In their verse, the Chinese speak of ghosts and skeletons inhabiting the Wall. These phantoms are the remains of workers, according to the poets, but some must also be soldiers, and if their spirits have eyes and ears, they surely would have roused from their sleep to the familiar sound of battle at Xifengkou on a late winter day. The Xifengkou pass was critical to the defense of the Wall. It had been targeted by a superior force, which could threaten the entire region if it breached the defenses. Wave after wave of assaults tested the Chinese; only furious close-quarters combat and the advantage of fortifications prevented the pass from being immediately overrun. Nightfall brought only temporary relief. As their enemy retired to sleep, Chinese officers selected their most skilled fighters for a counterattack. The elite troops carried dadaos, the machete-like swords favored by the military because their use could be mastered easily and quickly by conscripts. Sneaking down trails created by local woodcutters, the Chinese soldiers, temporarily abandoning the protection of the Wall, arrived at the enemy camp without warning and went to work quietly, slashing their foes in the dark. In the melee that erupted, they destroyed the enemy’s machines for battering the Wall, then slipped back behind the fortifications for safety. It was March 11, 1933—arguably the beginning of the Second World War—and China was defending the Great Wall, perhaps for the final time, against a Japanese army armed with machine guns, artillery, tanks, and bombers.
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In a different era—a dozen different eras, in fact—the Wall had been built to defend against just such attacks from the north. But time and war and weapons—especially weapons—had passed the venerable monument by. The Wall had become a relic.
The Wall’s last war had begun only two months earlier, when a rogue Japanese army launched an unprovoked attack on the monument’s easternmost pass. Japan’s Kwantung Army was experienced, highly disciplined, and fully modern. By 1933, it was also infamous for its independence. Its name came from the Chinese term for “east of Shanhaiguan,” referring to the Great Wall pass that so irritated the army’s aggressive and imperialist generals because it blocked their territorial ambitions. Politically, the Kwantung Army’s leaders had long been at odds with their own civilian government. In 1931, they ignored Tokyo when, on their own initiative, they invaded Manchuria and established a menacing Japanese presence on the Chinese border. In the views of the army’s imperialist generals, China—then deeply weakened by political divisions—made a rich and tempting target. The Wall was no longer viewed as a significant obstacle.
The Kwantung Army chose as its initial target the hated pass at Shanhaiguan, long the physical limit to its expansionist plans. After orchestrating an apparent “false flag” bombing incident, the Japanese commander denounced the Chinese defenders of the pass as terrorists and launched a massive combined-forces attack. Tanks, bombers, and offshore warships battered the “First Pass under Heaven,” while Japanese troops charged with bamboo ladders. The sheer organization of the attack on Shanhaiguan put to lie any protests that the incident had been anything but carefully planned. An assault by land, sea, and air spontaneously brought together in less than a day? The rest of the world wasn’t buying it. Ambassadors lined up to object to the seizure of the pass. Western journalists also expressed outrage, or at least as much as they could muster for events that still seemed to them distant and detached from anything of real importance. A writer for the Saturday Evening Post dutifully reported signs of impending war while logging his travels to the Wall—“the most stupendous construction work of man, ancient or modern.” The Chinese army, he observed, was frantically at work repairing roads to the Wall, but this hardly attracted more notice than the bleakness of the Chinese countryside or that the author had been gypped in a heroin deal.
To the Chinese, the preparations were far more serious. In Beijing, just south of the Wall, the army commandeered cars and trucks, along with ten thousand rickshaws and their drivers. The makeshift convoy made its way north to the famous monument, singing, “Go! Go! We must go together to the front to resist! . . . The bloodstained Great Wall is glorious!” Chinese citizens living north of the Wall were also streaming toward the ancient monument, but when they arrived, they found it closed to them, already buttoned-up and prepared for battle.
After taking Shanhaiguan, the Japanese general Sosaku Suzuki had given his assurance that Japan wouldn’t advance beyond the Great Wall—a statement carefully worded to exclude Jehol, the Chinese province that lay north of the Wall. Less carefully worded was his unreassuring response to world condemnation: “We have nothing to be ashamed of. The Chinese must come to us on bended knee.” The Kwantung Army wasted little time in moving against Jehol.
