Ardennes

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ardennes has swallowed armies whole. This sprawling region of dense forest, rough terrain, and rolling hills stretching across Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and France has a reputation that military commanders have underestimated to their great cost. In the 20th century alone, leading strategists considered the Ardennes entirely unsuitable for large-scale military operations. Germany proved them wrong twice. But before the tanks rolled and the battles were named, the Ardennes was already shaping history in quieter, slower ways - through the charcoal that fired the furnaces of Wallonia, through the rivers that carved its steep valleys, and through a geological story reaching back nearly 400 million years. What makes a landscape become a defining force in both industry and warfare? And how does a forest whose name may trace back to a Gaulish word for "blessed heights" become synonymous with some of the bloodiest fighting in modern history?

• 2. Deep Roots in Stone

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  The Ardennes range was raised during the Givetian age of the Devonian, a period spanning roughly 382.7 to 387.7 million years ago. That event, part of the broader Hercynian orogeny, shaped not just the hills but the entire economic destiny of the region that grew up around them. The remnants of what were once far taller mountains tend to trap valuable things in their low interiors. Coal, iron, zinc, and other metals accumulated in the subsoil beneath the Ardennes, a geological fact that the source describes as explaining "the greatest part of the geography of Wallonia and its history." Several geological stages now used internationally to classify rock sequences were defined from sites in Wallonia. The Frasnian, Famennian, Visean, Dinantian, and Namurian stages all take their names from places in the region - Frasnes-lez-Couvin, Famenne, Visé, Dinant, and Namur respectively. The region has also continued to shift upward in more recent geological time. A mantle plume has been lifting the area over the last few hundred thousand years, with the greatest uplift concentrated in the east where the Ardennes connects with the Eifel. That same mantle plume drives volcanic activity in the Eifel today.

• 3. A Forest With a Name

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  Romans called it Arduenna Silva. That ancient name is the source from which the modern "Ardennes" descends, and unpacking it reveals something of what the landscape meant to those who first recorded it. The first element, Arduenna, probably derives from a Gaulish word related to the Brythonic ardu-, a root also visible in the Welsh ardd, meaning "high," and the Latin arduus, meaning "high" or "steep." The second element is less certain, but may connect to the Celtic element windo-, seen in the Welsh wyn or wen, carrying the meaning "fair" or "blessed." If that reading holds, the original name would have meant something like "forest of blessed or fair heights." The name is not unique to this corner of Europe. The Ardennes probably shares its derivation with several Arden place names in Britain, including the Forest of Arden. By medieval times the forest had entered literature. The 12th-century Old French chanson de geste known as Quatre Fils Aymon mentions many of Wallonia's rivers, villages, and places, weaving the landscape into the cycle of songs about Charlemagne. At Dinant, a rock named Bayard takes its name from the legendary magic bay horse that, according to the tale, leaped from the top of the rock to the opposite bank of the Meuse.

• 4. Fire, Charcoal, and Industry

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  Before coal changed everything, the Ardennes forest fed the fires of an industrial revolution through charcoal. The trees themselves were the resource, harvested to fuel the first furnaces in Belgium's Luxembourg Province, Namur Province, Liège Province, and the French Ardennes department. In the region called Gaume, in the extreme south of present-day Luxembourg Province, charcoal production was central before the territory was reorganized in 1839. Wallonia became, by the 18th and 19th centuries, what the source describes as arguably the second great industrial region in the world. More precisely, it became the second industrial power area after Great Britain, measured in proportion to its territory and population. When coal replaced charcoal in metallurgy, the industry did not collapse - it shifted its center. The most important part of the Walloon steel industry concentrated around coal mines near Liège, Charleroi, La Louvière, the Borinage, and further into Walloon Brabant around Tubize. The rivers of the north and west of the Ardennes formed a natural industrial corridor: the Sambre and Meuse valleys arced across Hainaut Province, the Centre, Charleroi, and Liège Province, creating what is called the Sillon industriel. The wild game that still fills the Ardennes forests today, and the scenic terrain that now draws tourists, are in a sense the remaining face of a landscape that once powered a continent's metalwork.

• 5. Centuries of Contested Ground

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  The Vikings moved through the Ardennes on their pillaging raids of 881 and 882, following the old Roman roads to reach and attack the abbeys of Malmedy and Stavelot, and to destroy Prüm Abbey in the Eifel. That pattern - an outsider force using the Ardennes as a passage to strike at targets beyond it - would repeat across the centuries. Much of the Ardennes formed part of the Duchy of Luxembourg, a member state of the Holy Roman Empire that changed hands numerous times among Europe's powerful dynasties. Revolutionary France annexed the entire area in 1793, along with all other territories west of the Rhine. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored the previous arrangement, returning most of the Ardennes to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. When Belgium's revolution of 1830 established a new kingdom, the political future of the Ardennes became a point of dispute among Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Prussia, and Great Britain. The resolution came in 1839, when the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg ceded the westernmost 63% of its territory to Belgium. That ceded area, which was also the main part of the Ardennes, became what is now Belgium's Luxembourg Province. Signal de Botrange, at 694 metres in Liège Province, is both the highest point in the Ardennes and the highest point in the Benelux countries.

• 6. The Armies That Dared the Forest

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  In the 20th century, military strategists generally agreed that the Ardennes was unsuitable for large-scale military operations. The difficult terrain and narrow communication lines made it seem an unlikely route for a modern army. Germany disagreed, and acted on that disagreement twice. The first occasion was in August 1914, when the Battle of the Ardennes was fought during World War I. The second, and far more consequential, came in 1940. In 1939 and 1940, Nazi Germany's planners chose the forest as the primary route for their mechanised forces. The forest's great size could hide armoured divisions from detection. French planners either did not believe the Germans would make such a risky move, or assumed that any army crossing the forest would need at least 15 days to pass through. German forces, primarily under the command of Erich von Manstein, carried out the crossing in two days. They slipped numerous divisions past the Maginot Line and attacked France from the north. Under General Heinz Guderian, German armoured divisions crossed the Meuse at Dinant and at Sedan in May 1940. France fell on the 25th of June 1940. At the other end of the war, in December 1944, Germany launched a surprise attack through the same region in what became the Battle of the Bulge. The goal was to recapture Antwerp and drive a wedge between British and American forces in northern France. Allied forces ultimately blocked the German advance on the Meuse at Dinant - the same river crossing that had proved so decisive four years earlier.