a terraced botanical garden near the pyramidal chapel. Exceptionally well laid out, the Alpine beds are today being tended by about a dozen young adults—volunteers, perhaps—as colorfully clad as the blooms they care for. Informational boards tout the richness of Alpine microclimates: The drastic changes in altitude ensure varied flora. Indeed, the Alps have the greatest number of flower varieties of anywhere in Europe.

  The reason for this floral supremacy is attributable to changes in elevation. There are distinct ecosystems to be traversed as one climbs a mountain, the elevation attained affecting temperature, barometric pressure, and exposure to ultraviolet light. The Mont Cenis garden, being well above the tree line, naturally has a vocation to show off the blooms of what is called the Alpine tundra, the grass and lichen expanses of the taller elevations, where winters are harsh and summers short. The flowers have adapted to these conditions admirably—red is a common bloom color, as it stores the heat of sunlight—although their fragility has been increased by recent development. The hard snowpack of a ski run is no friend to these hardy yet delicate plants.

  Having had a childhood influenced by The Sound of Music, I immediately seek out and find the “noble-white” flower—the edelweiss—whose beauty is extolled in an invented folk tune sung by Captain von Trapp. It is too early in the season for the plant to bloom, so all that can be seen are fuzzy green leaves covered in what looks like confectioner’s sugar. I think mine is a more charitable description than the one offered by Mark Twain, who in his travels in the Alps said the edelweiss exhibits “the color of bad cigar ashes.”

  To find the other bloom I want to see, I have to traverse a section of the garden labeled les plantes qui font mal (plants that are bad for you). An alpenrose bush, a type of rhododendron that flourishes above the tree line, is in bloom there, its rusty-red flowers looking anything but toxic; still, I decide not to have a taste. Near it, at ground level, is the lovely yellow-and-white Alpine buttercup. Clearly, poison comes in many deceptive garbs.

  Of course, many Alpine plants are useful, in cosmetics and as food and medicine. Edelweiss extract has long been used as a cream to arrest the aging of skin and the formation of wrinkles. The root of a weed known as the “cursed thistle” has for centuries provided herders in the high meadows with a pleasant snack, their isolation in this instance being a good thing, as the plant causes flatulence. And the wood sorrel, found in rocky crevices, provides a natural treatment for sore throat, fever, and nausea. As one might imagine, the list goes on and on.

  In a few moments, I am before my goal. A clump of blue gentians stands alongside the footpath, almost stemless. In D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Bavarian Gentians,” he describes the flowers as “dark darkening the daytime torchlike with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom.” Unlike my reaction to Twain’s edelweiss, this time my inclination is to agree with a famous floral description. The Alpine gentian exhibits a deep, fathomless blueness, so blue as to be almost lewd.

  The kaleidoscope is too stunning to be left unrecorded. Out come my smartphone and notepad. Forget-me-not, bird’s-eye primrose, black vanilla orchid, snowbell—the native flora of the Alps form a garden of earthly delights. A patch of deep purple beckons. Two species of bellflower, peach-leaved and bearded, are surrounded by clumps of purple lupine, seemingly standing at attention like sentries to protect the more fragile blooms. The afternoon wears on, the colors and fragrances enchant. It is with reluctance that I leave the garden to resume the journey.

  I AM SOMEWHERE ELSE. Mont Cenis has become Moncenisio—a change that surely must be unacceptable in the café lady’s French world­view. The descent into the Piedmont is distinctly different than the ascent from Savoy. For one, the mountains seem impossibly tall, almost on a Mont Blanc scale. The southern slopes of the Alps are almost always steeper than their northern counterparts, as Italy is part of the African tectonic plate, slamming into the European one. The roadway is forced to narrow, describe many hairpins, plunge at slopes of 10 percent, the greatest I’ve seen thus far. Clearly, this is a formidable natural frontier, thus it seems only normal that it should give rise to a rupture in culture, that two Latin sisters, the French and the Italians, inhabit either side.

  I fall in behind the inevitable Dutch camper, whose slowness gives me time to admire the occasional appearance of old rail tunnels, sturdily buttressed against the rock face. These are the remnants of the Mont Cenis Railway, a technologically innovative means of locomotion developed by British engineer John Barraclough Fell. The Fell system, used here first, relied on a third rail between the two running rails. For going up, horizontal wheels would run along the third rail, ensuring better traction. For going down, brake pads clamped the sides of the third rail. This system is different from the cog or rack railway that supers
eded it—that type of train, which I rode up to Mer de Glace at Chamonix, relies on a third rail that is a toothed rack rail; the train’s third, vertical wheel is a cog wheel that meshes with the rail.

  The Mont Cenis Railway is also unusual for how briefly it was in business—­from 1868 to 1871—and for the reason behind its construction. It was thought that a conventional rail tunnel under a mountain near the pass would take years to build, and the imperial and entrepreneurial British were impatient to decrease the time it took to get matériel, messages, and men to and from India, now that the Suez Canal had just opened. With the Mont Cenis Railway, the rail trip from Calais in France to Brindisi in Italy (where ships lay at anchor for the rest of journey) would be dramatically shortened. In the event, what dramatically shortened was the time it took to build the conventional rail tunnel through a mountain near Mont Cenis, thanks to improvements in tunneling technology. So the Fell railway, the real-life little engine that could, was made redundant after only four years of operation.

  There is a certain irony to some of the graffiti now defacing the old stone bulwarks of the disused Fell system. Again and again, I read: TAV = MAFIE, which translated and spelled out means, “High-Speed Train = Corruption.”† A rail project, now approved by the French and Italian governments, is destined to link Lyon and Turin by a bullet train, which will entail carving out a new fifty-seven-kilometer-long tunnel under the Alps. No doubt intercity travelers welcome the initiative, but dwellers of Alpine valleys, such as that of Susa, where the train will run, know only too well the pitfalls of development. The first roads and rail lines were welcomed in the nineteenth century, as they opened up isolated areas to the outside world and promoted commerce and tourism. But the limited-access expressways and road tunnels of the twentieth century made the valleys a drive-by landscape; worse still, that landscape, often just a narrow vale between two mountain ranges, was marred by the newcomers, whose high-flying, multipillared viaduct bridges tower over medieval villages and age-old vineyards. The new bullet train that will run through the Susa Valley will doubtless eat up valuable land, require massive earth-moving, and entail widespread use of eminent domain—all for the comfort of business people whizzing past their country cousins at speeds of more than 250 kilometers per hour. And there are lucrative government contracts to be handed out—the estimated cost of the new train connection comes in at twenty-five billion euros—hence, the justifiable suspicion of antidevelopment activists that there will be boundless opportunities for corruption. Mafie, indeed.