When the Japanese arrived to clear out the province, the poorly prepared Chinese troops could do little more than take pot shots at them while the Japanese disembarked their trains. The defense of Jehol had devolved upon the province’s opium-growing warlord, Tang Wulin. A brash and somewhat colorful figure, Tang had established two heroin factories on the grounds of an old imperial palace. As the Japanese drew closer, he entertained foreign correspondents by performing acts of ambidextrous marksmanship while riding a Mongolian pony. He couldn’t do much about the Japanese, but at least his displays did less to provoke the enemy than the words of the Chinese foreign minister, who boasted that China had more people than the Japanese had bullets, saying, “Lives are our ammunition!” In reality, the defense of Jehol crumbled quickly as Chinese generals deserted their troops or displayed welcome flags for the invaders. Tang Wulin escaped, as drug lords so often do, disappearing forever from the world stage, where he’d enjoyed his brief flirtation with fame. He was last seen “staring vacantly out the window at some deer.”
The fall of Jehol brought the war to the Wall, General Suzuki’s assurances notwithstanding. On March 10, the Japanese attacked Xifengkou, where the Chinese swordsmen would make their daring night raid. Incredibly, the defenders held their position, despite their severe disadvantage in weaponry. The Japanese, unable to make any headway, abandoned the attack. Similarly, at Luowenyu the defenders also succeeded in stopping the invaders. The Great Wall, called out of a long retirement and hustled out onto the battlefield for one last mighty effort, had held.
More than a week passed before the mechanized and industrialized Japanese, with their state-of-the-art weaponry, finally made a critical breakthrough. The April 11 breach of the pass at Engkoo, after fierce fighting in which the pass changed hands several times, effectively marked the end of the Wall’s military career. Once Japanese troops had penetrated the line in force, the Wall’s remaining defenders could easily be surrounded and attacked from the rear. The entire line became indefensible. Chinese troops withdrew from the Wall on the very roads they’d so recently repaired. To their south lay some two thousand walled cities, defenseless against bombers, and inhabited by tens of millions of civilians who could still remember the waning days of an ancient empire.
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The Great Wall in 1933 may have been “bloodstained” and “glorious,” but it could barely slow down a technologically superior attacking force. By then, the venerable structure had already completed its transition from viable military fortification to worldwide celebrity and symbol. These were only the latest entries on the long résumé of a monument that had already served in many capacities. To the ancient inhabitants of the steppe, the Great Wall—and all its pre-Ming predecessors—had been a formidable barrier. To the Chinese laborer, forever liable to imperial conscriptions, it symbolized oppression. To the distant Romans, it was a model that their own emperors might emulate. To millions of Eurasians who’d never actually seen the Wall, couldn’t be certain where it was, and knew nothing of its history, it was a source of myth, usually associated with the apocalyptic trio of Alexander, Gog, and Magog.
The emergence of the Wall as an international symbol had resulted from many of those same forces that had elsewhere led to the colonization of the Americas. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Wall drew the attention of Jesuit missionaries to China. The Jesuits were never especially successful at converting the Chinese to Christianity. However, they dazzled the imperial court with novelties of Western manufacture—pumps, clocks, sextants, telescopes, cannons, even steam-powered automobiles—and in turn the Jesuits were dazzled by the Great Wall of the Ming. To Father Verbiest, whose accounts of China were widely read in Europe, the Wall surpassed all the Seven Wonders of the World put together. Western mapmakers enthusiastically, but inaccurately, depicted it enclosing the entire Chinese Empire. References to a great Chinese wall became common in Western literature. In the nineteenth century, when Western powers forcibly pried open the once-guarded nation, China became a tourist destination, and the Wall its greatest attraction.
For all its celebrity, the Great Wall would not, in modern times, continue to serve as a model to foreign powers, as the Han Walls had for the emperors of Rome and Persia. The early-modern period had not been kind to fortifications. The tales of Orban’s Horrible Bombard battering down the walls of Constantinople had changed attitudes toward walls. Western visitors to the Wall continued to marvel, but homebound critics adopted a more skeptical view. Daniel Defoe, in his hasty sequel to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, had his titular hero visit the Wall only to rudely inform his guide that the monument was nothing, that it was outdated, had never worked, and that a train of British artillery could make short work of it, obliterating the whole thing inside of ten days. Voltaire agreed. Despite his enthusiasm for China as a convenient vehicle for the Western self-loathing he did so much to popularize, the Frenchman eventually declared the Wall futile. The same Wall that he had, just a few years earlier, praised in the most hyperbolic terms, he described in later works as “a monument to fear.”
