Eighty-one years ago next Wednesday, September 17, began one of the great military calamities of the Second World War – the Anglo-American attempt to propel a huge armoured column through Holland and into the Ruhr. That autumn, the allies believed that the Germans were broken: a single, powerful blow would probably end the Reich. Instead, the outcome was the near-destruction of Britain’s First Airborne Division at Arnhem, and the severe mauling of two fine US paratroop-divisions along the myriad Rhineland waterways that make this part of the world so militarily lethal
There is a little corner of Germany that tells a universal truth about empires. It is not Berlin, the home of the Second Reich of Kaiser Bill (and of course our gallant ally in 1916) and later of Hitler’s Third Reich, nor it is Cologne – the French version of the Latin for “colony”. It is Xanten, once part of an empire that reached from Anatolia to Africa’s Atlantic shores. Xanten is on the Rhine, and its still-vast ruins today attest to its role in a single Roman imperial system, as recognisable in Tunis as in Tyre: one coinage, one military order, one loyalty (give or take), one kind of ampitheatre, and – most important – one kind of road, imposed equally by imperial engineers on the long haul to the North Sea beside Hadrian’s Wall and to the heartland of the Appian Way.
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