In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied by a cameraman, piloted an airship down the line of the old Western Front that stretched from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The result is a haunting piece of film in many ways, and yet what is perhaps most moving is not the scenes of devastation, but the sight of the people below, picking up again the threads of their old lives among the shattered ruins of what had once been homes, with the resilience of a people whom history had long accustomed to the miseries of war.
It is no coincidence that the Western Front — running down the old historical European fault-line that separates Germany from France — more or less exactly follows the spine of what was once, briefly, Lotharingia. After Charlemagne’s death in 814 his empire was eventually divided between his grandsons into three territories, an Eastern Francia that would eventually become Germany, a Western Francia that evolved into France and, sandwiched ominously between the two and named after Charlemagne’s great-grandson, Lothair II, the great swathe of contested land which is the subject of this book.
If the Great War would not be the last time that this part of Europe would face invasion from the east, it was most certainly not the first, and you could count on very few fingers the generations between the death of Charlemagne and the Battle of the Bulge that did not see ‘Lotharingia’ embroiled in one war or another.
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