Even as the Wall was acquiring its questionable associations with futility, obsolescence, and cowardice, it was becoming connected to yet another negative trait in Western eyes: that of wrongheaded isolationism. The Western rediscovery of China coincided precisely with the growth of capitalism, which would give rise to an ideology of open borders and free trade. The reluctance of China—still an ancient empire, playing by ancient rules—to open its markets appalled and annoyed Western traders, who made the Wall a symbol for backwardness and isolation. Before long, they’d dismissed the entire nation as introverted oddballs, freakishly addicted to walls.
The latter point needs addressing. In writings on China, it is customary, even among leading sinologists, to observe that the Chinese possess an innate predilection for isolationism and wall building. Western writers detect the alleged trait in the construction of China’s earliest walled cities, in the use of walled courtyards by architects, and especially in the Empire’s repeated attempts to secure its borders with walls. Thus, when Cambridge sinologist Julia Lovell speaks of China’s “impulse to wall-building” or a “Chinese love of enclosing walls,” she stands in good company alongside Owen Lattimore, the much-admired dean of Eurasian frontier studies, who believed that “there must have been something inherent in the historical process of the state in China that favored the evolution of walled frontiers, irrespective of hostile relations between the Chinese and peoples whose ways of life were incompatible with them.” Such statements can be multiplied indefinitely: “Wall is what makes China,” observes one scholar. “Even today the cultural power of the ‘wall’ runs deep in the national psyche,” writes another. The Chinese are thus singled out for having behaved no differently from any other civilized nation in world history. Nothing about China’s efforts to wall off its northern borders from the steppe was unique. Cimmerians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Khwarezmians, Slavs, Russians, Koreans, and others constructed similar walls for the same purpose, generally to defend against the same peoples—and this is to say nothing of analogous long walls built in other regions, by Sumerians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Peruvians, Nigerians, Indians, and Vietnamese. Walled cities were even more universal. The Chinese differentiated themselves solely by the impressiveness of their efforts, but this was enough that they became attached to the idea of “wall” when that idea was, during the ages of cannons and capitalism, brought into disrepute.
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Still more walls were being built during the twilight of their usefulness, and these, too, sometimes acquired greater significance as symbols than as concrete barriers. The smoke had hardly cleared from the last battles of the Great Wall before another type of wall—a newer breed, utterly unlike any of its ancient ancestors—fought its first. The new wall would never have the opportunity to develop a military record to compare with that of its older Chinese kin, much less a comparably hoary folk history. The Maginot Line was not even ten years old when German tanks scooted around it, hastening it on its own transformation from fortification to symbol.
Like so many other European institutions, the Maginot Line had its origins in the confused aftermath of the First World War. A late Allied offensive, made possible by the arrival in 1918 of 2 million American troops, had driven the Germans from the contested regions of Alsace and Lorraine and convinced the German government to accept what would turn into an infamously punitive peace. The French gained territory but not an accompanying sense of security. Not even the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty—which stripped Germany of its best industrial regions, crushed the German economy with punitive reparations, drastically limited the size of the German army and air force, and encircled Germany with newly created hostile states—could bring peace of mind in those days. Victory had hardly been celebrated before hand-wringing generals and politicians had begun debating how to prevent future invasions.
Nearly a century later, it is difficult to imagine the spirit of those times, when memories of the last war still jostled with fear of the next. French generals turned into bestselling authors with titles such as L’invasion, est-elle encore possible? (Is Invasion Possible Again?). Ministers and military men achieved fame for their positions on issues of national security. Who was Maginot, after all, except an obscure governmental minister, before his name became attached to his eponymous line?
