I'm off schedule on only my fourth day, but it was worth it. The GPS is now working and was very good yesterday, at Verdun. Today it wanted to take me onto toll motorways, but I wanted to travel the short distance to Thionville for free. The result was interesting. I do believe the machine was complaining -- it kept telling me to travel on the approved map plan, while I continued to ignore it as it led me on a merry goose chase in search of ways back to the motorway until I shut it off and went by map until motorways were quite distant. We then came to an accomodation.
Fort Hackenberg is the largest fort in the Maginot Line (ok - tied for first), which was he great defense work built by the French between the wars. While it bears surface resemblance to the great pre-WW1 fortresses at Douaumont and Vaux. this is something entirely different. While the garrisons of the older fortresses suffered from poor ventilation and almost no reliable sources of water, food, or even sufficient toilets, the Maginot Line provided everything -- dental and medical facilities, food and water for 3 months and even an underground Metro service to link the various posts over the huge area that the fort covered. Amazingly, most of the equipent still functions.
On weekends the fort goes off grid to give the diesel engines and generators some work. These are actually submarine pieces, redeployed to keep an underground city of a thousand working. The great gun turrets still revolve and push up as you can see in the video I've attacfhed to this blog. This was a really fascinating tour that took three hours -- hence I wound up staying in Thionville tonight instead of pushing on.
Tomorrow I head for the Somme -- hopefully arriving in time to see something.
No comments:
Post a Comment