It is not every day that I cross borders to take pictures of military installations. Yet that is what I decided to do one fine Saturday morning in November. Never mind that we are talking about the wide open Dutch-Belgian border here and military installations which have been out of use for more than sixty years, I still felt pretty excited as I got on my bicycle in Maastricht and headed south. I wanted to have a look at the WW2-era Fort Eben-Emael just across the border in Belgium.

I knew the border had to run somewhere across the corn and cabbage fields between Maastricht’s southern suburbs and the village of Kanne in Belgium. But I never figured out exactly where the border is, which was quite disappointing as I always get a kick out of crossing borders. This time I felt nothing and I cursed the European Union. At first I was not even sure that I had reached Kanne and Belgium until I saw a World War I memorial with the Belgian flag next to it outside a church. The Netherlands was of course neutral during the Great War, while Belgium saw some of the most brutal trench warfare in history.

From looking at the map before I set out, I knew that Kanne was part of a narrow strip of Dutch-speaking Flanders wedged in between the Netherlands and French-speaking Wallonia. As I crossed the bridge over the Albert Canal, I thought I was leaving Kanne and Flanders and entering the Walloon village of Eben-Emael after which the fortress is named. But I was not, all the signs were still in Dutch. It was not until I got to the roundabout literally a stone’s-throw from the bridge, that I saw a sign that said I was leaving Flanders. Was this little roundabout really the boundary between Germanic and Latin Europe? I expected more from a meeting-place of civilisations. But I suppose things have slowly become more mundane since the time of the Romans. A hundred or so metres further up the street and a sign proclaimed that I was now in Province de Liege and thus in Wallonia.

This meant that I was entering Eben-Emael, the purpose of this little excursion. I wanted to have a look at the fort, but decided to look around the village a bit first. Apart from a row of brick houses on either side of the road, a church, a couple of pubs sponsored by Jupiler beer, and a little vegetable market there was not too much to look at. An information board did capture my interest though. It described the “Black Carnival” of the area. Once a year a witch called the “Houre” goes around and smears black cream on peoples faces. There was also a house there dedicated to this tradition - Local officiel des Houres du carnival noire de Emael. As fascinating as this was, I decided to go find the fortress.

Fort Eben-Emael was a bit disappointing. First of all, it is only open to group tours and apparently there are no tours in mid-November. Secondly, I did not feel that I could explore it on my own, because the area was littered with trilingual “Domaine Militaire”-signs. There was even a sign with a skull and bones on it, as if the fort was surrounded by a minefield, and an angry German Shepherd in a cage was barking at me, probably trying to tell me how much he would enjoy ripping me to shreds if he could. I took a few pictures and got back on my bike.

While it was not much to look at, Fort Eben-Emael has a fascinating history. The fortress was constructed 1931-35 specifically in order to secure three important bridges over the Albert Canal and more generally to stop any attack on Belgium from the east (read Germany). Built into the hillside with walls of steel and concrete and packed with heavy artillery, Fort Eben-Emael was supposed to be impregnable and was the one defensive position the Belgians were supposed to be able to hold in case of an attack. By 1940, it was fairly obvious that an attack would come even though Belgium had declared its neutrality. Just like in the previous war, any German attack on France was likely to go through Belgian territory.

The Germans had been preparing for the attack on Eben-Emael months in advance, practicing on similar fortifications in already occupied Czechoslovakia. They simply worked around the fact that the fortress was the most modern of its kind by attacking it in a rather innovative fashion. When the attack came on May 10, 1940, 78 German paratroopers arriving in gliders landed on top of the fortress and promptly used a new and top-secret kind of deep-penetrating explosive to destroy the outer fortifications. Within ten minutes the fortress was “blind” and some 1000 Belgian soldiers were trapped inside it. Needless to say, this surprised the Belgians a whole lot and they had to surrender the following morning.

On my way back I spent some more time in Kanne where I had a look at another piece of World War 2 history. Up on the hill above Kanne I found a memorial dedicated to the crew of a British-Canadian bomber that had crashed there whilst engaged in bombing operations against Cologne in August of 1941. Three were apparently killed in the crash and two were taken as prisoners of war. The village also hosts a military cemetery which is the resting place for many of the Belgian soldiers who died during the fighting in May 1940.

By this time I felt that I had learned enough about the local war history and carnival traditions for one day, and I was getting ravenously hungry anyway, so I got back on the bike and snuck back across the invisible border. Feel free to take a look at the pictures below. Mouseover for description and click to see a larger version.