Prior to Maginot, the French had been tiptoeing around the possibility of a great wall for fully three hundred years—ever since 1636, the infamous Year of Corbie, when the Austrian capture of a French fortress at Corbie had left Paris directly imperiled. That kind of scare wasn’t easily forgotten. In 1678, France’s original general-turned-author, the self-promoting military theorist Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, had proposed, as an alternative to a wall, a frontier guarded by technically advanced border fortresses. Vauban’s designs were only the latest in a long series of efforts to extend the viability of the ancient technology of city walls, some two hundred years after the fall of Constantinople had proven them obsolete. The history of technology is replete with such rearguard actions, and Vauban’s fortresses fared no better than the typewriter or 8-track tape when their time had come and gone. Still, the French persisted in their pursuit of fortified borders. During the 1702–15 War of the Spanish Succession, when English and Dutch forces threatened from the east, the French established the palisades and earthworks of the seventy-five-mile-long Lines of Brabant. They subsequently constructed the longer and more intimidatingly named Ne Plus Ultra Lines, which stretched some two hundred miles. French desire for an impermeable border peaked after the nation’s rapid and humiliating defeat in the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. This led to yet another attempt to tweak an apparently obsolete technology, the final result being the cast-iron and reinforced-concrete fortifications of the Barrière de Fer (Wall of Iron).
It was the Barrière de Fer that most intrigued French policymakers in the 1920s. The Wall of Iron, unlike the Lines of Brabant or the Ne Plus Ultra Lines, never entirely failed. At Verdun, its modernized forts had withstood a fantastic battering during World War I, even at the hands of Germany’s massive Big Bertha guns. The Battle of Verdun, where André Maginot received the wound that left him with a limp and Marshal Philippe Pétain earned his reputation as a hero of France, was intensely studied during the interwar years. It planted the notion of a new type of fortified boundary, something that would not resemble the Great Wall of China. In the fierce debates over whether or how to fortify France’s borders, even proponents jockeyed to distance themselves from the Chinese symbol. Marshal Joffre argued that France would be “doomed to defeat for seeking to establish a new Wall of China.” Maginot himself stated, “We could hardly dream of building a Great Wall of France,” deeming it too costly. What they designed was a new prototype, a Great Wall for the twentieth century, or so it was hoped.
The Maginot Line, as it emerged from the French drawing boards, placed little emphasis on continuous physical barriers. It included exactly two: a long zone of dense barbed wire to stall infantry movements, and, in front of that, thousands of metal rails, projecting from the ground to stop tanks. The real essence of the Line was its network of fortified bunkers and gun placements. “Le feu tue!” Pétain had argued—“Firepower kills!” This revolutionary principle was embodied in the design. The Maginot Line would not resemble any wall of brick, tamped earth, or even iron. It was a wall of fire. By Pétain’s reasoning, if he could just protect the guns, the guns would protect France.
Never before had a defensive barrier taken such form. The Maginot Line dispensed with even the traditional fort. In its place, the French designed ouvrages (“works”) that lay almost entirely underground. Each ouvrage contained miles of tunnels, barracks, munition dumps, hospitals, and mess halls, all connected to a series of guns encased in either concrete bunkers or steel turrets that only peeped out of the ground during battle. The gun crews, living fifty feet underground in impenetrable mazes, were never exposed to enemy fire, and there was a welcome committee for anyone who managed to breach the seven-ton steel doors of the ouvrages: machine-gun bunkers were positioned to mow down intruders. If all else failed, the tunnels were rigged with explosives for self-destruction.
Work on the new design proceeded quickly. In 1926, the French government undertook the construction of the first experimental units for the proposed Line. A few years later, in 1930, with international relations deteriorating and a grim pessimism taking root in the early days of the Depression, the Chamber of Deputies allocated funds to realize the entire plan. André Maginot, whose lobbying had been crucial in generating support for the project, died a year later, in 1932, three years before the first newspaper attached his name to the Line.
For almost the last time, masses of workers contributed to the construction of a barrier intended to defend their nation from military attack. Their numbers were oddly small—fifteen thousand, hardly a fraction of the workforces once employed by the ancient empires—but the Depression-era French had the advantage of backhoes, excavators, dump trucks, bulldozers, and cement mixers. Over the next several years, they poured more than a million cubic yards of concrete and placed 150,000 tons of steel. By 1939, they had completed the Line.
In its final form, the Maginot Line shared one conspicuous attribute with its more ancient Chinese cousin: it covered only a small portion of the border it was intended to defend. Like the Romans, the French believed they could rely on the Rhine River to prevent intrusions across much of their eastern border. Along the Rhine, they placed only a rudimentary array of defenses—a few machine-gun bunkers and fortlets, augmented by mines and barbed wire. Only in the region above the Rhine, principally in Alsace and Lorraine, the two territories that Germany and France had contested for decades, did the French deem the full panoply of the Line necessary. They left unfortified the “impassable” Ardennes Forest, as well as the border with the Low Countries, working on the assumption that the Germans would avoid either route.
On the eve of world war, the defenders of the Maginot Line settled into their subterranean world like groundhogs. Wearing khaki uniforms emblazoned with the optimistic motto On ne passe pas (“None shall pass”), they moved through their tunnels on trolleys, taking advantage of wine cellars, barbershops, and chapels as they awaited the inevitable coming of the Germans.
In May 1940, the Germans at last launched their assault on France. They addressed the Maginot Line in exactly the same way the Manchu had addressed the Great Wall: by avoiding it. Confounding French expectations, German tanks swarmed through both the Low Countries and the Ardennes, where they took ordinary roads, finding the forest not at all impassable. The rapidity of the German advance enabled the invaders to surround the French armies, while the khaki-clad troops of the Maginot Line had no targets for their intact firepower.
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The fall of France came swiftly, and it was with equal rapidity that the Maginot Line joined the Great Wall in that growing list of symbols that compose our mental shorthand when thinking about walls. For the next fifty years, at least, writers could speak of a “Maginot Line psychology” when dismissing some misplaced faith in the power of sanctuary. Historians applied the term retroactively. The great Persianist Richard Frye spoke of Sasanid Persia’s “Maginot Line mentality” when describing its system of walls. Arthur Waldron compared the Great Wall of China to the Maginot Line. Writers and politicians invoked the Maginot Line to condemn all manner of policies. Even poets piled on. As recently as 2004, the unfortunate Line became the subject of a poem by Harold Rosen. The poem is set in 1939 and introduces us to a Frenchman in a straw hat and sunglasses who is going off to service. Along the way, he picks up a hitchhiker, for whom he puts on a brave face:
The Maginot Line. He utters it like a charm,
Warding off catastrophe.
“Couldn’t be in a safer place”
Than in his concrete labyrinth.
Lost in the general disdain of historians, poets, and politicians is the underreported and now somewhat ironic reality of the Maginot Line: there was, when the Germans invaded in 1940, in fact no safer place in France than in the concrete labyrinth. If the Line had only been extended farther, the German invasion of France, Hitler’s Europe, and perhaps, by extension, the Holocaust, all could have been stopped.
The combat record of the Line is brief but exemplary. In mid-June 1940, after the Germans had secured control of France, Hitler ordered his Wehrmacht to turn back and destroy the Maginot Line. In this action, dubbed Operation Tiger, the Germans had every advantage, being able to attack the Line simultaneously from the front and the rear. The Germans pounded the Line with aerial bombing and artillery. In reply, the French popped up in their steel domes, pivoted, and fired. Not a single grand ouvrage was destroyed or captured. The defenders, unharmed in their underground world, but slowly working through their three-month supply of food, surrendered only reluctantly, when ordered to do so by the French commander in chief.
The Germans, who had been taught the value of the Line, studied it and perhaps borrowed from it an idea or two in the design of their own late-war bunkers. The French, stunned by the collapse of their army in the field, immediately began assigning blame. Pétain, the hero of Verdun, had supported the Maginot Line, but then made peace quickly with the Germans. Postwar, he was branded a traitor. The Line’s leading prewar opponent, Charles de Gaulle, was elected president of France. As for the Line, it remained exactly where it was, as ineradicable as it was indestructible. It was not fated to command the awe reserved for the Great Wall. A few ouvrages have been opened to tourists, but they rarely figure in postcards from France. The Line’s real legacy was symbolic, a universal byword for folly, and a hardy example of the misuse of history.
Perhaps somewhere there is a club where old walls gather to commiserate, grumbling about their obscurity or their ill-deserved infamy. If such a place exists, the Maginot Line is surely there, sharing a stiff drink with the Great Wall, and they have reserved a curse or two for another wall, which, for a while, eclipsed them both, dragging down their reputations even further, until the very name wall had become anathema. That wall was in Berlin.